The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place

Rezensionen / Stimmen

The latest addition to Bloomsbury's Popular Music Handbook series is a well-conceived and intelligently organized introduction to one of the most interesting areas of contemporary popular music scholarship: the study of musical spaces and places. The editors do an excellent job of arranging a variety of voices and bring together contrasting approaches in a way that makes coherent a topic that is, it seems, limitless! There are essays here on the bedroom, the studio and the record shop; on the toilet circuit of small gigs and the portaloo logistics of large festivals; on French banlieus, South African townships, Brazilian favelas and English suburbia; on musical cities as conceived by policy makers, tourists and musicians; on travelling at home with a Frank Sinatra album and feeling at home in the circuits of the digital universe; on the historical space of heritage and musical nationalism; on experiencing the noise of cities and the sounds of the countryside. This is a rich field of scholarship indeed! The experience and the forms of music might seem to become ever less tethered to locality, but this collection of essays from many disciplines and countries shows how space cannot but structure sound, from global commodity flows to the banlieu and the bedroom. With succinct chapters providing evocative case studies and quick access to the relevant theoretical literatures, the Handbook will be much appreciated as the primary gateway into researching the variegated geographies of today's popular music. This is not another book about the relationship between music and the city. It is not another book about musical cities. Nor is it a book about musical scenes. Following the primordial path of Simmel or Lefebvre, this edited book expands, systematizes and updates the fruitful (and foundational) relations between music, space and place from a theoretical and empirical point of view.

It is a crucial work of transdisciplinary profile that equates space, place (and even the non-place) in a dialogical relationship through the presentation of the different dynamics and means of appropriation and consumption of music spaces and places - home, radio, record store, nightclub, live concert, mobile devices. It unveils the relationships between space, place, music production and performance in the city, in the bedroom, in the (virtual-) studio, in the record or in the live gig.

Music does not exist without space and the place. Considering the contemporary metamorphosis of this equation, this edited book shows us the impressive number of 29 chapters dedicated to the different issues, disciplines, theories, methods and geographical latitudes that are at stake. It ranges from suburban breakout, to South African township life, Rio de Janeiro's Favelas funk, postcolonial noise and even trans-national music.

The plethora of meanings of the relationship between music, space and place is further explored in terms of its historicity, heritage, memory, tourism, events/festivals or cinema. In short, this edited book has come to occupy a place - which was empty because fragmentary - for all the academics, researchers, students, music lovers, managers and politicians who have music and its 'territories' as their field of action. Moreover, I can tell you how much I missed it.