Songs from Sweden shows how Swedish songwriters and producers are the creative forces behind much of today’s international pop music. As Ola Johansson reveals, the roots of this “music miracle” can be found in Sweden’s culture, economy, and thriving music industry, concentrated in Stockholm. While Swedish writer-producers developed early global recognition for making commercially successful pop music, new Swedish writer-producers have continuously emerged during the last two decades. Global artists travel to Stockholm to negotiate, record, and co-write songs. At the same time, Swedish writer-producers are part of a global collaborative network that spans the world. In addition to concrete commercial accomplishments, the Swedish success is also a result of the acquisition of reputational capital gained through positive associations that the global music industry holds about Swedish music. Ultimately, pop songs from Sweden exhibit a form of cultural hybridity, drawing from both local and global cultural expressions.

Scandinavian art songs are a unique expression of the cultures of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Although these three countries are distinct from one another, their languages and cultures share many similarities. Common themes found in art and literature include a love of nature, especially of the sea, feelings of longing and melancholy, the contrast between light and dark, the extremes of the northern climate, and lively folk traditions. These shared sensibilities are reflected and expressed in a tangible way through music. Scandinavian art song has faced several challenges over the years in North America (even in the American Midwest, where descendants of Scandinavian immigrants are concentrated). But matters have changed recently with the recent expansion of diction curricula to cover languages other than English, French, German, and Italian. The primary obstacle remains practical resources for the study of art songs and lyric diction of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This guide remedies this problem. Scandinavian Song is a practical guide to the art songs of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Unlike other sources that give at best a cursory overview of lyric diction in the Scandinavian languages, this guide provides practical information, enabling teachers and students to render transcriptions of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish texts into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)—an absolute necessity for any study of repertoire. An extensive survey of available music, sample IPA transcriptions and translations, as well as a website link with native speakers reciting selected song texts, make this book an invaluable resource for students and professors in North American college, university, and conservatory voice programs.

Harp

The essential companion to a Swedish dinner party: Everything you need to know to navigate safely through social functions in Sweden or Swedish America. Customs and traditions change over time but there are some things you should know if you ever plan to join a Swedish dinner party. Singer or not, these are occasions when ev-eryone makes his or her voice heard. When, what, who, how and why-to toast, to sing and to truly blend in. This book introduces you to the Swedish custom of singing at the table; the do's and don'ts, the unspoken rules and practical advice along with close to 100 songs in English and Swedish.

Viewed annually by 600 million people, Eurovision is the world's biggest and most watched song festival. This text presents a guide to almost five decades of Eurovision.

Popular music is a cultural form much rooted in space and place. This book interprets the meaning of music from a spatial perspective and, in doing so it furthers our understanding of broader social relations and trends, including identity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism and politics. The book's editors have brought together a team of scholars to discuss the latest innovative thinking on music and its geographies, illustrated with a fascinating range of case studies from the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and Great Britain.

"An utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music." —Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic There’s a reason today’s ubiquitous pop hits are so hard to ignore—they’re designed that way. The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider’s look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked. Full of vivid, unexpected characters—alongside industry heavy-hitters like Katy Perry, Rihanna, Max Martin, and Ester Dean—this fascinating journey into the strange world of pop music reveals how a new approach to crafting smash hits is transforming marketing, technology, and even listeners’ brains. You’ll never think about music the same way again. A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book

Introduction. How this book is organized ; Instruments covered ; Working with percussionists ; Location specifics ; The value of not reading this book.

I remember very clearly the day on which I was supposed to dieSo starts the story of Squadron Leader Hugh Mallory Falconer, British Special Operations Executive agent and prisoner of the Nazis for over two and a half grueling years.When he was caught out of uniform by the Gestapo in Tunisia not long after the culmination of Operation Torch in 1942, he had no right to expect anything but the worst. Quite miraculously however, his papers vanished whilst he was being sent to Gestapo HQ in Berlin and, as a result, no-one could make out who he was. This, coupled with his quick-thinking and cunning whilst under interrogation, led to the Nazis including him in a group of high-profile hostages, holding him alongside such notable figures as the former French Minister Leon Blum.The group was intended to save the Nazi leaders' necks as the War ground down to its inevitable end. Offered a certain amount of protection on account of their special status in the eyes of their captors, they experienced the war from a unique vantage point. Held at a variety of infamous camps, including Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald, Squadron Leader Mallory was taken on a virtual grand tour of the Third Reich, witnessing the full extent of its horrors.Then in 1945, he was forced to new heights of cunning when the Nazis began exterminating their captives. His daughter, who has painstakingly transcribed the only copy of her fathers memoirs, describes this book, published here for the first time, as a personal manual on keeping your sanity when your weight has dropped to that of a small German Shepherd dog, you are covered in vermin, you are alone and you have everything to fear. It makes for vital and compelling reading.

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.