Television Music

This Routledge Television Guidebook on Television Music provides a comprehensive overview of the engagement between music and television since the inception of network television broadcasting in the United States in the late 1940s. In this book, Norma Coates presents a "how-to" guide, providing examples and case studies of many approaches to making sense of how music functions on television. Music plays many roles on television—it can function as a soundtrack, comment on the narrative, or be part of the narrative itself. Music can be foundational to a genre and industrial structure like music television, or it can be the organizing principle for a type of program such as the televised singing contest. Music can provide content in the form of band or individual performances across a range of television genres. With case studies of popular shows like American Idol and Glee, thisTelevision Guidebookaims to help students explore and understand how music contributes to television style, narrative, genre, and history.

Chapter 1: Overview and Definitions. Chapter 2: History. Chapter 3: Television Music as Soundtrack. Chapter 4: Television Music in Genre. Chapter 5: Music Television as Genre. Appendices: Research Resources, Further Reading, Discussion Questions, Suggested Clips.

Norma Coates is Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Don Wright Faculty of Music and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Coates received her Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches courses on television music, popular music and gender, the history of music industry, the history of women in popular music, and studies in musical genre, in particular punk rock. She was instrumental in developing the University of Western Ontario’s innovative MA program in Popular Music and Culture and served as its coordinator for 4 years. Her articles about gender and music, and music on television, appear in many anthologies and journals. She held executive positions in the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US branch for a decade, and is currently the co-chair of the Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.