Popular Music Books

New and Published Books

1. The Music Documentary

   Acid Rock to Electropop

   Edited by Benjamin Halligan, Robert Edgar, Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs

   Series: Routledge Music and Screen Media Series

   The Music Documentary offers a wide-range of approaches, across key moments in the history of popular music, in order to define and interrogate this prominent genre of film-making. The writers in this volume argue persuasively that the music documentary must be considered as an essential cultural...

   Published March 26th 2013 by Routledge
2. Musical Performance and the Changing City

   Post-industrial Contexts in Europe and the United States

   Edited by Fabian Holt, Carsten Wergin

   Series: Routledge Research in Music

   A contribution to the field of urban music studies, this book presents new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of music in urban social life. It takes musical performance as its key focus, exploring how and why different kinds of performance are evolving in contemporary cities in the...

   Published March 3rd 2013 by Routledge
3. Experiencing Jazz

   Book and Online Access to Music, 2nd Edition

   By Richard Lawn

   Experiencing Jazz, Second Edition, is an integrated textbook with online resources for jazz appreciation and history courses. Through readings, illustrations, timelines, listening guides, and a streaming audio library, it immerses the reader in a journey through the history of jazz, while placing...

   Published February 18th 2013 by Routledge
4. The John Coltrane Reference

   By Lewis Porter, Chris DeVito, David Wild, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler

   The BBC's Jazz Book of the Year for 2008. Few jazz musicians have had the lasting influence or attracted as much scholarly study as John Coltrane. Yet, despite dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and his own recorded legacy, the "facts" about Coltrane's life and work have never been definitely...

   Published February 13th 2013 by Routledge
5. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music

   Edited by Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor

   Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the "mainstream" in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures – what may have been considered alternative to...

   Published January 24th 2013 by Routledge
6. Understanding Society through Popular Music

   2nd Edition

   By Joe Kotarba, Bryce Merrill, J Patrick Williams, Phillip Vannini

   Written for Introductory Sociology and Sociology of Popular Music courses, the second edition of Understanding Society through Popular Music uses popular music to illustrate fundamental social institutions, theories, sociological concepts, and processes. The authors use music, a social phenomenon...

   Published January 10th 2013 by Routledge
7. Local Music Scenes and Globalization

   Transnational Platforms in Beirut

   By Thomas Burkhalter

   Series: Routledge Studies in Ethnomusicology

   This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut, looking at musicians working towards a new understanding of musical creativity and music culture in a country that is dominated by mass-mediated pop music, and propaganda. Burkhalter studies the generation...

   Published December 18th 2012 by Routledge
8. Liveness in Modern Music

   Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of Performance

   By Paul Sanden

   Series: Routledge Research in Music

   This study investigates the idea and practice of liveness in modern music. Understanding what makes music live in an ever-changing musical and technological terrain is one of the more complex and timely challenges facing scholars of current music, where liveness is typically understood to represent...

   Published December 17th 2012 by Routledge
9. Vocal Music and Contemporary Identities

   Unlimited Voices in East Asia and the West

   Edited by Christian Utz, Frederick Lau

   Series: Routledge Research in Music

   Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural identity in 20th- and 21st-century music in both East Asian and Western music. The authors approach musical meaning in specific case studies against the...

   Published December 17th 2012 by Routledge
10. Understanding Popular Music Culture

    4th Edition

    By Roy Shuker

    This extensively revised new edition of Understanding Popular Music Culture provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the production, distribution, consumption and meaning of popular music and the difficulties and debates that surround the analysis of popular culture and popular...

    Published October 25th 2012 by Routledge