- Table View
- List View
Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)
by Shannon DrauckerCan the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.
Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science
by Peter PesicThe unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences, from ancient times to the present.Beginning in ancient Greece, Peter Pesic writes, music and sound significantly affected the development of the biomedical sciences. Physicians used rhythmical ratios to interpret the pulse, which inspired later efforts to record the pulse in musical notation. After 1700, biology and medicine took a &“sonic turn,&” viewing the body as a musical instrument, the rhythms and vibrations of which could guide therapeutic insight. In Sounding Bodies, Pesic traces the unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences. Pesic explains that music and sound provided the life sciences important tools for hearing, understanding, and influencing the rhythms of life. As medicine sought to go beyond the visible manifestations of illness, sound offered ways to access the hidden interiority of body and mind. Sonic interventions addressed the search for a new typology of mental illness, and practitioners used musical instruments to induce hypnotic states meant to cure both psychic and physical ailments. The study of bat echolocation led to the manifold clinical applications of ultrasound; such sonic devices as telephones and tuning forks were used to explore the functioning of the nerves. Sounding Bodies follows Pesic&’s Music and the Making of Modern Science and Polyphonic Minds to complete a trilogy on the influence of music on the sciences. Enhanced digital editions of Sounding Bodies offer playable music and sound examples.
Sounding Brass: Brasswind Instruments And How They Work
by Arnold Myers Murray Campbell Joël GilbertA lone bugler sounds the Last Post at a Festival of Remembrance. Overlapping horn arpeggios conjure up the flowing waters of the Rhine in Wagner&’s opera &“Das Rheingold&”. Seventy-six trombones lead the big parade; trumpets sound ceremonial fanfares, and power the horn sections in jazz and funk bands. The sounds of brass instruments enrich many of our most inspiring musical experiences. But what defines a &“brass instrument&”? How is a stream of air blown through a small gap in the player&’s lips transformed into a sound which fills a concert hall? When did brass instruments originate, and how did they evolve into the instruments of the modern orchestra? These are some of the questions addressed in this book. The authors, professional scientists but also experienced brass players, explain how recent research has illuminated our understanding of brass instruments. The presentation is aimed at a general readership, including players, teachers, and lovers of all types of music. No mathematical background is assumed. Descriptions of many experiments on brass instruments carried out by the authors and others bring out the musical significance of the results. A novel approach to the systematic classification of brass instruments is outlined and graphically illustrated. Separate chapters are devoted to trumpets and related instruments, horns, trombones, tubas, brass instruments with toneholes, and instruments from antiquity including the Celtic carnyx. The final chapter reviews the application of electronic enhancement techniques to brass instruments. The book is generously illustrated with colour photographs, musical examples, and explanatory figures.
Sounding Dissent: Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism (Music and Social Justice)
by Stephen MillarThe signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. As the public has overwhelmingly rejected a return to the violence of the Troubles (1968–1998), loyalist and republican groups have sought other outlets to continue their struggle. Music has long been used to celebrate cultural identity in the North of Ireland: from street parades to football chants, and from folk festivals to YouTube videos, music facilitates the continuation of pre-Agreement identity narratives in a “post-conflict” era. Sounding Dissent draws on original in-depth interviews with Irish republican musicians, contemporary audiences, and former paramilitaries, as well as diverse historical and archival material, including songbooks, prison records, and newspaper articles, to understand the history of political violence in Ireland. The book examines the hagiographic potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of republican martyrs, and demonstrates how musical performance and political song not only articulate experiences and memories of oppression and violence, but play a central role in the reproduction of conflict and exclusion in times of peace.
Sounding Emerging Media
by Claire FitchSounding Emerging Media details a practice-based approach to sonic art and electroacoustic composition, drawing on methodologies inspired by the production of electronic literature, and game development. Using the structural concepts identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the book is based around ideas related to labels such as Assemblage, Strata, Smooth and Striated Space, Temporal Space and, The Fold. The processes employed to undertake this research involved the creation of original texts, the development of frameworks for improvisation, the use of recordings within the process and implementation of techniques drawn from the practices of electroacoustic composition, and the use of ideas borrowed from electronic literature, publishing and game development. The results have helped to shape a compositional style which draws on these processes individually or collectively, drawing on practice often seen in game development, visual scores and composition using techniques found in electroacoustic music. Providing a journey through the landscape of emerging digital media, Sounding Emerging Media envisages a world where the composer/user/listener all become part of a continuum of collective artistry. This book is the ideal guide to the history and creation of audio for innovative digital media formats and represents crucial reading for both students and practitioners, from aspiring composers to experienced professionals.
Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 (New Material Histories of Music)
by Deirdre LoughridgeAn expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing “human” musicality from its “merely mechanical” simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the “human or machine” logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries. Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a “sound wave instrument” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers’ voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human.
Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas (Big Issues in Music)
by Jairo MorenoHow is Latin American music heard, by whom, and why? Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity. This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.
Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
by Royster Francesca T.Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.
Sounding Objects
by Carla ZecherOften abstracted by the aesthetic implications of music itself, musical instruments can be seen as physical signifiers apart from the music that they produce. In Sounding Objects, Carla Zecher studies the representation of musical instruments in French Renaissance poetry and art, arguing that the efficacy of these material objects as literary and pictorial images was derived from their physical characteristics and acoustic properties, as well as from their aesthetic product.Sounding Objects is concerned with ways in which musical culture provided poets with a rich, nuanced vocabulary for reflecting on their own art and its roles in courtly life, the civic arena, and salon society. Poets not only depicted the world of musical practice but also appropriated it, using musical instruments figuratively to establish their literary identities. Drawing on music treatises and archival sources as well as poems, paintings, and engravings, this unique study aims to enrich our understanding of the interplay of poetry, music, and art in this period, and highlights the importance of musical materiality to Renaissance culture. Disclaimer: Images removed at the request of the rights holder.
Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability In Music
by Neil Lerner Joseph N. StrausDisability, understood as culturally stigmatized bodily difference (including physical and mental impairments of all kinds), is a pervasive and permanent aspect of the human condition. While the biology of bodily difference is the proper study for science and medicine, the meaning that we attach to bodily difference is the proper study of humanists. The interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies has recently emerged to theorize social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability. Although there has been an astonishing outpouring of humanistic work in Disability Studies in the past ten years, there has been virtually no echo in musicology or music theory. Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music is the first book-length work to focus on the historical and theoretical issues of music as it relates to disability. It shows that music, like literature and the other arts, simultaneously reflects and constructs cultural attitudes toward disability. Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music promises to be a landmark study for scholars and students of music, disability, and culture.
Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity
by Susan Miyo AsaiA product of twenty-five years of archival and primary research, Sounding Our Way Home: Japanese American Musicking and the Politics of Identity narrates the efforts of three generations of Japanese Americans to reach “home” through musicking. Using ethnomusicology as a lens, Susan Miyo Asai examines the musical choices of a population that, historically, is considered outside the racial and ethnic boundaries of American citizenship. Emphasizing the notion of national identity and belonging, the volume provokes a discussion about the challenges of nation-building in a democratic society.Asai addresses the politics of music, interrogating the ways musicking functions as a performance of social, cultural, and political identification for Japanese Americans in the United States. Musicking is an inherently political act at the intersection of music, identity, and politics, particularly if it involves expressing one’s ethnicity and/or race. Asai further investigates how Japanese American ethnic identification and cultural practices relate to national belonging. Musicking cultivates a narrative of a shared history and aesthetic between performers and listeners. The discourse situates not only Japanese Americans, but all Asians into the Black/white binary of race relations in the United States.Sounding Our Way Home contributes to the ongoing struggle for acceptance and equal representation for people of color in the US. A history of Japanese American musicking across three generations, the book unveils the social and political discrimination that nonwhite immigrants and their offspring continue to face when it comes to finding acceptance in US society and culture.
Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project)
by Andrew McGraw Christopher J. MillerSounding Out the State of Indonesian Music showcases the breadth and complexity of the music of Indonesia. By bringing together chapters on the merging of Batak musical preferences and popular music aesthetics; the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a Balinese rock band; the burgeoning underground noise scene; the growing interest in kroncong in the United States; and what is included and excluded on Indonesian media, editors Andrew McGraw and Christopher J. Miller expand the scope of Indonesian music studies. Essays analyzing the perception of decline among gamelan musicians in Central Java; changes in performing arts patronage in Bali; how gamelan communities form between Bali and North America; and reflecting on the "refusion" of American mathcore and Balinese gamelan offer new perspectives on more familiar topics.Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music calls for a new paradigm in popular music studies, grapples with the imperative to decolonialize, and recognizes the field's grounding in diverse forms of practice.
Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros And Lesbian Musicality
by Martha MockusSounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality examines the musical career of the avant-garde composer, accordionist, whose radical innovations of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have redefined the aesthetic and formal parameters of American experimental music. While other scholars have studied Oliveros as a disciple of John Cage and a contemporary of composers Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley, Sounding Out resituates Pauline Oliveros in a gynecentric network of feminist activists, writers, artists and musicians. This book shows how the women in Oliveros’s life were central sources of creative energy and exchange during a crucial moment in feminist and queer cultural history. Crafting a dynamic relationship between feminism and music-making, this book offers a queerly original analysis of Oliveros’s work as a musical form of feminist activism and argues for the productive role of experimental music in lesbian feminist theory. Sounding Out combines key elements of feminist theories of lesbian sexuality with Oliveros’s major compositions, performances, critical essays, and interviews. It also includes previously unpublished correspondence between Oliveros and Edith Guttierez, Jill Johnston, Annea Lockwood, Kate Millett, and Jane Rule.
Sounding Race in Rap Songs
by Loren KajikawaAs one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness. Sounding Race in Rap Songs argues that rap music allows us not only to see but also to hear how mass-mediated culture engenders new understandings of race. The book traces the changing sounds of race across some of the best-known rap songs of the past thirty-five years, combining song-level analysis with historical contextualization to show how these representations of identity depend on specific artistic decisions, such as those related to how producers make beats. Each chapter explores the process behind the production of hit songs by musicians including Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Sugarhill Gang, Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, and Eminem. This series of case studies highlights stylistic differences in sound, lyrics, and imagery, with musical examples and illustrations that help answer the core question: can we hear race in rap songs? Integrating theory from interdisciplinary areas, this book will resonate with students and scholars of popular music, race relations, urban culture, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and beyond.
Sounding Values: Selected Essays (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology Series)
by Scott BurnhamFor several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half of the volume confronts pressing issues of historical theory and aesthetics, including intellectual models of tonal theory, leading concepts of sonata form, translations of music into poetic meaning, and recent rifts and rapprochements between criticism and analysis. The essays in the second half can be read as a series of critical appreciations, engaging some of the most consequential reception tropes of the past two centuries: Haydn and humor, Mozart and beauty, Beethoven and the sublime, Schubert and memory.
Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts (SOAS Musicology Series)
by Mohd Anis Nor Kendra StepputatPerforming 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 either focused on "music" or "dance" rather than treating the two in combination. The authors in this book look at both aspects in performance, moreover, they focus explicitly on the interrelation between the two, on both descriptive-analytical and metaphorical levels. The book includes diverse examples of regional performing art genres from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. All case studies are composed from the perspective of the relatively new approach and field of ethno-choreomusicology. This particular compilation gives an exemplary overview of various phenomena in movement-sound relations, and offers for the first time a thorough study of the phenomenon that is considered essential for the performing arts in Maritime Southeast Asia - the inseparability of movement and sound.
Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape
by Prof. Jim Sykes Prof. Julia Suzanne BylA free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be "heard" outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm—which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures—the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.
Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze And The Theory And Philosophy Of Music
by Nick NesbittIt is the contention of the editors and contributors of this volume that the work carried out by Gilles Deleuze, where rigorously applied, has the potential to cut through much of the intellectual sedimentation that has settled in the fields of music studies. Deleuze is a vigorous critic of the Western intellectual tradition, calling for a 'philosophy of difference', and, despite its ambitions, he is convinced that Western philosophy fails to truly grasp (or think) difference as such. It is argued that longstanding methods of conceptualizing music are vulnerable to Deleuze's critique. But, as Deleuze himself stresses, more important than merely critiquing established paradigms is developing ways to overcome them, and by using Deleuze's own concepts this collection aims to explore that possibility.
Soundpainting: Collaborative Creativity in Conducted Improvisation (Palgrave Studies in Sound)
by Anders EskildsenThis book explores Soundpainting, a multidisciplinary sign language for live composition and conducted improvisation, highlighting its role in facilitating creative, social interactions in music and other performative arts. Examining the meaning of Soundpainting’s syntax, the connection between constraints and creativity in hand signs, and the means for dynamic distribution and transformation of agency within ensembles, the book provides insight into the nature of cocreation and the organization of creative processes.
Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground
by Kevin C. KarnesSounds Beyond charts the origins of Arvo Pärt’s most famous music, which was created in dialogue with underground creative circles in the USSR. In Sounds Beyond, Kevin C. Karnes studies the interconnected alternative music and art scenes in the USSR during the second half of the 1970s, revealing the audacious origins of some of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s most famous music. Karnes shows how Pärt’s work was created within a vital yet forgotten culture of collective experimentation, the Soviet underground. Mining archives and oral history from across the former USSR, Sounds Beyond carefully situates modes of creative experimentation within their late socialist contexts. In documenting Pärt’s work, Karnes reveals the rich creative culture that thrived covertly in the USSR and the network of figures that made underground performances possible: students, audio engineers, sympathetic administrators, star performers, and aspiring DJs. Sounds Beyond advances a new understanding of Pärt’s music as an expression of the aesthetic and religious commitments shared, nurtured, and celebrated by many in Soviet underground circles. At the same time, this story attests to the lasting power of Pärt’s music. Dislodging the mythology of the solitary creative genius, Karnes shows that Pärt’s work would be impossible without community.
Sounds German: Popular Music in Postwar Germany at the Crossroads of the National and Transnational
by Kirkland A. FulkFor decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music—whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.
Sounds Like Helicopters: Classical Music in Modernist Cinema (SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema)
by Matthew LauExplores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music's original subversive energy.Classical music masterworks have long played a key supporting role in the movies-silent films were often accompanied by a pianist or even a full orchestra playing classical or theatrical repertory music-yet the complexity of this role has thus far been underappreciated. Sounds Like Helicopters corrects this oversight through close interpretations of classical music works in key modernist films by Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Terrence Malick. Beginning with the famous example of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now, Matthew Lau demonstrates that there is a significant continuity between classical music and modernist cinema that belies their seemingly ironic juxtaposition. Though often regarded as a stuffy, conservative art form, classical music has a venerable avant-garde tradition, and key films by important directors show that modernist cinema restores the original subversive energy of these classical masterworks. These films, Lau argues, remind us of what this music sounded like when it was still new and difficult; they remind us that great music remains new music. The pattern of reliance on classical music by modernist directors suggests it is not enough to watch modernist cinema: one must listen to its music to sense its prehistory, its history, and its obscure, prophetic future.
Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song
by Sara BareillesAn anniversary edition of The New York Times bestselling collection of essays by two-time Grammy Award winner, creator of Little Voice on Apple TV+, and star of Netflix&’s Girls5eva Sara Bareilles &“resonates with authentic and hard-won truths&” (Publishers Weekly)—and features new material on the hit Broadway musical Waitress.Sara Bareilles &“pours her heart and soul into these essays&” (Associated Press), sharing the joys and the struggles that come with creating great work, all while staying true to yourself. Imbued with humor and marked by Sara&’s confessional writing style, this essay collection tells the inside story behind some of her most popular songs. Well known for her chart-topper &“Brave,&” Sara first broke through in 2007 with her multi-platinum single &“Love Song.&” She has since released seven studio albums that have sold millions of copies and spawned several hits, not to mention creating and starring in the hit Broadway musical Waitress. &“A breezy, upbeat, and honest reflection of this multitalented artist&” (Kirkus Reviews), Sounds Like Me reveals Sara Bareilles, the artist—and the woman—on songwriting, soul-searching, and what&’s discovered along the way.
Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
by Jessica Chiccehitto HindmanA young woman leaves Appalachia for life as a classical musician—or so she thinks. When aspiring violinist Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman lands a job with a professional ensemble in New York City, she imagines she has achieved her lifelong dream. But the ensemble proves to be a sham. When the group “performs,” the microphones are never on. Instead, the music blares from a CD. The mastermind behind this scheme is a peculiar and mysterious figure known as The Composer, who is gaslighting his audiences with music that sounds suspiciously like the Titanic movie soundtrack. On tour with his chaotic ensemble, Hindman spirals into crises of identity and disillusionment as she “plays” for audiences genuinely moved by the performance, unable to differentiate real from fake. Sounds Like Titanic is a surreal, often hilarious coming-of-age story. Hindman writes with precise, candid prose and sharp insight into ambition and gender, especially when it comes to the difficulties young women face in a world that views them as silly, shallow, and stupid. As the story swells to a crescendo, it gives voice to the anxieties and illusions of a generation of women, and reveals the failed promises of a nation that takes comfort in false realities.
Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music
by Anna BeerFrancesca Caccini. Barbara Strozzi. Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Marianna Martines. Fanny Hensel. Clara Schumann. Lili Boulanger. Elizabeth Maconchy.Great composers all, but their musical legacy is still rarely acknowledged.Since the birth of classical music, those women who dared to compose have been patronised, had their sex lives scrutinised and the veracity of their authorship questioned. They worked within a musical culture where beliefs about what women could and could not do determined their every move. Yet, time and again there emerged individuals who would evade, confront and ignore the rules that sought to exclude them from the world of composition.Taking the reader on a journey from seventeenth-century Medici Florence to London in the Blitz, and beyond, Anna Beer reveals the hidden histories of eight remarkable women, explores the special communities that enabled them to compose their music, and asks tough questions about why we still don't hear their masterpieces performed.A long-overdue celebration of neglected virtuosos, Sounds and Sweet Airs presents a complex and inspirational picture of artistic endeavour and achievement that deserves to be part of our cultural heritage.