Discourse on popular music frequently describes artists' recordings and performances as “intimate.” Yet that discourse often stops short of elucidating how a mass-produced commodity such as popular music is able to elicit feelings of intimacy with and among its audience. Through detailed analysis of popular music's composition, performance, production, and promotion, Musical Intimacy examines how intimacy is constructed and perceived in popular music via its affective and technological affordances. From the recording studio to the concert stage, from collective experience to individual listening and perception, this book presents a working understanding of musical intimacy.

Focusing on three entertainers who have become national icons Martin Stokes offers a portrait of Turkish identity that is very different from the official version of anthems and flags. In particular, he discusses how a Turkish concept of love has been developed through the work of the singers and the public reaction to them.

The stories and reflections in this book describe powerful encounters between nine music therapists and their clients. These clients include four-year-old Giorgios, who is terminally ill; Wendy, a passionate, battered child who has been rejected by her mother; Olive, suffering from senile dementia; Martha, whose successful life is in crisis; and Steve, who is living with HIV/AIDS. Through music therapy the clients - and therapists - discover their creativity, and, in the process, come to terms with suffering. The stories reveal the passion and integrity of nine music therapists who themselves undergo profound changes as a result of their work. Music Therapy - Intimate Notes is a practical and inspiring introduction to music therapy, showing its range of possibilities in various settings. The book provides a lively and informal theoretical foundation, and connects music to our intimate lives.

The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres—often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance. With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

Intended for readers who are already married or in premarital counseling, "Sheet Music" is a detailed, practical guide to sex within marriage according to God's plan. With his characteristic warmth and humor, Leman addresses a wide spectrum of people, from those with no sexual experience to those dealing with past sexual sin or abuse.

Presenting a range of ethnographic case studies from around the globe, this edited collection offers new ways of thinking about the interconnectivity of gender, place, and emotion in musical performance.

Neapolitan Postcards gathers a diverse group of international scholars to investigate unexplored transnational aspects of the intimate yet globally popular canzone napoletana. Performed and beloved worldwide in almost every language, the style had hits such as “Funiculì funiculà” (1880) and “’O sole mio” (1898) which sold millions of copies. These hits fueled the tradition’s spread across the world over the course of the twentieth century with the eventual popularity of covers by singers and musicians of all music genres and styles, from popular music to opera and jazz. This book is the first scholarly work that considers the specific complexities of the international Neapolitan Song scenes through case studies from Argentina, England, Greece, and the United States, employing analyses of compositions, iconographical sources, international films, mechanical musical instruments, performances, and recordings devoted to the canzone napoletana.

Why is music so important to most of us? How does music help us both in our everyday lives, and in the more specialist context of music therapy? This book suggests a new way of approaching these topical questions, drawing from Ansdell's long experience as a music therapist, and from the latest thinking on music in everyday life. Vibrant and moving examples from music therapy situations are twinned with the stories of 'ordinary' people who describe how music helps them within their everyday lives. Together this complementary material leads Ansdell to present a new interdisciplinary framework showing how musical experiences can help all of us build and negotiate identities, make intimate non-verbal relationships, belong together in community, and find moments of transcendence and meaning. How Music Helps is not just a book about music therapy. It has the more ambitious aim to promote (from a music therapist's perspective) a better understanding of 'music and change' in our personal and social life. Ansdell's theoretical synthesis links the tradition of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy and its recent developments in Community Music Therapy to contemporary music sociology and music studies. This book will be relevant to practitioners, academics, and researchers looking for a broad-based theoretical perspective to guide further study and policy in music, well-being, and health.

Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.

Playing It Dangerously questions what happens when feelings attached to popular music conflict with expressions of the dominant socio-cultural order, and how this tension enters into the politics of popular culture at various levels of human interaction. Tambura is a genre-crossing performance practice centered on an eponymous stringed instrument, part of the mandolin family, that Roma, Croats, and Serbs adopted from Ottoman forces. The acclamation that one "plays dangerously" connotes exceptional virtuosic improvisation and rapid finger technique and is the highest praise that a (typically male) musician can receive from his peers. The book considers tambura music as a site of both contestation and reconciliation since its propagation as Croatia's national instrument during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. New sensibilities of 'danger' and of race (for instance, 'Gypsiness') arose as Croatian bands reterritorialized musical milieus through the new state, reestablishing transnational performance networks with Croats abroad, and reclaiming demilitarized zones and churches as sites of patriotic performance after years of 'Yugoslavian control.' The study combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and music analysis to expound affective block: a theory of the dialectical dynamics between affective and discursive responses to differences in playing styles. A corrective to the scholarly stress on music scenes saturated with feeling, the book argues for affect's social regulation, showing how the blocking of dangerous intensities ultimately privileges constructions of tambura players as heroic male Croats, even as the music engenders diverse racial and gendered becomings.