Music

Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts, while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images.

Many photographers, including African American photojournalists, studio photographers, early twentieth-century émigrés, the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research, Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography, and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject, its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did.

One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research, the empirical documentation of photographers, their techniques, working practices, equipment etc., and cultural theory, the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics, cultural sociology, the politics of identity, etc.  The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love.

The long-lasting effects of colonialism are still present throughout Latin America. Racism, political persecution, ethnic extermination and extreme capitalism are some salient examples. This new book explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to critically challenge the historical legacy of colonialism and its present-day manifestations.

Through extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Argentina, Varas-Díaz documents how metal music listeners and musicians engage in ‘extreme decolonial dialogues’ as a strategy to challenge past and ongoing forms of oppression. This allows readers to see metal music in a different light and as a call for justice in Latin America.

Heavy metal related scholarship has made strides in the past decade. Many books have aimed to explain its origins, uses and the social meanings ascribed to the music in a variety of contexts. For the most part, these have neglected to address the region of Latin America as an area of study.

It represents a historical and sociological journey in Latin American heavy metal music through rich ethnographic engagements with performers, fans and scholars of music. Its central premise is the dialogic relationship amongst deep histories of coloniality, systematic oppression, entrenched inequalities and the expressive forms generated by ‘decolonial metal music’. The book also provides an exemplary and potentially iconic model of ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music.  

Most previous work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the Global North, and is therefore limited in understanding the region through its particular history and experiences. There is no scholarship of heavy metal scholarship in the Latin American region that achieves the depth or breadth of analysis represented by this book. It provides a roadmap and a model for this emerging mode of musical analysis, by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved. 

Academic readership for the book will come from multiple disciplines including cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, history and Latin American studies. It will be of interest to music studies programmes, as well as for methods courses on structurally informed social research. The book will also be of interest to those outside academic settings – accessibly written, with its concise reviews of historical and political-economic contexts, and its vivid storytelling, it will be of interest to consumers of the metal musical genre.

The first book-length study in English of composer Mathias Spahlinger, one of Germany’s leading practitioners of contemporary music. One of the most stimulating and provocative figures on the new music scene on Germany, he has long been a touchstone for leftist, ‘critical’ composition there, yet his work has received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship until now. 

Born in 1944, Spahlinger has risen only gradually to prominence in his native Germany and for many years was considered an outsider within the contemporary music scene. Yet, his position as one of the most venerable exponents of post-WWII modernism in his homeland is now undeniable: his music is regularly performed, he has received commissions from many of the major orchestras and new music groups in Germany, and in 2014 he received the Großen Berliner Kunstpreis (Berlin Art Prize – Grand Prize) from the city’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).

Spahlinger is, however, becoming increasingly known as a significant figure within later twentieth-century music – in 2015, a festival in Chicago focused exclusively on his music, and he was a keynote speaker at a conference on Compositional Aesthetics and the Political at Goldsmiths, University of London.

This new book provides an essential reference for scholars of new music and twentieth-century modernism. There are no other book-length studies of Spahlinger in English, though there is a monograph and a book of essays in German, and books of interviews. This original work promises a more critical perspective upon the composer and his aesthetics and political ideas compared to previous publications. The illustrations include musical examples.

Its primary market will be a specialist musicological readership, including academics, researchers and composers, but the writing style such that it could be accessible also to undergraduates interested in the field. The discussion of aesthetic debates in post-war Germany, and the interesting reading of the work of Jacques Rancière, means that it could also have significant appeal across the disciplines of philosophy and critical theory.

Some 22 years after its creation, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still held in high critical regard as one of the finest examples of the video game medium. The same is true of the game’s music, whose superlative reception continues to be evident, whether in the context of the game or in orchestral concerts and recordings of the game’s music.

Given music’s well-established significance for the video game form, it is no coincidence that music is placed at the forefront of this most lauded and loved of games. In Ocarina of Time, music connects and unifies all aspects of the game, from the narrative conceit to the interactive mechanics, from the characters to the virtual worlds, and even into the activity of legions of fans and gamers, who play, replay and reconfigure the music in an enduring cultural site that has Ocarina of Time at its centre. As video game music studies begins to mature into a coherent field, it is now possible to take the theoretical apparatus and critical approaches that have been developed in antecedent scholarship and put these into practice in the context of an extended concrete game example.

The most extensive investigation into the music of a single game yet undertaken, this book serves three important primary purposes: first, it provides a historical-critical account of the music of an important video game text; second, it uses this investigation to explore wider issues in music and media studies (including interactivity, fan cultures, and music and technology); and third, it serves as a model for future in-depth studies of video game music.

An in-depth regional discussion of heavy metal music, Heavy Metal Music in Argentina explores metal music as a catalyst for social change and site for engaging political reflection. Originally published in Spanish and sold locally in Argentina, this is the first time the work has been available in English.  

Edited by leading researchers, this collection addresses the music’s rituals, circulations, cultural products, lyrics and allows readers to rethink the place of heavy metal within Argentinean politics and economics. Exclusively written by members of the Group for Interdisciplinary Research on Argentinian Heavy Metal (GIIHMA) in a communal approach to scholarship, the book echoes the working-class voices that marked early post-dictatorship metal music in Argentina.

This is the first collection of essays on Argentine metal music. It has opened up research channels between different universities in the country while also engaging a non-academic audience, and widening the potential market for the book.

The book makes an interdisciplinary examination of a complex and fascinating object: it allows for the examination, discussion and analysis of its nationalist postulates, relationship with the Creole culture (for example, with nineteenth-century ‘gauchesca’ literature), indigenism, and with the political processes of contemporary Argentina.

Metal Music Studies, as an academic area of inquiry, has focused mostly on the music’s cultural components in Europe and the United States. The few books that have addressed metal music as a global phenomenon, have severely neglected the inclusion of Latin American countries. Argentina, with the largest and oldest metal scene in the region, has also been neglected in the existing literature. There is a growing interest in this area, as demonstrated by the emergence of documentary film on metal music in Latin America.

The book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Latin American studies.  It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.

 

Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.

Forty years after its inception, punk has gone global. The founding scenes in the United Kingdom and United States now have counterparts all around the world. Most, if not all, cities on the planet now have some variation of punk existing in their respective undergrounds, and long-standing scenes can be found in China, Japan, India, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Each scene, rather than adopting traditional interpretations of the punk filter, reflects national, regional and local identities.

 

The first offering in Intellect’s new Global Punk series, The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global is the first edited volume to explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate international punk scenes, including Mexico, China, Malaysia and Iran, The Punk Reader is a long-overdue addition to punk studies and a valuable resource for readers seeking to know more about the global influence of punk beyond the 1970s.

Antônio Carlos Jobim has been called the greatest of all contemporary Brazilian songwriters. He wrote both popular and serious music and was a gifted piano, guitar and flute player. One of the key figures in the creation of the bossa nova style, Jobim’s music made a lasting impression worldwide, and many of his songs are now standards of the popular music repertoire.

 

In The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim, one of the first extensive musicological analyses of the Brazilian composer, Peter Freeman examines the music, philosophy and circumstances surrounding the creation of Jobim’s popular songs, instrumental compositions and symphonic works. Freeman attempts to elucidate not only the many musical influences that formed Jobim’s musical output, but also the stylistic peculiarities that were as much the product of a gifted composer as the rich musical environment and heritage that surrounded him.

Though it’s given little attention – and even less serious attention – by the mainstream press, metal music has for decades been a major creative and cultural force around the world. This book brings together a group of contributors from Europe, North America and the Caribbean to make a case for metal’s place not merely on the periphery of our culture, but at its very heart. Contributors attend not merely to the music, but also the accompanying culture, and they offer intriguing insights into the rise of metal in places where it’s traditionally been little known, like the Middle East and North Africa. The result is a global portrait of metal that asserts its importance and its ongoing contribution to culture.

English pop music was a dominant force on the global cultural scene in the decades after World War II – and it served a key role in defining, constructing and challenging various ideas about Englishness in the period. Kari Kallioniemi covers a stunning range of styles of pop – from punk, reggae and psychedelia to jazz, rock, Brit Pop and beyond – as he explores the question of how various artists (including such major figures as David Bowie and Morrissey), genres and pieces of music contributed to the developing understanding of who and what was English in the transformative post-war years.