‘Festschriften are no longer in fashion’, notes Rose Rosengard Subotnik in her Preface at the beginning of this volume (p. vii). Bucking the trend, this collection of essays is unabashedly a Festschrift for musicologist Susan McClary. The affection for McClary and the esteem in which she is held by the various contributors here, including long-time colleagues and former students (the three co-editors belong to the latter category), is clear. The collection is testament to McClary's importance to, and continuing influence within, contemporary musicological study. Recognising the wide range of McClary's interests and the changing foci of her work over the course of her career, the contributors thus engage with a number of areas of inquiry that have been important in McClary's work. As one might expect, music and gender is one focus here, but it is by no means the only, or even the primary one.

Like McClary's own work, the essays here collectively range widely over many genres and historical periods, including opera and music for the stage, film soundtracks, pop, rock, jazz, country, electronic dance music and Tin Pan Alley. What makes the book cohere is the contributors’ shared conviction, inspired and invigorated by McClary's work, that musicology is at its most vital when practised creatively, with an open mind and with political commitment. The idea of commitment is more explicit in some of the chapters (such as those of Lawrence Kramer and Robert Walser, which bookend the volume) than in others, but these essays collectively show that aesthetic matters cannot be separated from political ones, that the aesthetic and the political actually co-construct each other, and that uncovering the processes of musical structure and meaning can make an important contribution to the larger intellectual programme of the critique of power. The collection thus shows that the ‘new musicology’ (often dated from the publication of McClary's Feminine Endings in Reference McClary1991) has entered into a healthy second generation, and continues to develop its potential not only by building on critical categories already established within cultural studies, but by also making its own original and indispensable contributions to topics such as the body as a site for experience and meaning-making practice. In this short review, it is impossible to consider in detail all 17 of the book's chapters, so I will have to limit myself to only some of its many highlights.

The book is divided into three sections, titled respectively: (1) Musical Identities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race; (2) Music and Temporality; and (3) Reinventing Analysis. A number of themes and theoretical or methodological approaches cut across these headings, however. The chapters on women musicians and gender are, for example, not all automatically shunted into the section that includes gender as an explicit focus, but are spread through all three of the book's sections, nicely making the point that gender issues also complexly articulate with other concerns such as temporality. Other connecting threads are the continued breaking down of distinctions between so-called high and low culture by putting elite musics and popular musical expressions on an equal footing, and the complex relationships between sound and visual media such as film or stage drama. Most of the chapters are framed in terms of readings of musical texts, either focusing closely on one or two works, or taking a broader comparative perspective over repertories or the work of specific artists throughout their careers.

After Subotnik's Preface and the editors’ brief Introduction, Kramer starts the volume by grasping the bull squarely by the horns, addressing directly the issue of culture and commitment through what might be called the ‘guilty pleasures’ question – how can people of conscience allow themselves to derive pleasure from musical works which they know mediate questionable representations that serve the interests of power? Kramer's chosen example is The Magic Flute, and he seeks an answer by going back to the work and exploring alternative interpretations beyond the usual and obvious critique of the opera's orientalist and misogynist representations of race and gender, suggesting that Mozart actually subtly empowers the subaltern characters in the work through the music he gives them. Kramer's ‘rehabilitation’ strategy for the opera is largely successful, since this large-scale and complex work offers many possibilities for critical interpretive positionings, though it remains to be seen how useful such a strategy would be for tackling the ‘guilty pleasures’ question in relation to other types of music, such as small-scale forms that are less ambiguous in regard to the subject positions they enable.

Steven Baur's discussion of the controversy surrounding the waltz craze in late 1800s USA recalls similar controversies of more recent vintage surrounding musics like metal and rap. But where those more recent moral panics articulated anxieties about class and race, the controversy around the waltz craze brought gender to the fore, as the dance ‘challenged the emergent ideology of domestic femininity so critical to industrial expansion’ (p. 150). Jacqueline Warwick offers an informative study of the Blossoms, the group that set the template for the standardised trio of black female backing singers behind the lead vocalist in pop since the 1960s. Warwick combines original interview material, careful use of relevant published sources, and analysis of recorded TV performances to trace the career of the Blossoms. The chapter is a nice piece of historical writing, with minimal explicit theoretical ambitions, but is none-the-less exemplary in the way it highlights the intersecting cultural politics of gender and race as Warwick tells the little-known history behind the well-known trope of the racialised and gendered vocal backing group.

While they are not placed consecutively within the book's plan, the two respective chapters by Paul Attinello and Raymond Knapp on Stephen Sondheim create a fascinating dialogue. Attinello's chapter appears at the end of the book's first section, thus forming a sort of fulcrum between that section's focus on identity and the following section's concern with temporality. Attinello's approach is to focus closely on the temporalities constructed within individual musical numbers that he argues are each central to the two respective musicals he considers, Pacific Overtures and Sunday in the Park with George. For example, Attinello argues that ‘Someone in a Tree’ in Pacific Overtures crystallises – through a ‘transcendent vision of awareness’ (p. 83) – that musical's overall Zen Buddhist take on the moment of violent cultural contact that it depicts, the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan in 1853. Knapp's chapter, whose placement at the end of the section on temporality similarly provides a fulcrum between that section and the final section on analysis, focuses on the larger structure of Pacific Overtures, comparing how tropes of Japanese-ness and American-ness are differently articulated in the progression of musical numbers through Sondheim's changing treatment of text and music.

The essays grouped together under the heading ‘Music and temporality’ explore what the editors call ‘music's capacity to define and regulate perceptions and experiences of time’ (p. xxi). One of the high points for me of this section is John Richardson's discussion of loose synchronisation – ‘an approach to synchronizing [music and images] that is loose and occasional, rather than narratively close-knit’ (pp. 135–6) – in Philip Glass's opera for Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la Bête and in The Dark Side of Oz. The latter, originating in the mid-1990s, is a fan-created synchronisation of Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon (1976) with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. By turning off the sound of the film's soundtrack and starting the film and the album simultaneously, users create a ‘new audiovisual conglomeration’ (p. 142) that results in various striking coincidences and serendipitous synch-points where the music and images seem to be relating to or commenting on each other. Richardson argues that this ‘surrogate soundtrack’ (p. 143) transforms the film's nostalgic structure of feeling to a much darker filmic experience, including potential critiques of industrial capitalism and technological alienation. Both the Oz and the Philip Glass examples, with their overt exposure of the technological mediations that create their ‘dis-synchronous audio-visual relations’ (p. 138), can be perceived as homologous to similar tensions in modern life (p. 141) and the particular subjectivities those tensions create. Stan Hawkins also addresses the relationship between musical temporalities and subjectivity in his chapter on electronic dance music, focusing in particular on time's ‘mediation of corporeal responses’ (p. 129). Hawkins’ reading of two tracks from the early 1990s by the well-known DJ Joey Beltram locates the political in groove-based musics whose structure is predicated on small-scale gesture and repetition rather than large-scale architectonic form, and which enable subjectivities and experiential modes based on a corporeality where it is not necessarily easy to separate ‘listening’ and ‘response’.

While the first two sections of the book hold together well, Part 3 ‘Reinventing Analysis’ seems a bit of a grab bag, with less of a thread of coherence running through the chapters. As a whole, the essays in this section do not actually foreground the analytical process itself, as the section heading might suggest, but rather illustrate different approaches to analysis while focusing more explicitly on other issues. Richard Leppert's chapter on ‘the gender in’ (p. 194) Patsy Cline's voice is representative. Leppert focuses on Cline's vocal sound in particular, arguing that the way that Cline broke with the established country vocal practice of nasal twang, along with her particular approach to phrasing and other elements of her delivery, are crucial parts of her musical agency that effectively ‘leave the gender straitjacket’ (p. 196) she inherited from country singers like Kitty Wells.

Subotnik offers a spirited defence of Tin Pan Alley popular song from its detractors Hayakawa, Levine and, not least, Adorno. Subotnik argues that the worth of the Tin Pan Alley song is to be found not through analysis of its lyrics but in the affordances it offers for performance, through its careful craftedness and as mediated through published sheet music that both challenges the performer and allows some flexibility in performance, what Subotnik calls the ‘open-ended availability of the Tin Pan Alley song’ (p. 217). David Ake uses what he calls an ‘inadvertent sound’ (p. 226) in a recorded performance by Miles Davis – the (very audible) apparent creak of a stool or chair in the studio during the recording session – as a starting point for an exploration of the ways in which listeners make meaning from the experience of listening to recorded sound, with special consideration paid to issues of recording technology and the place of the body in recorded musical performance.

The last chapter, Walser's brief essay on Alanis Morissette's song ‘Uninvited’, brings the book back full circle to the concerns Kramer voiced in the first chapter about value and meaning in music, and to the concern with identity in the first section as a whole. Walser uses for the most part the traditional tools of analysis – harmony, melody, text-setting, form – but subverts these potted formalist categories by showing how Morissette uses these musical resources to create an affective ‘articulation of desire and fear, of power and paranoia’ that ‘resonate[s] powerfully with contemporary problems of maintaining female identities’ (p. 237).

The book has an accompanying website hosted by the library at UCLA, where all of the chapters (except for Daniel Goldmark's essay on narrative time in film soundtracks) have illustrative audiovisual material (photographs and other images in .jpg format, score excerpts as .pdf files, audio streamed in Real Media's proprietary format, and embedded video that plays right within the browser window); some chapters have additional textual material as well. Subotnik's chapter, in particular, makes extensive use of online textual additions in the form of expanded notes, further bibliographic references, discographic information and parenthetical asides, such that if the reader inserts these at the indicated places in the book's printed text, it amounts to a ‘director's cut’ of Subotnik's paper, restoring a lot of material apparently cut for length. The editors are to be commended for making the extra effort to conceptualise, set up and maintain this website. As of this writing, all the links at the site seem to work except for, unfortunately, most of the audio excerpts pertaining to Charles Hiroshi Garrett's chapter on jazz artist Cassandra Wilson and some of the examples illustrating the chapters by Leppert and Subotnik.

As we continue into the second decade of the new millennium, it is increasingly quipped that the ‘new musicology’ is not so new anymore. That may be so, but this book is evidence that the paradigm (I actually prefer to think of it as a movement, in order to capture some of the sense of the idea of a social movement) continues to push in new directions and inspire relevant and compelling work. The papers in this volume, collectively diverse and all relatively short, to the point and clearly written, lend themselves especially well to classroom use at all levels, and so provide a useful resource for giving students an overview of where cutting-edge musicology is today.