MUSIC & SOUND
July - September 2026
Ebooks
ePub and ePDF availability is listed under each book entry.
Review Copies
Email academicreviewus@bloomsbury.com (Americas) academicreviews@bloomsbury.com (UK / Rest of World).
Standing Orders
Many series are available on standing order. Please contact our trade ordering departments (see page 10).
Translation Rights
Available unless otherwise indicated.
Key to Symbols
Online resources available.
COLLECTIONS
Available for institutions to purchase on www.bloomsburycollections.com
Bloomsbury Open Access
OPEN ACCESS
Selected research publications are available on open access. For our policy or to publish OA, see www.bloomsbury.com/openaccess
Proposals
See www.bloomsbury.com/discover/bloomsburyacademic/authors
Pricing and Availability
Whilst we try to ensure that prices, publication dates and other details are correct on going to press, they are subject to change without further notice.
Your Data
For information on how we process your personal data please read our Privacy Policy located at www.bloomsbury.com/privacy-policy
You can unsubscribe or manage your preference at any time via www.bloomsbury.com/newsletter or by emailing us at academic@bloomsbury.com
COLLECTIONS
33 1/3 Africa
UK November 2026 • US August 2026
224 Pages
HB 9798765119716 • £60 00 / $80 00
PB 9798765119723 • £16 99 / $22 95
ePDF 9798765119747 • £15 29 / $20 65
ePub 9798765119730 • £15 29 / $20 65
Bloomsbury Academic
Nico, Rochereau, Roger & L'African Fiesta - Volume 1 (1962-1963)
Frank Gunderson, Florida State University, USA
Nico, Rochereau, Roger & L'African Fiesta - Volume 1 (1962-1963) played a crucial role in developing the careers of Tabu Ley Rochereau and Docteur Nico, and more importantly, the genre of Congolese rhumba music
The extraordinary Congolese musicians Nicolas Kasanda aka “Docteur” Nico (1939-1985), guitarist, together with Tabu Ley Pascal “Rochereau” (1937-2013), singer, songwriter, and bandleader, first worked together under “Le Grande Kallé” Joseph Kabasélé and what has been considered the first truly great Congolese orchestra, l'African Jazz They are considered among the pioneers of Congolese rumba, a genre that originated during the 1940s and has been enormously influential worldwide
The album Nico, Rochereau, Roger & L'African Fiesta - Volume 1 (1962-1963) also featuring Mwamba Charles “Dechaud” on rhythm guitar and Roger Iziedi on vocals, contains some of their first Vita Label studio singles, recorded after the musicians left l'African Jazz to form L'African Fiesta Subsequently re-released on SonoDisc, this collection of songs (curated by Iziedi) represented a significant new direction for Congolese rumba as the literal soundtrack for the heady and hopeful years of post-Independence life for much of Sub-Saharan Africa
COLLECTIONS
33 1/3 Africa
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
152 Pages
HB 9798765126066 • £60 00 / $80 00
PB 9798765126059 • £16 99 / $22 95
ePDF 9798765126080 • £15 29 / $20 65
ePub 9798765126073 • £15 29 / $20 65
Bloomsbury Academic
Paul Simon's Graceland
Kalvin Schmidt-Rimpler Dinh, University College London, England
Celebrated, controversial, and conspicuously eclectic, Paul Simon’s Graceland stands among the monumental albums of the 20th century This book explores how and why it made its mark, from the international collaborations that defined its musical character, to the inflamed political environment from which it emerged
Graceland incorporated some of South Africa’s most beloved popular music traditions, including ‘township jive’, kwela, and the intricate isicathamiya harmonies of Ladysmith Black Mambazo It also featured contributions from Central and West African musicians, alongside an array of North American styles – Chicano rock, country, synth-pop, Louisiana zydeco – and, of course, Simon’s characteristically abstract poetics
This book revisits Graceland as an important example of the global relevance of African music Released in 1986, amid an intensified period of anti-apartheid activism across world, the album had a unique relationship to South Africa: it drew attention to apartheid and Black African music while its popular significance was simultaneously propelled by the antiapartheid movement As a collaborative, cross-cultural project straddling the boundaries of a deeply unequal world –economically, politically, racially – Graceland invites reflection on the relationship between art and politics, both then and now
COLLECTIONS
33 1/3 Oceania
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
144 Pages
HB 9798765145043 • £60 00 / $80 00
PB 9798765145036 • £16 99 / $22 95
ePDF 9798765145067 • £15 29 / $20 65
ePub 9798765145050 • £15 29 / $20 65
Bloomsbury Academic
Dick Diver's Calendar Days
Mitch L Ryan, Independent Scholar, Australia
This study of Dick Diver ’s acclaimed 2013 album, Calendar Days, discusses the work within its cultural and historical context
Critically acclaimed upon its 2013 release, Dick Diver ’s album Calendar Days was consistently praised for its “Australianness ” Across the album’s 11 tracks, the group poeticize the banality of daily life and distil it into melodic pop music that leans on colloquial language and references sung in thick Australian accents, replete with shimmering guitars, and a lackadaisically lilting rhythm section It is a sound that would soon became emblematic of the micro-genre of “Dolewave” (referring to social welfare, or the Dole), a joke coined by a user of an online forum that then spurred broader recognition in a series of debates across blog platforms This particular label sat uncomfortably with a lot of the bands that were plastered with the label
This book uses Calendar Days to tease out the histories of the band and to complicate the notion of Dolewave, situating it all within a broader history of Australian independent music and politics in the early 2010s In doing so, it not only offers the first historical account of a recent major movement in contemporary music, but also considers the unique conditions that Australian independent music operated in from the late 2000s through to the early 2010s Through close listening to the album, oral histories, and secondary research, this book will explore the ideas of “Australianess” and (anti-)nationalism that underpinned them
COLLECTIONS
33 1/3 Oceania
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
128 Pages • 4 color, 1 bw illus
HB 9798765119853 • £60 00 / $80 00
PB 9798765119860 • £16 99 / $22 95
ePDF 9798765119884 • £15 29 / $20 65
ePub 9798765119877 • £15 29 / $20 65
Bloomsbury Academic
Gary Shearston's Dingo
Peter Mills, Leeds Beckett University, UK
When Gary Shearston released his worldwide hit version of "I Get A Kick Out Of You" in 1974, he had already been recording for over a decade, and years of creative adventure lay ahead
His most commercially successful album, Dingo, provides a lens through which to study his role in establishing and developing a purposefully Australian variant on '70s pop and rock music with its poetic evocations of Australian landscapes, topographies, character and cultural identity, mixed with connections to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and 1970s London These blend with the Bush Ballad tradition, native Australian music and rhythms, the '60s folk and protest song boom, of which he was a key figure and prime mover All these elements combine on this album to provide a fresh and enduring evocation of what Australian music was, is and could be, and provides a link back to traditional forms and a signpost forward to acts such as The Go Betweens and Nick Cave
Drawing on the author's correspondence with Gary Shearston from 2008-2013, this book contains previously unpublished primary material from the artist himself Peter Mills digs into the "Australian-ness" of Shearston's music, and how such a term came to be defined
3RD EDITION
National Association for Music
Education
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
• 19 b/w line art
184 Pages
HB 9798216365365
• £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798216365372 • £24 99 / $34 95
ePDF 9798216365389 • £22 49 / $31 45
ePub 9798216365402 • £22 49 / $31 45
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
National Association for Music Education
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
200 Pages
HB 9798765150122
• £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765150139 • £24 99 / $34 95
ePDF 9798765150146 • £22 49 / $31 45
ePub 9798765150153 • £22 49 / $31 45
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
The Study of Sound
UK November 2026 • US August 2026
144 Pages
HB 9781501393334 • £50 00 / $75 00
PB 9781501393341 • £17 99 / $24 95
ePDF 9781501393365 • £16 19 / $22 45
ePub 9781501393358 • £16 19 / $22 45
Bloomsbury Academic
Middle School General Music
The Best Part of Your Day
Elizabeth Ann McAnally
Create a meaningful, accessible, and joyful middle school music program that will motivate students to enthusiastically engage using practical strategies and lessons
This book offers strategies and lessons that have been created in the real world of general music Written by an educator with decades of experience, it focuses on joyful engagement with music through composing, improvising, singing, playing instruments, listening, and making authentic connections This 3rd edition includes new and updated content:
- A framework for making instructional decisions based on the pedagogical principles of safety, voice, access, and rigor
- Strategies for developing instructional units with templates and examples from the author ’s practice
- A love letter and survival guide for new teachers
- Important revisions for today s post-pandemic classrooms and compatibility with national and state standards
Each section is full of tips and lessons to support middle schoolers in developing a life-long love of music From instructional units to composition projects, rhythm games to listening lessons, there are plenty of strategies that are rigorous and easily adaptable to a range of contexts Unit planning templates and an appendix of suggested resources empower teachers to design their own ways to invite middle-level students into the world of music
Differentiation in Music Education
An Inclusive Approach for the Neurodiverse Classroom
Susan Raponi
This groundbreaking book equips music teachers with practical strategies for supporting inclusive, studentcentered music classrooms by integrating differentiation and praxial music education
Every music classroom includes students with a wide range of learning profiles, including those with identified and unidentified neurodivergence, mental health challenges, and diverse cultural and social backgrounds Differentiation in Music Education explores how music educators can create inclusive, student-centered learning environments that support all learning styles
Drawing on research in neurodiversity, inclusive education, and praxial music pedagogy, Susan Raponi provides practical strategies for adapting instruction, assessment, and classroom design to meet the needs of all students By centering the role of musical identity, readiness, and learner preferences, the book offers a flexible and multimodal approach that allows students to explore music through varied pathways The book investigates the Four Pillars of Differentiation in Music Education (DIME) Musical Environment, Musical Understanding, Progressive Assessment, and Musical Praxis as a foundation for creating classrooms where all students can thrive
Audio Paper Using Sound to Create New Approaches to Research Sanne Krogh Groth, Lund University, Sweden & Stefan Östersjö, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
Audio Paper offers a conceptual and practice-based approach for researchers across a wide range of disciplines to integrate auditory culture into their published work in the form of the audio paper
The audio paper is an academic text presented as an audio production Introducing this new format, the book invites scholars to work in a publication format that integrates aesthetic perspectives and technological components in an academic work This text builds on the authors' experience developing the audio paper and newly collected insights from researchers who have been involved in the production of audio papers over the past five years
By providing you with historical perspectives, ranging from early radio production to present day podcasts, the audio paper is contextualized as a technologically driven publication format, with a grounding in auditory culture and a theoretical framework Through a structural analysis of published audio papers, the authors seek a more robust understanding of the methods for analysis as well as the dramaturgical means employed For the future development of the audio paper, the book proposes a series of directions, underlining how the audio paper holds a potential to become a transgressive intervention in academic publishing and a vehicle for new formats for thinking and doing research
COLLECTIONS
Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
200 Pages
• 6 b/w photos
PB 9798216452973 • £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9781666967258 • £80 00 / $110 00
ePDF 9798216261742 • £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781978760561 • £72 00 / $99 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
UK September 2026 • US September 2026
280 Pages
HB 9798765101254 • £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765101292 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765101278 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765101261 £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Songs of Desire and Defiance Subjectivity, Emotions, and Authenticity in Bhawaiya Folk Songs of North Bengal
Nasrin Khandoker
Explore the desires and defiance of women through the haunting lyrics of Bhawaiya folk songs, a musical tradition of Bengal.
Bhawaiya and other Bangla folk traditions endure without conforming to dominant expectations, and they sustain deviant, defiant voices that resist cultural homogenization By weaving together history, performance, emotion, and politics, this book highlights the transformative power of folk music to unsettle identity and create new possibilities of sexual subjectivity in South Asia It explores how cultural forms embody, negotiate, and subvert constructions of identity, looking at lyrics and performances that historically embody female sexual subjectivity and defiant emotions while considering the debate around authenticity between nationalist, corporate, and Islamist interests With in-depth ethnographic storytelling that connects colonial and postcolonial histories and contemporary politics, it traces how Bhawaiya creates spaces for alternative voices that resist dominant narratives of national, religious and gender identities
NEW IN PB
Born a Sufferah
Dancehall Music's Insurgent Soundscapes
Quito J Swan, Indiana University, USA
This book evaluates modern Black internationalism through the sonic insurgencies of Reggae and Dancehall Born as a sufferer in the 1970s, Dancehall is often framed by its lyrics of hyper masculinity This has distorted its intertwined engagement with the politics of its older sibling Reggae largely Rastafari's critique of the West as being of a Biblical Babylon Both strains grappled with questions of a decolonizing and migrating Caribbean: hard times, concrete ecologies, and promised lands But if Reggae's radical soundings of Black liberation repatriated East beyond Babylon's rivers, then to what extent did Dancehall imagine Zion amidst the contradictions of the gully sided West?
In the global 1990s Reggae and Dancehall sound systems curated sites of Black cultural insurgency across the world Stretching beyond the bombastic business of moving crowds with music, they were amplifiers and receivers of Caribbean political epistemologies In the dancehall, these cultural innovators remixed Western modernities and compressed timelines of Black radicalism, fashioning myriad sound-driven Zions to move against the traffic blocking of Babylon’s street sweepers and lookout fetishes Their frequencies of subaltern clap back thrived in night clubs, nyabinghis, and favelas where subversive musical practices were documented on dubplates and globally distributed on cassettes
COLLECTIONS
New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
UK September 2026
• US September 2026
176 Pages
• 17 bw illus, 13 color
PB 9798216200857
• £28 99 / $39 95
HB 9798216200864 • £90 00 / $120 00
ePDF 9798216200888 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798216200895 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
UK August 2026 • US August 2026
256 Pages
HB 9798765124819 • £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765124857 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765124833 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765124826 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
COLLECTIONS
New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
UK July 2026 • US July 2026
224 Pages
HB 9798765112182 • £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765112229 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765112205 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765112199 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Found Footage Films A Work of Experimental Scholarship
Justin Remes, Iowa State University, USA
Found Footage Films examines the rich aesthetic history of cinematic remixes, from pioneering films by Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner to contemporary mashups and memes.
We live in the era of the remix Visual artists rework images from popular culture, music producers sample and loop elements from classic songs, and content creators transform images from films and television shows into viral memes We are swimming in a sea of appropriated sounds and images But how did we get here? It is impossible to answer this question without considering the crucial role played by found footage films
This book argues that found footage films complicate widespread assumptions about originality, creativity, and authorship It argues that the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of cinematic appropriation were provided by Marcel Duchamp and suggests that many scholars have thus far given insufficient attention to the sounds of found footage films and their powerful role in shaping a spectator ’s interpretation of the reworked material
NEW IN PB
Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros
Ideology and Utopia in the Hollywood Musical James Phillips, University of New South Wales, Australia
Busby Berkeley’s big-production numbers are emblematic of the Hollywood dream factory.
Exploring the tensions between escapism and ideological over-coding in the Warner Bros musical, this book tracks the ways in which Berkeley created spectacles that are both critical and complacent in relation to the society that produced and received them
Berkeley carried into his images of utopia the assembly plant, the misogyny, the fascism and racism of his day, but his collaboration with the filmmakers (Enright, Bacon and LeRoy) into whose narratives his numbers were spliced likewise involved taking care to draw a line between spectacle and the everyday The book makes the case that the Warner Bros musical, with its attention to the specificity and containment of the aesthetic dimension, has corrective lessons to impart for the aestheticized politics not only of the 1930s, but also of the current age
Musicking TikTok
A Musical Ethnography from a Glocal Austrian Context Juan Bermúdez, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
This ethnographic work about TikTok’s musicking in a glocal (Austrian) context complements and build upon ethnomusicological assumptions, theories, and methods for the study of musical practices in digital spaces
An overview of elements that make up TikTok’s interface as well as the technical-performative possibilities that it allows, this book introduces a general categorization of existing performance types and how TikTokers appropriate the platform to make their music It illustrates how some TikTokers became aware of and began using TikTok, and it reviews some of the different strategies TikTokers apply to learn how to use the application and successfully develop their performances Bermúdez explores how performers move from being “ordinary users” to becoming TikTokers, developing and performing an identity he calls TikTok Persona Moreover, he discusses how some TikTok practices can and have occurred across multiple, interconnected platforms, and he examines how localities are articulated and negotiated in these contexts
Bermúdez argues for an understanding of musicking as a multimedia practice that different actors create and experience individually in everyday synchronous and asynchronous, physical and digital situations
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
160 Pages
HB 9781501369346 • £80 00 / $110 00
PB 9781501369353 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9781501369377 • £72 00 / $99 00
ePub 9781501369360 • £72 00 / $99 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Compression Mode
The Edge of Sensibility
Stephen Kennedy
This book examines how compression can be understood not only as a digital process enacted through computing, but as a wider economic and political phenomenon that impacts on the ecology of waste, diversity and social inclusivity
Setting out from the linguistic underpinning of visual space it proceeds to the development of the MP3 algorithm and an examination of the ‘waste’ it creates As it does so it challenges the received wisdom, prevalent in western thought, that human reason and logic enacted through language is uniquely capable of bringing order to chaos Returning to the idea of a sonic economy it seeks to reintroduce waste, error, and other discarded material back into our systems of thought, or perhaps more accurately into systems beyond our thought
COLLECTIONS
UK August 2026
• US August 2026
264 Pages
HB 9798765100080 • £90 00 / $120 00
PB 9798765100127 • £28 99 / $39 95
ePDF 9798765100103 • £81 00 / $108 00
ePub 9798765100097 • £81 00 / $108 00
Bloomsbury Academic
Musical Genre
Assemblage, Abstraction and Digital Terms
Mads Krogh
From recent decades’ digitization have emerged a myriad of techniques for mapping musical life, identifying patterns in sound or musico-cultural practices, and compiling labels, names, tags, and classes on an unprecedented scale
Proliferating genre catalogs in the context of digital platforms and the conjunction of genre with notions of, for example, mood and activity are among the consequences, which challenge prevailing scene-based and identificational understandings in musical genre studies This book answers to this challenge Centering on the concepts of musico-generic assemblage and abstraction, it offers new perspectives on musical genre fit for current times but with the potential for also reconsidering historical cases
