Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music.

Made in Italy serves as a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Italian popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Italian music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Italy and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Italian popular music. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Themes; Singer-Songwriters; and Stories.

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.

As the numerous genres of world music radiate further from their roots, so too does the instrumentation and technique that governs their execution. Greek music has changed in many ways over the last 100 years, most recently by the spread of western popular culture throughout the world. The Mediterranean however, remains a region with a rich pool and history of string playing musicians. Laying somewhere between the ‘oud’ players of the east and the flamenco guitarists of Spain are the bouzouki players of Greece and Cyprus, whose music has been heavily influenced by the tragedy of Greeks fleeing persecution in 1923 from Turkey.