This is a book about classical music – for people who say they love music “but don’t understand how it works”, as well as for performers and music students of all ages. Proposing that deeper enjoyment begins with an understanding of music’s basic structures, the book describes how the simple template of earlier dance-songs was adapted by composers writing music for instruments. The instrumental sonata became one of the great formal frameworks of western music: in symphonies, concertos, chamber music and solo sonatas, it dominated concert music for some 250 years – yet it is little understood by many music lovers. To simplify this vast field, Past Sounds singles out for study “sonatas” for piano trio – piano, violin and ’cello. These instruments have well-contrasted and easily identifiable sounds, and as the story unfolds the reader is introduced to many rarely heard but beautiful works for piano trio. This is a lively, clearly-written narrative as well as a handbook for subsequent listening. The book has two distinctive features. Firstly, technical terms are carefully explained, and for those not familiar with music notation, audio clips in an accompanying website reproduce the actual sound of the music described. Secondly, in a broad historical sweep from mid-18th to 20th centuries, the development of the sonata is followed in its context of contemporary arts and literature – demonstrating how the sonata idea of classical music well deserves to be understood and valued as a western cultural archetype alongside other great artistic and literary forms.

Table of contents

The author covers the development of the electronic musical instrument from Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium at the turn of the last century to the MIDI synthesizers of the 1990s. --book cover.

Remembering Popular Music’s Past capitalizes on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimized and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The cultural studies framework adopted in Remembering Popular Music’s Past encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly, the collection deals with the precarious nature of popular music heritage, history and memory.

The author presents a cultural history of popular Viennese electronic music from 1990 to 2015, from the perspectives of production, scene and national and international reception. To illustrate this history in depth, a number of case studies of the most successful and distinguished musicians are explored, such as Kruder and Dorfmeister, Patrick Pulsinger, Tosca, Electric Indigo and Sofa Surfers. The author draws on research about electronic music, the relationship between music and the urban environment, the history of Austria and Vienna, music scenes and fandom, the digital shift , stardom in popular music (especially electronic music), as well as theories of postmodernism. Chapters 4 and 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.