Enhance your library’s holdings with the Film, Media and Music Collection, comprising 254 titles. This collection features over 200 books authored by leading scholars in the field and is accompanied by the esteemed journal, Film Studies.
The collection provides comprehensive coverage of film, television and media studies, featuring in-depth volumes on British, French, Spanish and Latin American filmmakers. It includes exclusive interviews, debates and discussions on contemporary practices, and explores the intersections of film and television with sociocultural and political landscapes. Additionally, the collection offers historical context and analysis of current debates and future challenges in the medium.
| Key series |
| French Film Directors Series |
| Music and Society |
| Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers |
| Studies in Popular Culture |
| The Television Series |
| British FilmMakers |
| Cinema Aesthetics |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 16 |
| 2023/4 titles | 19 |
| 1998-2022 titles | 211 |
| Total collection | 254 |
| Keywords |
| Theory |
| TV |
| Radio |
| Feminism |
| Genre |
| Migration and race |
| Representation and adaptation |
| International cinema |
| Propaganda |
| Filmmaking |
| Subcultures |
| Music |
| Thema subject categories |
| Digital, video and new media arts |
| Documentary films |
| Film history, theory or criticism |
| Film: styles and genres |
| Development studies |
| Filmmaking and production |
| France |
| Individual film directors, film-makers |
| Media studies |
| Music industry |
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Film, media and music collection
The concluding chapter goes ‘behind the scenes’, re-examining the processes by which theatrically oriented orchestral performance are made. It collages an informal, observational account of the preparation process for an immersive concert staged by Southbank Sinfonia, a commentary section drawn from interviews with practitioners, a photographic interlude, and a recap of the book’s main arguments and contribution to knowledge.
This chapter examines immersive performances staged by Aurora Orchestra, Southbank Sinfonia, and Paraorchestra in which audience members were invited to position themselves within an orchestra as it played. These performances contained elements of theatrical staging, including lighting design, storytelling, and dance, which enriched the performances and animated their moving parts. The chapter argues that immersive orchestra performance can harness the embodied nature of live music-making and the power of music to move us, physically and emotionally, making the experiential dynamics of the event as important as the music being performed. Consequently, the chapter shows how immersive performance can promote affirmative relationships between diverse participants, foster community and inclusivity, and provide emotionally affecting, celebratory experiences of collective music-making, while reimagining an orchestra’s constitution.
The Introduction provides a contextual framework for the book. It examines the artistic, cultural, financial, theoretical, and historical bases for current international practices involving experimentation in the presentation of orchestral music. The Introduction frames these practices in relation to the ‘theatrical orchestra’ – a music ensemble that ‘thinks theatrically’ about performance. Connections between orchestral performance and theatre are made, and the idea of a concert as a ‘stage composition’ is proposed. Recent developments in the study of music as performance are outlined. The ensembles under survey in this book are introduced. The subsequent chapters are outlined, and the methodology is explained.
This chapter shows how the orchestra’s ability to function as a storyteller is expanding and diversifying. Orchestras are finding new ways to be storytellers and new stories to tell. They are doing this by, for example, collaborating with theatre-makers and creating artistic work that is generically hybrid, such as music theatre; operating as a small troupe to create storytelling concerts; and integrating contemporary performance idioms, such as ‘spoken word’ poetry and rap – seemingly strange bedfellows for classical music. The orchestra can serve as civic actor engaged in community storytelling, distributing creative agency amongst a wider collective and enabling a diverse range of voices to be heard. This chapter sets out a series of contrasting, yet mutually illuminating, performance examples involving three British orchestras: Scottish Ensemble, Aurora Orchestra, and Multi-Story Orchestra. The chapter advances the book’s overall argument by illustrating how novel exploration of storytelling can enable orchestras to re-engage with a vibrant aspect of (classical) music and speak directly to contemporary social issues and concerns.
This chapter investigates the phenomenon of orchestras engaging in choreographed movement, above and beyond that involved in playing instruments in a co-ordinated fashion. Orchestral musicians are not usually trained dancers, but they can still move in ways that can highlight their own individuality, enhance the physicality of performance, and present new interpretive possibilities for a piece of music, even when performing music thought to belong to an abstract, non-corporeal realm. This chapter analyses projects by Southbank Sinfonia and Scottish Ensemble (the latter in collaboration with Andersson Dance) in which musicians perform choreographed movement in addition to playing their instruments. The chapter shows how these groups offered new interpretations of the music they performed, relating it to contemporary social issues and quotidian experience through the artful arrangement and movement of bodies in space.
This chapter examines orchestral performance in which location is an integral part of the meaning of the event and music interacts dynamically and idiosyncratically with place, making it into a ‘scene partner’. The chapter investigates site-specific and site-responsive work presented by Aurora Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, and London Contemporary Orchestra, and features performances that took place in conventional and unconventional performance settings. The chapter considers the challenges of producing this work and outlines its potential benefits, arguing that it offers audiences unique aesthetic experiences that can prompt novel consideration of the music performed, the performance location, and the act of attending. The chapter shows how site-engaged orchestral performance can draw on elements of theatre to stage music, including music not written with a particular location in mind, thus recontextualising music and giving it new resonance. Lastly, the chapter proposes that the staging of site-responsive ‘concert experiences’ by orchestras, in which an audience is led on a musical and physical journey, capitalises on music’s ability to spark our imaginations and generate affective responses, and is connected to the commodification of experiences in a consumer society.
This chapter queries what it means to think theatrically about orchestra concerts, paying particular attention to the visual dimension of performance. It analyses a selection of concerts given by Southbank Sinfonia, Aurora Orchestra, and Manchester Collective that exemplify the modern/retro practice of incorporating staging elements into orchestral performance, thereby going beyond the concept of ‘music itself’. These concerts featured existing, sometimes canonical, repertoire, most of which was not composed with special staging elements in mind. The chapter investigates how and why these pieces were re-presented using theatrical techniques and technologies and how audiences made audio-visual and semantic sense of them. The chapter argues that presentation of orchestral music that incorporates staging elements can enrich meaning-making, enhance aesthetic experience, and create work that resonates with contemporary social issues.
This book shows how theatrical approaches to presenting orchestral music can facilitate unique and powerful experiences for audiences, enable new interpretation of repertoire, and connect music-making to contemporary social issues and modes of thought. Orchestras are rethinking how they present music – attending to performance design, the creation of atmosphere, the configuration and choreography of bodies in space, audience experience, and the dramaturgy of the live event. They are collaborating in new ways with artists from other disciplines to create performances that challenge conventional understanding of the orchestra, of musicians’ skills and capabilities, of orchestral repertoire, and of borders between art forms. This book focuses on the contribution of British music ensembles to these practices, analysing the theatrical aspects of their work, in particular. It argues that increased attention to stagecraft along with cross-artform collaboration can reveal new aspects of orchestral music and enable audiences to appreciate its embodied, inter-sensorial qualities, as well as its dramatic and narrative potential, uniquely and in a heightened manner. The book delves deeply into performances presented by Aurora Orchestra, London Contemporary Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Collective, Multi-Story Orchestra, Paraorchestra, Scottish Ensemble, and Southbank Sinfonia. It examines intersections between music and visuality, storytelling, physical movement, performance site, and audience immersion, highlighting the creative process and practitioner insights. The Theatrical Orchestra makes an eclectic set of innovative performances vivid for the reader and theorises their cultural significance.
The early life of Clock DVA founder Adi Newton is explored. The influence of Sheffield Central Library as a cultural resource for autodidacts like Adi is acknowledged. Adi describes joining Meatwhistle and bringing dadaist chaos to the musical and theatrical projects that developed there. Solo artist and fellow investigator James Leesley, the new incarnation of Studio Electrophonique, is invited to support Etienne Daho at the Paris Olympia. A local man, Dennis Greatbatch, contacts the author to reveal the location of some of Ken’s old studio gear. Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson detail the development of Cabaret Voltaire through their pursuit of Brian Eno, Hawkwind, Doctors of Madness and cabaret singers from Opportunity Knocks. At their first gig, they are attacked by the audience and Mallinder is hospitalised. Adi Newton and Paul Bower briefly move to London to open a junk shop named after the artist/boxer/exhibitionist Arthur Cravan.
Ken Patten’s early adventures in tape recording are discovered in the back issues of Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar Magazine from the early 1960s. The world of postwar amateur tape enthusiasts is explored through the research of Ian Helliwell and the archives of Tape Recording Monthly. The University of Sheffield’s Arts Tower is identified as a locus of creative intent and the brutalist architectural plans of Sheffield city council in the 1960s are examined. Martyn Ware and Chris Watson remember growing up in Sheffield in the 1960s and describe their musical awakenings through pirate radio, Sparky’s Magic Piano and Pierre Schaeffer.