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About the Series

Music and the City sets urban musical and sonic cultures within new global and cross-disciplinary perspectives.

The series aims to open up new ways of thinking about music in an urban context, embracing the widest diversity of music and sound in cities across the world. Breaking down boundaries between historical and contemporary, and between popular and high art, it seeks to illuminate the diverse urban environment in all its exhilarating and vivid complexity. The urban thus becomes a microcosm of a much messier, yet ultimately richer, conception of the ‘music of everyday life’.

Rigorously peer-reviewed and written by leading scholars in their fields, the short-format texts offer authoritative and challenging approaches towards a fast-developing area of music research. Elements in Music and the City presents extended case-studies within a comparative perspective, while developing pioneering new theoretical frameworks for an emerging field. 

The series is inherently cross-disciplinary and global in its perspective, as reflected in the wide-ranging multi-national advisory board.  It encourages a similar diversity of approaches, ranging from the historical and ethnomusicological to contemporary popular music and sound studies. 

Elements in Music and the City will be of interest not only to researchers and students in music and related arts, but also to a broad range of readers intrigued by how we might understand music and sound in its social, cultural and political contexts.

Cambridge Elements are between 20,000 and 30,000 words in length and are published online, as well as print-on-demand in paperback. The digital first format provides enhanced user experience and easy access to online resources, not only to illuminate these themes but also to inspire further exploration and new interdisciplinary research.

Contact the Editors

If you would like to propose a new Element for Music and the City, please contact one of the editors in the first instance: Simon McVeigh ([email protected]) or Abigail Wood ([email protected]).


About the Editors

Simon McVeigh is Emeritus Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a former President of the Royal Musical Association. His research focuses on British musical life 1700–1945; and on violin music and performance practices of the period. Books include Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge) and The Italian Solo Concerto 1700–1760 (Boydell). Current work centres on music in Britain around 1900: a monograph entitled Music in Edwardian London will be published by Boydell in 2024. He is also co-investigator on the digital concert-programme initiative InConcert.

Abigail Wood is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Department of Music, School of Arts, University of Haifa, and past editor of Ethnomusicology Forum. Her research focuses primarily on musical life in contemporary urban spaces, from new musical spaces among religious Jewish women, to the reflection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the contested soundscapes of Jerusalem’s Old City. 

Editorial Board

Karin Bijsterveld 

Maastricht University

Philip Bohlman

University of Chicago

Tim Carter

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sara Cohen

University of Liverpool

Jonathan Hicks

University of Aberdeen

John Koegel

California State University, Fullerton

Frederick Lau

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Laudan Nooshin

City, University of London

Gascia Ouzounian 

University of Oxford

Jann Pasler

University of California, San Diego

George Revill

Open University

J. Griffith Rollefson

University College Cork

Matt Sakakeeny

Tulane University

Derek B. Scott

University of Leeds

Yannick Simon

Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

Darci Sprengel

University of Oxford

Lakshmi Subramanian

BITS Pilani, Goa

Benjamin Walton

University of Cambridge

Tom Western

University College London

Susana Zapke

Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna