SOAS Studies in Music is today one of the world’s leading series in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Our core mission is to produce high-quality, ethnographically rich studies of music-making in the world’s diverse musical cultures. We publish monographs and edited volumes that explore musical repertories and performance practice, critical issues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, historical and analytical approaches to music across the globe. We recognize the value of applied, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and our authors draw on current approaches in musicology and anthropology, psychology, media and gender studies. We welcome monographs that investigate global contemporary, classical and popular musics, the effects of digital mediation and transnational flows.
Series Editors:
Professor Rachel Harris (SOAS University of London)
Dr Richard Williams (SOAS University of London)
Editorial Board
Professor Kwasi Ampene (University of Michigan)
Professor Linda Barwick (University of Sydney)
Professor Angela Impey (SOAS University of London)
Dr Peter McMurray (University of Cambridge)
Dr Moshe Morad (Tel Aviv University)
Professor Suzel Reily (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Professor Henry Spiller (University California Davis)
By Paolo Pacciolla
May 26, 2020
The book studies the evolution of the ancient drum mṛdaṅga into the pakhāvaj, crossing more than 2,000 years of history. While focusing on the Nathdwara school of pakhāvaj, the author joins ethnographic, historical, religious and iconographic perspectives to argue a multifaceted interpretation of ...
By Marzanna Poplawska
February 13, 2020
This book is a study of music inculturation in Indonesia. It shows how religious expression can be made relevant in an indigenous context and how grassroots Christianity is being realized by means of music. Through the discussion of indigenous expressions of Christianity, the book presents multiple...
By Eleni Kallimopoulou
January 31, 2020
Since the 1980s, musicians and audiences in Athens have been rediscovering musical traditions associated with the Ottoman period of Greek history. The result of this revivalist movement has been the urban musical style of 'paradosiaká' ('traditional'). Drawing from a varied repertoire that includes...
By Bonnie McConnell
November 07, 2019
Music, Health, and Power offers an original, on-the-ground analysis of the role that music plays in promoting healthy communities. The book brings the reader inside the world of kanyeleng fertility societies and HIV/AIDS support groups, where women use music to leverage stigma and marginality into ...
By Keith Howard
October 29, 2019
As Korea has developed and modernized, music has come to play a central role as a symbol of national identity. Nationalism has been stage managed by scholars, journalists and, from the beginning of the 1960s, by the state, as music genres have been documented, preserved and promoted as 'Intangible ...
By Robert Faulkner
April 15, 2013
A sparsely populated island in the North Atlantic recently made worldwide headlines in the Global Financial Crisis and for volcanic eruptions that caused unprecedented chaos to international air travel. Large contemporary audiences have formed very different images of Iceland through the vocal ...
By Kerstin Klenke
April 23, 2019
The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era is a pioneering study of the intersection between popular music and state politics in Central Asia. Based on 20 months of fieldwork and archival research in Tashkent, this book explores a remarkable era in Uzbekistan’s ...
By John Baily
April 16, 2019
This book presents the vocal art music of Kabul as performed by Ustad Amir Mohammad. At the heart of Kabul's vocal art music is the ghazal, a highly flexible song form using Persian (or Pashto) texts derived from a variety of sources. Much of this poetry is in the Sufi tradition, with frequent ...
By Patricia Matusky, Tan Sooi Beng
March 07, 2019
The Music of Malaysia, first published in Malay in 1997 and followed by an English edition in 2004 is still the only history, appreciation and analysis of Malaysian music in its many and varied forms available in English. The book categorizes the types of music genres found in Malaysian society and...
By Moshe Morad
November 07, 2016
The ‘Special Period’ in Cuba was an extended era of economic depression starting in the early 1990s, characterized by the collapse of revolutionary values and social norms, and a way of life conducted by improvised solutions for survival, including hustling and sex-work. During this time there ...
Edited
By Mohd Anis Nor, Kendra Stepputat
February 07, 2019
Performing arts in most parts of Maritime Southeast Asia are seen as an entity, where music and dance, sound and movement, acoustic and tactile elements intermingle and complement each other. Although this fact is widely known and referenced, most scholarly works in the performing arts so far have ...
By Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson
February 07, 2019
Why has the female voice—as the resonant incarnation of the female body—inspired both fascination and ambivalence? Why were women restricted from performing on the Chinese public stage? How have female roles and voices been appropriated by men throughout much of the history of Chinese theatre? Why ...