Music & Camp (Music/Culture)

This collection of essays provides the first in-depth examination of camp as it relates to a wide variety of twentieth and twenty-first century music and musical performances. Located at the convergence of popular and queer musicology, the book provides new research into camp’s presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including: musical theatre, classical music, film music, opera, instrumental music, the Broadway musical, rock, pop, hip-hop, and Christmas carols. This significant contribution to the field of camp studies investigates why and how music has served as an expressive and political vehicle for both the aesthetic characteristics and the receptive modes that have been associated with camp throughout twentieth and twenty-first-century culture.

About the Author
CHRISTOPHER MOORE is associate professor of musicology at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses primarily on French music of the twentieth century, which he examines in relationship to questions of criticism, style, gender, identity, and politics. He is currently writing a book about musical criticism in France during the 1930s.

PHILIP PURVIS is the director of music at d’Overbroeck’s, an independent school in Oxford. He researches identity politics in French music and culture of the twentieth century, contributing to on-going scholarly re-examination of the image of post-First World War Parisian modernism as relatively playful or even frivolous. Purvis is the editor of Masculinity in Opera and he is currently working on a book on music and war with Rachel Moore.

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