The 21st Century Music Practice series of Elements by Cambridge University Press is part of a publishing format that CUP have developed and which consists of a 20,000 – 30,000 word text – somewhere in between a standard journal article and a book – and which can also involve extensive multi-media content. The series has developed out of the 21st Century Music Practice Research Network which currently has around 250 members in 30 countries and is dedicated to the study of what Christopher Small termed Musicking – the process of making and sharing music rather than the output itself. Obviously this exists at the intersection of ethnomusicology, performance studies, and practice pedagogy / practice-led-research in composition, performance, recording, production, musical theatre, music for screen and other forms of multi-media musicking. The generic nature of the term ‘21st Century Music Practice’ reflects the aim of the series to bring together all forms of music into a larger discussion of current practice and to provide a platform for research about any musical tradition or style from anywhere in the world. So far the series includes work about various forms of transcultural music making as well as studies of practice in classical music conducting, record production, kit drum performance, Chinese street performance and more. You can see the list below.
You can also find guidance for authors and a link to the proposal form here
Current List of Elements in the series
The Marks of a Maestro
Annotating Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2021
Summary
Only recently has it become obvious that conductors’ annotated scores and marked orchestral parts are of great cultural, historical and musical importance. In the not-so-distant past, these artefacts had something of an uncertain status with many either languishing unopened in libraries and family archives or simply being dispersed or discarded. With the help of institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, Harvard University and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra this has begun to change with their extensive collections of these materials now being made available to scholars and musicians. This element examines the emergence of these artefacts as didactic and interpretative tools and explores the ways in which the performance styles of ten iconic conductors active in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries are reflected in their annotated scores and marked orchestral parts of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, K. 551 (‘Jupiter’).
Chinese Street Music
Complicating Musical Community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2021
Summary
Musical community is a notion commonly evoked in situations of intensive collective activity and fervent negotiation of identities. Passion Square shows, the daily singing of Chinese pop classics in parks and on street corners in the city of Wuhan, have an ambivalent relationship with these ideas. They inspire modest outward signs of engagement and are guided by apparently individualistic concerns; singers are primarily motivated by making a living through the relationships they build with patrons, and reflection on group belonging is of lesser concern. How do these orientations help complicate the foundations of typical musical community discourses? This Element addresses community as a quality rather than as an entity to which people belong, exploring its ebbs and flows as associations between people, other bodies and the wider street music environment intersect with its various theoretical implications. A de-idealised picture of musical community better acknowledges the complexities of everyday musical experiences.
Reimagine to Revitalise
New Approaches to Performance Practices Across Cultures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2021
Summary
How can the classical Karnatik music of South India illuminate performers’ and researchers’ understanding of the art music of seventeenth-century Italy, and specifically Monteverdi’s operas? Both art forms attach great value to the skill of vocal ornamentation, and by exploring the singer’s practice moving between them, this Element reveals how intercultural approaches can enable the reconsideration of the history of Western music from a global perspective. Using methods from historical and comparative musicology, theory and practice-based research, Charulatha Mani analyses vocal ornamentation and technique and arrives at an innovative approach to studying musics from the past. Musical practice, the author argues, is an enactment of hybridity and the artistic product of plurality. Specifically, in early modern Europe the fluid movement of musicians from the East paved the way to a plurality of musical cultures. This finding holds deep implications for diversity in and decolonisation of current music performance and education.
A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit
Magical Nexus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2022
Summary
The author is a drummer with experience in a variety of musical genres and contexts, with emphasis on rock and related styles. This auto ethnographic Element presents the author’s philosophy of playing drum kit. The text explains how playing drum kit matters to this musician and may resonate with others to whom making music matters in similar ways. The Element contains audio files of music in which the author plays drum kit in the ensemble settings described. There are photos of the author’s drums and of him drumming. Based on June Boyce-Tillman’s non-religious model of holistic spirituality and Tim Ingold’s notion of correspondences, the author describes how playing drum kit enables him to experience transcendence – the magical nexus at which Materials, Construction, Values/Culture and Expression meet. Each of these domains, and the magic derived from their combination, is illustrated through examples of the author’s live and recorded musical collaborations.
Shared Listenings
Methods for Transcultural Musicianship and Research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2023
Summary
This Element demonstrates how a combination of stimulated recall and collaborative autoethnographic strategies can be applied to artistic and scholarly work at the intersection of ethnomusicology and practice-led-research. The authors relate recently collected material from fieldwork in Vietnam to the long-term method development within the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones, of which three authors are the founding members. The discussion centers around the inter-subjective forms of stimulated recall analysis, developed through the creative work of this innovative intercultural music ensemble. The aim of this Element is to create a decolonized methodology—for both music performance and research—and it provides a detailed account of this method development starting in 2006. Furthermore, the authors discuss how this practice was successfully shared with three master performers in the south of Vietnam as part of a collaborative project in 2018–2019.
Repetition and Performance in the Recording Studio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2024
Summary
The recording studio is a performance setting in which popular music performers often produce multiple takes, using particular strategies to vary outcomes in search of the ‘perfect take’. However, repetition offers the opportunity to discover the unexplored liminality between what we expect to hear and what is performed. Observing multiple takes of one’s own recorded performance within the temporal limits of a vocal recording session yields qualitative data to create an ethnography of both the process and the Work itself. Presenting artefacts from a recording session in conjunction with an autoethnographic text provides a demonstration of how evolving external cues, and internal cognitive scripts interact with technology and social conventions in the recording studio to impact a popular music musician’s performance and, in effect, the creation of a new Work.
Original Pirate Material
The Streets and Hip-hop Transatlantic Exchange
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 November 2024
Summary
With his debut album Original Pirate Material (2002), Mike Skinner, who recorded under the name The Streets, combined the world of UK dance music with US hip-hop. Original Pirate Material is the result of the so-called ‘bedroom producer’, hybridizing previous forms into something novel. This Element explores a number of themes in this album: white masculinity, the everyday, technology, sampling, hybridity, the Black Atlantic, and US-UK transatlantic relations. It examines the exoticism of Englishness from a US perspective as well as within the wider context of Anglo-American cross influence in post-WWII popular music. Twenty years since the album’s release, this Element provides an investigation of the album’s content and reception, as an important case study of (postcolonial) hybridity and (English, male) identity.
Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music
Practice-Based Research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2024
Summary
Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.
What Musicking Affords
Musical Performance and the Post-cognitivist Turn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2025
Summary
The last three decades of work in cognitive science have challenged the idea that thinking occurs entirely in the head, claiming instead that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. The claims of 4E cognition challenge the dominance of computational approaches to cognition, and music scholars have explored Gibson’s notion of affordances to propose a new understanding of musical performance as primarily grounded in action. This Element draws from paradigms such as enactive cognition, cybernetic and systems-theoretical approaches, phenomenological perspectives on practice, Gibson’s theory of affordances, and aspects of the author’s own practice as a multi-instrumentalist to consider cases of how the interface between musician and instrument influences performance.
Hidden Music
The Composer’s Guide to Sonification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2025
Summary
This book explores the intersection of data sonification (the systematic translation of data into sound) and musical composition. Section 1 engages with existing discourse and offers an original model (the sonification continuum) which provides perspectives on the practice of sonification for composers, science communicators and those interested in this rapidly emerging field. Section 2 engages with the sonification process itself, exploring techniques, models of translation, data fidelity, analogic and symbolic data mapping, temporality and the listener experience. In Section 3 these concepts and techniques are all made concrete in the context of a selection of the author’s projects (2004–2023). Finally, some reasons are offered on how sonification as a practice might enrich composition, communication, collaboration, and a sense of connection.
More Than Words
Songs for the Language Classroom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 February 2025
Summary
English language teachers have long recognised pop songs’ potential for engaging students and establishing positive classroom environments conducive to language learning. Educational publishers increasingly incorporate music into their coursebooks, including specially commissioned ‘ELT songs’, whose lyrics feature aspects of target language. This Element explores the phenomenon of ELT songs from the authors’ insider perspective as songwriters. It considers the relationship between music and lyrics in songs, what this means for using songs in the language classroom, the historical developments through which ELT songs emerged, and the contexts in which they are written, listened to, and made. Through literature review and reflection, the authors derive a framework of twelve criteria and ten dilemmas to guide ELT songwriting, before applying it in an analysis of their songs and songwriting process. The final section proposes a model for multidisciplinary collaboration between songwriters and non-musician collaborators including authors, teachers, and publishers.