This volume of 12 chapters, stimulated by a conference at the University of Huddersfield in 2012, joins a relatively select group of scholarly considerations of the relationships between music, gender and age, which includes performer-focused publications by Whiteley (Reference Whiteley2005), Jennings and Gardner (Reference Jennings and Gardner2012) and Elliott (Reference Elliott2015), as well as studies of ageing in the experience of music fans by Hodkinson and Bennett (Reference Hodkinson and Bennett2012) and Bennett (Reference Bennett2013). Throughout the volume, gender and age are recognised as ‘flexible, culturally contingent aspects of lived experience’ (p. 2); both are markers of difference that intersect in complex ways with other markers such as ethnicity, class and religion. However, defining age is uniquely problematic: for example, ‘when does “young” become “old”?’ (p. 2) This volume, then, is a valuable addition to an important and burgeoning area of study.

Sophie Fuller's opening chapter explores the phrase ‘something revolting’, used by composer Grace Williams seemingly to express self-disgust with being a creative older woman. Fuller compares female musicians who resist ageing, such as Madonna, with those who represent more age-positive role models, for example Patti Smith. Turning the phrase ‘something revolting’ on its head, she urges women musicians to be ‘fiercely, ferociously and unapologetically heretical’ (p. 23) in their response to social and cultural prejudice against ageing women.

Following this, the volume is split into three chronologically arranged sections, the first of which explores how music shaped the public identities of high profile men and women in Europe in the early modern period. Tim Shephard discusses the ways in which musical women negotiated their social positions at the courts of Renaissance Italy c.1430–1520. Kirsten Gibson's chapter focuses on masculinity and music in Early Modern England, explaining how masculine status in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was defined significantly by age, through social and cultural rather than biological factors (p. 44). Anne Desler argues that the eighteenth-century Italian castrato Nicoló Grimaldi used acting skills, specifically his portrayal of roles beyond the ‘young lover’, to negotiate the problem of ageing in the performance context of Italian serious opera that was particularly unforgiving of anyone or anything ‘perceived as old and old-fashioned’ (p. 62). In these interesting historical accounts, popular music scholars will recognise issues relating to gender and age similar to those in more recent music culture.

The chapters in the second section use archival research to explore the role of institutions in supporting creativity at different life stages. Stephen Etheridge's account of the working men's brass bands of the Southern Pennines c.1840–1914 shows how membership of a local brass band was a lifelong pursuit, providing a route from youthful roughness through the social bonds of courtship to the respectability of the mature bandsman. Laura Seddon's chapter focuses on The Society of Women Musicians formed in 1911 to support professional and amateur women musicians. Her research provides a model of working musical intergenerational relationships that could, she suggests, provide an alternative approach to contemporary issues between second- and third-wave feminism. Melissa J. de Graaf's research into female composers in the New York City Composers' Forum, set up as part of the 1930s New Deal, shows how the reception of their work was typically cordial but lacking respect (p. 118), caught as they were in the double bind of having to avoid both feminine triviality and ‘seeking after virility’ (p. 121). Each of these chapters provides a fascinating insight into the roles played by institutions in negotiations of age and gender for musicians and musical communities.

The third section of the volume covers topics relating to more contemporary music. For Jacqueline Warwick, the huge success of the musical Annie is due partly to its blurring of the distinctions between two prominent archetypes, the (middle-class) sweet girl and the (working-class) sassy girl (p. 129), represented in the role of Annie by her performing both with ‘the voice of an angel’ and ‘the great big voice’ (p. 131). Warwick concludes that the character of Annie is ‘still relevant to the ways we construct and negotiate girlhood’ (p. 139). Richard Elliott similarly considers representations of innocence and experience; however his focus is on the ‘late voice’. Through close textual analysis of Sandy Denny's song ‘Who Knows where the Time Goes’, Elliott illuminates the notion of ‘lateness’ in the lives and experiences of three performers of the song, Judy Collins, Nina Simone and Denny herself, exploring five key aspects of ‘lateness’: career stage, the authenticity of the vocal act, posthumous careers, retrospection and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss in the song text. Mimi Haddon's chapter analyses the work of 1980s Manchester indie band The Smiths, arguing that all aspects of their work ‘codedly communicate the trauma of social exclusion’ (p. 158). Haddon demonstrates convincingly how the Smiths' work romanticises poverty and decline through retrospection and nostalgia for 1960s style and culture, particularly the queer references in new wave drama.

Examining the musical category ‘New Music’, Lauren Redhead argues that the focus on the ‘material’ of music as a means of evaluation results in exclusivity that maintains patriarchal power, delineating who can be considered a ‘composer’ (p. 174). Analysing reviews of works by Rebecca Saunders and Jennifer Walshe, Redhead demonstrates how the former is considered to meet the criteria of acceptable material, while the latter falls outside the New Music discourse, and consequently is not considered a composer. Similarly, in the final chapter, Caroline Lucas presents a compelling case for the importance of asserting her own gendered subjectivity and creativity within a masculine academic and creative context, taking an autobiographical, self-reflexive and stylistically unorthodox approach to exploring gender issues in relation to the ‘composer’ identity.

To conclude, as a contribution to the body of scholarship concerned with age, gender and music, this is an eclectic and rich collection of thought-provoking case studies that establishes the complexity and significance of this area across time and place. For the popular music scholar, the diversity of topics demonstrates how issues of age and gender relevant to the study of popular music exist in a wide historical and geographical context of socio-cultural continuity and change.