Sporting Sounds: Relationships Between Sport and Music

Front Cover
Anthony Bateman, John Bale
Routledge, 2009 - Music - 274 pages

Music and sport are both highly significant cultural forms, yet the substantial and longstanding connections between the two have largely been overlooked. Sporting Sounds addresses this oversight in an intriguing and innovative collection of essays.

With contributions from leading international psychologists, sociologists, historians, musicologists and specialists in sports and cultural studies, the book illuminates our understanding of the vital part music has played in the performance, reception and commodification of sport. It explores a fascinating range of topics and case studies, including:

  • The use of music to enhance sporting performance

  • Professional applications of music in sport

  • Sporting anthems as historical commemorations

  • Music at the Olympics

  • Supporter rock music in Swedish sport

  • Caribbean cricket and calypso music

From local fan cultures to international mega-events, music and sport are inextricably entwined. Sporting Sounds is a stimulating and illuminating read for anybody with an interest in either of these cultural forms.

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About the author (2009)

The life of John Bale embodied the turbulent contradictions of the early Reformation. Reared from age twelve as a Carmelite friar, he converted to Protestantism as an adult and soon became one of its most ardent polemicists. Much of Bale's work consists of vituperative prose attacks on the institutional corruption of the Roman Church, a style for which he received the nickname "Billious Bale." Bale was also an energetic dramatist, whose zeal in staging Protestant propaganda earned him the sponsorship of Oliver Cromwell. While Bales's drama bears evidence of the medieval morality plays, he is remarkable for authoring the first Tudor history play, King Johan (1539), which displays the English monarch as a proto-Protestant enemy of the papacy. In his choice of topic and invention of genre, Bale anticipated the history plays of William Shakespeare. Bale's martyrology A Brief Chronicle Concerning the Examination and Death of Sir John Oldcastle (1544) may have provided the Bard with a source for his portrait of Falstaff.

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