Ian Biddle is Senior Lecturer and Head of Postgraduate Studies in Music at Newcastle University, UK. He is a cultural theorist and musicologist, working on a range of topics in music and sound-related areas. His work ranges from the cultural history of music and masculinity, music in the Holocaust, theorising music's intervention in communities and subjectivities, sound, soundscapes and urban experience, and the politics of noise. He has interests in memory studies, sound studies, Italian workerist and autonomist theory, psychoanalysis and theoretical approaches to 'affective' states. He is co-founder and co-ordinating editor (with Richard Middleton) of the journal Radical Musicology.
'In significant ways like a love letter to a complicated lover, this book displays both its commitment to and critique of the nineteenth-century German repertoire. I am certain that this will become one of the most cited and read books in the field. Ian Biddle makes a substantial contribution to the literature on gender in general, and masculinity in particular - an excellent piece of scholarship.' Anahid Kassabian, University of Liverpool, UK 'By re-examining the musical works as well as musical writings and analyses, Biddle succeeds in broadening the concepts of Romantic musical discourse and makes readers consider the positioning of works like Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in music history.' Choice '... energetic and thought-provoking...' Music and Letters