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243 results in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Music

Page 1 of 13

Yugoslav Avant-Garde Music, 1945–1991
  • Laura Emmery
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Informed by fascinating interviews, photographs, and previously unexamined archival materials, this book reveals a compelling story of Yugoslav avant-garde and experimental music from 1945 until 1991, ending with the year when all artistic activities came to a sudden halt with the start of the Yugoslav wars. It examines the political, social, and cultural events that gave rise to the flourishing avant-garde scene in the country and follows the emergence and development of Yugoslav cultural programs in the postwar period that made the republic a magnet for cultural exchange, through to the sudden and violent dissolution of those programs with the collapse of the political state. The book is the first full-length book in English on the subject, and provides an indispensable, interdisciplinary resource that will contribute to the preservation of this legacy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Elizabeth Maconchy in Context
  • Edited by Justin Vickers, Lucy Walker
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Elizabeth Maconchy was one of the most prominent and successful composers of the twentieth century, a champion of contemporary music who composed chamber operas, choral music, orchestral works, a range of compositions and operas for children, and a highly-regarded series of string quartets. This collection explores her life and work, her Irishness and her formative years at the Royal College of Music. It examines her intersections with musical and cultural movements, and the persistent and insidious presence of sexism against which she presented a forceful, often humorous stance. There are chapters devoted to her important friendships with composers and teachers, interactions with broadcasters and festival organisers along with a focused section dedicated to the breadth and depth of Maconchy's compositions. The Irish-English composer is revealed a force to be reckoned with who frequently demonstrated a powerful instinct to thrive and survive, often against the odds.

No Future
  • Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984
  • Matthew Worley
  • Foreword by Paul Morley
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    14 May 2026
  • 'No Feelings', 'No Fun', 'No Future'. The years 1976 to 1984 saw punk emerge and evolve as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude and an aesthetic. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment and socio-economic change, punk rejuvenated and re-energised British youth culture, inserting marginal voices and political ideas into pop. Rejecting both tired clichés and nostalgic myths, Matthew Worley provides the definitive account of how punk was constructed and utilised from the ground up. He takes youth culture seriously as a way of understanding history, demonstrating how punk not only reflected but directly impacted social and political history through its unique ability to provoke, disrupt and subvert. This revised and updated edition marks fifty years since the birth of punk and includes a new foreword from acclaimed music journalist, Paul Morley. It remains the foremost history of British punk.

Hip-Hop and American Culture
  • Edited by Rob Turner
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026

The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price
  • Edited by Samantha Ege, Alexandra Kori Hill
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • Active in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century, Florence B. Price was an African American composer, pianist, organist and music teacher, and a central figure in the first generation of Black composers of art music in the US. Price's aesthetic engaged with Black music of the enslavement period, and her gendered racial identity deserves careful consideration, while her geography and era distinguish her trajectory from those of her European and Anglo-American counterparts. This Companion introduces readers to archives and sources on Price, the style and genre of her music, and her artistic communities, and reception. It contextualizes Price's music and life in relation to the sociocultural climate of her time, the Black classical scene to which she belonged, and the compositional aesthetics that informed her craft. It offers an alternative view of music's capacity to uplift and amplify underrepresented voices.

The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music
  • Edited by Hillegonda C Rietveld, Toby Young
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • Electronic dance music is increasingly the focus of a multitude of academic research projects around the world but has been drastically under-represented in accessible core published material. This innovative scholarly collection provides an important 'first stop' for researchers and students wishing to work in this area. It examines the key features of numerous electronic dance music scenes and (sub)genres alongside discussions of the musical, social and aesthetic experiences of participants to consider how these musical practices create purpose and cultural significance for millions around the world. At the same time, it introduces diverse theoretical approaches to the understanding of electronic dance music cultures and addresses the issues and debates in electronic dance music culture studies. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawn from both music and cultural studies – including music aesthetics, technologies, venues, and performativity – from a broad geographical perspective, the volume sheds fresh light on electronic dance music cultures.

The Cambridge Companion to French Art Song
  • Edited by Stephen Rumph
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in the French art song, or mélodie, with a flood of new books, articles, and editions. This Companion draws on the best of this new research, with chapters by world-renowned scholars and performers examining French art song through the practicality of performance, both pianistic and vocal. The book surveys the repertory chronologically from the 1820s into the 1950s, covering all the central composers (Berlioz, Gounod, Fauré, Debussy, Duparc, Chausson, Ravel, Poulenc, Messiaen, and many more). It includes chapters on the role of women in the creation, performance, and diffusion of French song; the analysis of French prosody and poetic forms; the position of the mélodie in French literary history; and the interpretation of mélodie in performance. Scholars, students, performers, and music lovers will find thorough and up-to-date resources to enable them to explore this crucial yet understudied song repertory.

The World of Leonard Cohen
  • Edited by David R. Shumway
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    29 January 2026
  • Leonard Cohen's artistic career is unique. Most poets and novelists do not become rock stars. No other rock star's career peaked in their eighth decade as Leonard Cohen's did. Cohen's popularity is still growing following his death. In The World of Leonard Cohen, a team of international scholars and writers explore the various dimensions of the artist's life, work, persona, and legacy to offer an authoritative and accessible summation of Cohen's extraordinary career. His relation to key themes and topics – Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Zen and the East, the Folk tradition, Rock & Roll, Canadian and world literature, film – are all addressed. The World of Leonard Cohen offers a comprehensive, uniquely informed and wholly fresh account of this iconic songwriter and artist, whose singular voice has permanently altered our cultural landscape.

Welcome to the club
  • The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ
  • DJ Paulette
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    08 January 2026
  • This book is a heartfelt and at times hilarious and frustrating account of DJ Paulette’s thirty-year music career. She spans the scenes she has inhabited, the characters she has encountered and the many twists and turns and ups and downs of her career. DJ Paulette, a Black queer woman, breaks through the gates of the boys’ clubs, enduring the knock-backs and fighting for a seat at the table. As a foremother to all women, she has tirelessly worked to share her passion for music with the world, and has become a doyen of DJ culture. She has worked in radio stations, record labels, magazines, recording studios and, most powerfully, and in DJ booths. Paulette relates how electronic dance music and the associated media experienced a whitewashing that was extreme in its execution. She discusses Flesh, the Haçienda years and the Haçienda renaissance with the people at the sharp end of operations: Paul Cons, Peter Hook, Luke Howard, Kath McDermott and Ang Matthews. Paulette examines the chaotic rupture caused by hard graft, and disagreements with bookers and bar managers over equipment, conditions and pay. She relates why and how her life went from wonderland to warzone. Paulette also discusses women’s secret legacy, women’s rights-related issues and the importance of planning one’s career. Finally, she explores the journey through the pandemic with the people and organisations she worked with who refused to surrender in the face of this invisible assailant.

Debussy Studies 2
  • Edited by Barbara L. Kelly, David J. Code
  • Published online:
    15 November 2025
    Print publication:
    06 November 2025
  • Over a century after his death, Debussy remains prominent in concert programmes and international scholarly research. This collection showcases the latest developments in the field. It reflects new preoccupations in aesthetics, using an array of archival sources to piece together Debussy's literary tastes and influences, and drawing on philosophy and contemporaneous ideas about perception and cognition to explore the perceived links between Debussy's music, emotion and nature. The volume is notable for its embrace of the composer's earliest and latest works, which are often seen as unrepresentative of the 'real' Debussy. Its fresh approaches to analysis give new focus, in particular, to rhythm, metre, and the dance. It also reflects the current musicological preoccupation with performance and recording. Debussy Studies 2 ends with an assessment of the ways in which the scholarly debates immediately after his death have continued to influence our understanding one hundred years on.

Schoenberg in Context
  • Edited by Alexander Carpenter
  • Published online:
    04 September 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • Contradictory and paradoxical, Schoenberg was responsible for explosively radical innovations in composition - including atonality and the twelve-tone method - that changed the face of music in the twentieth century. This volume explores Schoenberg's life, work and world, offering contributions from internationally recognized musicologists, music theorists, cultural historians, literary scholars and more. Chapters examine the different places where Schoenberg lived, his various approaches to composition, the people and institutions that shaped his life and work, and the big issues and ideas that informed his worldview, including religion, gender, technology and politics. This book is essential for students and educators but also accessible to a general audience interested in the intersections of music, modernity, society and culture, offering a variety of fresh, multi-disciplinary perspectives on Schoenberg and his richly variegated world.

Anton Webern at the Dawn of Modernism
  • Sebastian Wedler
  • Published online:
    21 August 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • Anton Webern is recognised as one of the pivotal figures of atonality and precursors to post-war serialism. However, his earlier, tonal works have been largely neglected and shrouded in clichés. A study of both the generative elements of Webern's aesthetic imagination, and the philosophical signatures of musical modernity, this first book-length account of Webern's tonal music explores the complex and variegated ways in which the young composer engaged with, and sought to contribute to, the cultural discourses of fin-de-siècle modernism, well before he self-consciously embarked upon his famous 'path' to the New Music. While acknowledging the rapid stylistic transformation that Webern's musical language underwent, the author suggests that earliness in Webern is not simply a chronological term but is rather best understood in terms of a constitutive tension between phenomenological and dialectical modes of musical thought.

The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap
  • Edited by Richard Bramwell, Alex de Lacey
  • Published online:
    25 July 2025
    Print publication:
    14 August 2025
  • Rap has remapped the way we think about music. For more than fifty years its poetics, performance and political power has resonated across the globe. This Companion offers an array of perspectives on the form, from the fields of sociology, linguistics, musicology, psychology, literary studies, education and law, unpacking how this versatile form of oral communication has permeated nearly every aspect of daily life. Taking a decidedly global perspective, these accounts draw from practice in Australia, China, France, Germany, Jamaica, India and Tanzania; exploring how the form has taken hold in particular contexts, and what this can tell us about the medium itself and the environments in which it was repurposed. An indispensable resource for students and researchers, the collection provides an introduction to global rap studies as well as insights into the some of the most important and exciting new developments in this field.

Boulez in Context
  • Edited by Edward Campbell
  • Published online:
    08 July 2025
    Print publication:
    24 July 2025
  • Pierre Boulez was a towering figure in contemporary music from the 1940s and 1950s to his death in 2016. This volume demonstrates his distinctive impact on new music and situates him within a wide range of contexts to enhance appreciation of the cultural embeddedness of his work. Successive sections consider his early life and education, his engagements with cultural, musical, literary and artistic modernism, his relationships with his modernist predecessors and contemporaries, and the intersections of his work with literature, visual art, mathematics, philosophy and technology. Contributors explore his various roles as composer, conductor, recording artist, writer, teacher and systems builder, as well as his role in French cultural politics, his move to Germany and the time he spent in the United States. This book is essential for students and educators but also accessible to a general audience interested in Boulez's legacy and his unique position in recent music history.

The Cambridge Companion to The Rite of Spring
  • Edited by Davinia Caddy
  • Published online:
    28 June 2025
    Print publication:
    17 July 2025
  • A Companion not only to the historic, path-breaking ballet production by Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Roerich and Stravinsky that premiered in Paris in 1913, but also to its legacy across the centuries. The newly commissioned essays will guide students and ballet-goers as they encounter this fascinating work and enable them to navigate the complex artistic currents it set in motion, intertwining music, theatrical ballet and modern dance with the wider world of ideas. The book embraces The Rite of Spring as a spectrum of creative possibility that has impacted the arts, politics, gender, race and national identity, and even popular culture, from the 1910s to the present day. It distils an enormous body of literature, sharing insights from the very latest research while inviting readers to rethink standard scholarly narratives, and brings together contributions from specialists across multiple disciplines: music history, theory and analysis, dance and theatre studies, art history, Russian history, and European modernism.

The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story
  • Edited by Paul R. Laird, Elizabeth A. Wells
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, this Companion explores this explosive 1950s remake of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its portrayal of the raw passion, rivalries, jealousy and rage that doom the young lovers to their tragic fate. Organised thematically, chapters range from Broadway's history and precursors to West Side Story; the early careers of its creators; the show's score with emphasis on writing, production, and orchestrations; issues of class, colourism, and racism; New York's gang culture, and how the show's legacy can be found in popular culture throughout the world.

The Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia
  • Edited by Amanda Harris, Clint Bracknell
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • As a companion to 'music in Australia', rather than 'Australian music', this book acknowledges the complexity and contestation inherent in the term 'Australia', whilst placing the music of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at its very heart. This companion emphasizes a diversity of musical experiences in the breadth of musical practice that flows though Australia, including Indigenous song, art music, children's music, jazz, country, popular music forms and music that blurs genre boundaries. Organised in four themed sections, the chapters present the latest research alongside perspectives of current creative artists to explore communities of practice and music's ongoing entanglements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural practices, the influence of places near and far, of continuity, tradition, adaptation, and change. In the final chapter, we pick up where these chapters have taken us, asking what is next for music in Australia for the future.

The Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar
  • Edited by Jan-Peter Herbst, Steve Waksman
  • Published online:
    08 November 2024
    Print publication:
    17 October 2024
  • The electric guitar is one of the most important musical instruments and cultural artifacts of the 20th and 21st centuries and enjoys popularity worldwide. Designed for students, this Companion explores electric guitar technology and performance, and the instrument's history and cultural impact. Chapters focused on the social significance of the electric guitar draw attention to the ways in which gender and race have shaped and been shaped by it, the ecology of electric guitar manufacturing, and the participation of electric guitarists in online communities. Contributions on electric guitar history stretch the chronology backwards in time and broaden our ideas of what belongs in that history, and those addressing musical style investigate the cultural value of virtuosity while providing material analysis of electric guitar technique. The Companion's final section considers the electric guitar's global circulation, particularly in Africa, the Afro-Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.

The Year that Made the Musical
  • 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre
  • William A. Everett
  • Published online:
    26 September 2024
    Print publication:
    11 July 2024
  • Whether they appeared on Broadway or the Strand, the shows appearing in 1924 epitomized the glamor of popular musical theatre. What made this particular year so distinctive – so special – was the way it brought together the old and the new, the venerated and the innovative, and the traditional and the chic. William Everett, in his compelling new book, reveals this remarkable mid-Roaring Twenties stagecraft to have been truly transnational, with a stellar cast of producers, performers and creators boldly experimenting worldwide. Revues, musical comedies, zarzuelas and operettas formed part of a thriving theatrical ecosystem, with many works – and their leading artists – now unpredictably defying genres. The author demonstrates how fresh approaches became highly successful, with established leads like Marie Tempest and Fred Stone appearing in new productions even as youthful talents such as Florence Mills, Fred and Adele Astaire, Gertrude Lawrence and George Gershwin now started to make their mark.

The Cambridge Companion to Composition
  • Edited by Toby Young
  • Published online:
    25 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • There are as many ways of creating music as there are composers in the world, with a vast array of possible methods and practices. This book provides essential critical and practical tools for composers as they try to navigate this complex landscape, whilst also offering provocations for practitioners discovering their own voices and solidifying their place in their musical communities. Designed to be a companion in the truest sense, the book offers practical support throughout the creative process and thought-provoking insights on technical questions for a range of compositional approaches.

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