For David Cameron and ‘Big Society’ Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular ‘folk’ is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from folk music to football supporters’ trusts, from Raoul Moat to Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a powerful force in British culture, asserting that the left must recapture this cultural territory from the far right and begin to rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up. ,

First published in 1996. The need to write, particularly in pre-technological recording days, in order to preserve and to analyze, lies at the heart of folklore and yet to write means to change the medium in which much folk communication and art actually took and takes place. In Part I of the collection, the contributors address literary constructions of traditional and emergent cultures, those of Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Carmen Tafolla, Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Thomas Hardy, and Dacia Maraini. The contributors to Part II of the collection offer readings of a variety of traditional, vernacular, and local performances.

The book focuses on the threat to free self-development and the effort to ward off a perceived threat of extinction as well as the development of self-preservation forces. The challenges for ethnic and religious minorities in the 19th–21st centuries are explained and unfolded against the historical background that serves as a frame of reference. The royal privileges granted in medieval Hungary were abolished in the mid-19th century. The German-speaking people’s church (Saxones) in Transylvania founded on this had to reorient itself, although a pioneer region of religious freedom had established itself behind the “Ottoman Curtain”. Since the reception of the Reformation, the “Saxones” had been Protestant. At the end of the 19th century, after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, this minority realised the concept of cultural Protestantism in its purest form: ethnicity and religion were understood to be congruent. Homogeneity of society was the ideal, and affiliation with the German Empire was intensified. Economy, science, culture, language as well as school and church were understood as a unity; segregation and emigration were frowned upon. This concept fell into crisis due to various developments, including economic ones – especially after the annexation of Romania in 1918. National Socialism was widely adopted, along with anti-Semitism. For exponents of the church leadership, the Confessio Augustana only served as a label. On the one hand, external pressure under communist rule brought about a (only conditionally possible) retraditionalisation, on the other hand, it led to the bleeding out of the congregations due to increased emigration. Free development has only started again since the political upheaval in 1989. The church, which has become small, conveys important impulses and serves as a bridge to ecumenism.

"This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.