Pirkko Moisala – författare

This book is the first comprehensive study of the music and career of contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho received her early musical training at the Sibelius Academy, where her close circle included composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has since become internationally known and recognized for her operas L'amour de loin and Adriana Mater and other works that involve electronic music. Her influences include the spectral analysis of timbre, especially string sounds, micropolyphonic techniques, the visual and literary arts, and sounds in the natural world. Pirkko Moisala approaches the unique characteristics of Saariaho's music through composition sketches, scores, critical reviews, and interviews with the composer and her trusted musicians. Drawing extensively from this material, Moisala describes the development of Saariaho's career and international reception, the characteristics of her musical expression, and the progression of her compositional process.

Through the experiences of performers, composers, and ethnomusicologists working in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, Music and Gender explores how the uses and descriptions of music shift in response to rapid political, economic, or technological change.  A cross-section of case studies from the Central African Republic, Finland, and Turkey addresses issues of how performance reflects gender and furthers other social goals, such as negotiating identity and transforming consciousness. Articles on Croatian and Serbian popular music and on the changing circumstances of women musicians in war-torn Ethiopia and post-Soviet Estonia consider the fate of fragile constructions of gender and nationhood in times of war or crisis. Other essays consider the relationship of gender to digital sound technology--in terms of access to the field, interactions among musicians, and aesthetic decisions--and gender issues in writing the musical lives of women composers and performers.  Articulating a theoretical agenda that encompasses perspectives from vastly different musical cultures, this important collection shows how music can help bridge the radical transformations of individuals, groups, and nations.

`The book will be of particular value to those wishing to understand and review the importance of gender within their research studies. It provides a clear and critical view of some of the social theories concerning gender, society and experience' - Nurse Researcher

Gender and Qualitative Methods outlines the practical and philosophical issues of gender in qualitative research. Taking a social constructionist approach to gender, the authors emphasize that the task of the researcher is to investigate how gender/s is/are defined, negotiated and performed by people themselves within specific situations and locations.

Each chapter begins with an introduction to a specific method and/or research subject and then goes on to discuss gender as an analytical category in relation to it. Areas covered include: field work; life story; membership categorisation analysis; and analysis of gender in sound and vision.

Written in a clear and accessible way, each chapter contains practical exercises that will teach the student methods to observe and analyze the effects of gender in various texts and contexts. The book is also packed with examples taken from women and men's studies as well as from feminist and other gender studies.

`The book will be of particular value to those wishing to understand and review the importance of gender within their research studies. It provides a clear and critical view of some of the social theories concerning gender, society and experience' - Nurse Researcher

Gender and Qualitative Methods outlines the practical and philosophical issues of gender in qualitative research. Taking a social constructionist approach to gender, the authors emphasize that the task of the researcher is to investigate how gender/s is/are defined, negotiated and performed by people themselves within specific situations and locations.

Each chapter begins with an introduction to a specific method and/or research subject and then goes on to discuss gender as an analytical category in relation to it. Areas covered include: field work; life story; membership categorisation analysis; and analysis of gender in sound and vision.

Written in a clear and accessible way, each chapter contains practical exercises that will teach the student methods to observe and analyze the effects of gender in various texts and contexts. The book is also packed with examples taken from women and men's studies as well as from feminist and other gender studies.

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject.The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound.