Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this chapter shows how women artists navigate the gendered complexities of working in the highly male-dominated occupation of electronic music production and performance. Using a feminist critical management studies lens and positioning the construction of subjectivity as a relational, and power-laden process, the discussion notes six subjectivities enacted by women producing and performing electronic music. (1) The Intersectional Artist (2) The Genderless Artist (3) Visible Woman: Invisible Artist (4) Shrinking Violets and Tough Cookies (5) One of the Boys and (6) Bringers of Divine Feminine Energy. The discussion addresses the impacts these subject positions have on women’s careers and concludes by showing how women’s collectives, despite representing an additional burden on those who organise them, are challenging the status quo by providing public and visible action through the ‘safety and strength in numbers’ of collective activism.

This chapter presents an analytic autoethnographic account of techno production within the Berlin electronic dance music scene. The discussion analyses the composition, production, and creative processes underpinning several commercially successful techno records: ‘Ellipse’, ‘Pulse Train’, and ‘Cognitive Resonance’. Observations of the production practice reveal several rhythmic principles underpinning techno music: sixteenth notes flow in uninterrupted ‘pulse trains’, kick drums articulate 4/4 beats; groupings in powers of two predominate; polymetricity enables non-binary groupings. Describing a process of integration in the global techno scene and its Berlin focal point, the chapter is written in the first person to show the author’s presence. Links are drawn between personal experience and rhythmic structures in techno music. Three insights emerge: pulse trains as central rhythmic structure of techno music; interiorising production techniques and immersing oneself in scene-specific aesthetic codes; and using embodied knowledge, gained through listening and dancing, is a significant component of producing techno.

Fanny Hensel inherited a tradition of powerful salonnières and redefined it for her time. She navigated gendered constraints on her music career via her Sonntagsmusiken, which were private yet highly curated performances that prioritized music just as much as conversation. Hensel’s social and religious concerns shaped many of her choices, initially confining her to informal settings and to a secondary role as her parents launched her brother’s career. However, her early exposure to Berlin’s elite musical circles allowed her to analyze areas for improvement in Berlin’s musical culture, and she embarked on a mission to raise the level of musical excellence and taste in her circle. This study examines key milestones in Hensel’s journey, highlighting shifts in the number of performers, performance formats, genres, and complexity. Hensel’s evolving approach to musical gatherings reflected broader nineteenth-century tensions between domesticity and professionalization, and shaped her eventual legacy far beyond her Berlin salon.

Vienna enjoys particularly high esteem as a city of music, a reputation that emerged long ago and still holds true today. This chapter considers the Viennese institutions focused on music as a prime generator of the frequent and the frequently high level of musical activity, discussing inter alia churches, the Tonkünstler-Societät, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Vienna Philharmonic and twentieth-century institutions such as the Wiener Konzertverein and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Women in mid-nineteenth-century Madrid participated in salon culture as a means of social mobility and musical expression, navigating both the opportunities and constraints of gender norms. As salons expanded beyond aristocratic circles into the bourgeoisie, music became a key marker of cultural refinement and an avenue for female participation in public and semiprivate artistic spaces. Institutions like the Liceo Artístico y Literario de Madrid provided performance opportunities, though women also faced criticism for their growing visibility. Figures such as Paulina Cabrero exemplified the dual role of women as performers and composers, blurring boundaries between domestic leisure and public recognition. Personal albums, inscribed with musical compositions, poetry, and dedications, serve as vital sources for understanding salon culture’s influence on female artistic agency. Examining these albums alongside periodicals and historical accounts, this study situates salon culture within Spain’s broader sociopolitical transformations, highlighting its impact on women’s musical production, education, and cultural expression.

DJ culture has long been associated with the collective experience of the dance floor in Electronic Dance Music Cultures (EDMCs), yet it has also spread through various forms of broadcast technology, from radio to television and the internet. In this chapter, we explore some of the ways that DJ culture adapted to the conditions of social isolation that defined the Covid-19 pandemic. We are particularly interested in the adoption of the streaming platform Twitch to facilitate aspects of virtual belonging and online community that emerged to redress the absence of the dance floor. We are also interested in how ‘online DJing’ constructs conditions for virtual engagement by remediating forms of broadcast media. In this chapter we address how DJ culture navigated the transition from in-person events to ‘being-scene’ on the screen, and how affective experiences of the dance floor, the ‘vibe’ and its communitas transformed during this process.

This chapter introduces the notion of the rave moment as an aesthetic experience that foregrounds affect. Its theorisation takes place in the context of an affect-deficit society through the case study of a series of dance parties that took place in Blackburn, UK, between 1989 and 1990. Seemingly resisting a categorisation within hegemonic discourses of raves, the Blackburn parties are used to show that the rave moment is a cultural product that can be exported and adapted. Its flexibility is evident in the changing character of the parties with regard to their location, organisational structure, popularity and promoted values. On the one hand, it is difficult to portray them as a coherent series of events. On the other hand, the parties were retrospectively labelled as ‘raves‘ in an attempt to fit their development into common narratives of rave culture. This tension is used as a starting point to argue for a reframing of electronic dance music events as contextualised aesthetic experiences.

This essay considers music-making in Vienna over five centuries, dividing attention between the court and the city’s institutions, outdoor performance spaces and homes. It discusses not only well-known individuals who elevated Vienna’s fame as a musical city but also representative figures who stand in for others whose lives and careers are less known, and many whose names are lost.

Vienna’s musical heritage is defined not solely by its composers and performers but also by an impressive array of distinctive instruments that have emanated from the city. This chapter delves into the variety of sound bodies that have shaped the city’s sonic environment: mechanical clocks with music, bells, string, keyboard and wind instruments, as well as their unique Viennese modifications. Designed and produced specifically for and/or in Vienna, they reflect the needs of their time and materialize the creative ideas of then-manufacturers, serve as popular tourist attractions or curiosities and transmit symbolic or social meaning.

This chapter analyzes how a network of discourses, sounds, images, and behaviors conveyed content in Colombian salons during the nineteenth century, producing a “world of meaning.” To do this, I study the salon as a part of a civilizing project, exploring how it articulated gender and musical practice under new forms of sociability while examining masculinity and femininity roles introduced and performed within the salon, often using music and dance as means for fostering social interaction among peers. Ultimately, such analysis suggests that the salon became a musical scene that played a prominent role in social reform as a medium for bridging multiple social class and distinction discourses with new ideas about civilization, modernization, social order, and progress. From this standpoint, salons became semiprivate spaces where music and socialization allowed the members of the new Colombian urban bourgeoisie to articulate their visions of the private and the public spheres.

In 1849–50, Étienne Duverger co-edited La Violette: Revue musicale et littéraire in New Orleans. He published this feuilleton with an aim to instill the idea of the Parisian salon among women in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and he encouraged them to adopt a new repertoire (Chopin) and a new stance (in the public gaze rather than out of it). In other words, he urged them to come out of the shadows (where violets hide) and into a broader light. His efforts, however, failed. This essay argues that while the rising domination of US-American culture (over that of the French) contributed to the breakdown of Duverger’s mission, the data that can be gleaned from this publication provides the most detailed account of salon activities in the South, and possibly the entire nation. Thus, La Violette proves invaluable as a resource for women’s musical culture in this period.

This chapter addresses the nightclub as an architectural typology. It will consider what the Italian architect Carlo Caldini, co-designer and owner of Florence’s Space Electronic nightclub (1969–2017), called the nightclub’s ‘inexistent architecture’ - in other words, the importance of sound and light over bricks and mortar in the design of club spaces. This was echoed by the critic Aaron Betsky who described a design of ‘rhythm and light’ (Queer Space, 1997) in his description of New York’s iconic Studio 54. The discussion further considers a range of nightclubs from the late twentieth century including Rome’s Piper club, Florence’s Space Electronic, and Electric Circus, Studio 54, Area, and Palladium in New York. In addition, it brings in other voices from architecture, design and music – including Simon Reynolds’ concept of the ‘affective charge’, to position design and architecture as a key realm in electronic dance music culture.