Musical biography has infrequently been an item of theoretical and methodological mirrored image. Our present-day conception of the lives of sought after composers and performers of the earlier has been mostly shaped by means of cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century fans. whereas older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new facts, their historiographical premisses and narrative thoughts stay principally unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals within the humanities because the Nineteen Sixties have generated a physique of theoretical proposal that has undermined a number of the assumptions of conventional biography. hence, lots of those assumptions have misplaced their carry as workable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. for instance, the buildup of evidence is not any longer believed to convey us towards an knowing of the topic; nor are the normal perspectives of the unified self and the self as a foundational inspiration taken without any consideration. This quantity brings jointly musicologists and historians who discover, via person case experiences, the wealthy capability of those new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this quantity learn how the insights supplied by means of those theories light up our serious reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works those biographies have been used to construe - and aid forge new techniques to musical biography. The authors additionally discover the services musical biographies served in several historic contexts, the relevance of biography for musical feedback, the reliability of archival facts, the ethics of biography, the calls for put on biography by means of feminist and gender historical past, and the hot percentages provided by means of cinema. The individuals to this quantity problem the view that biography has little significance for song background, research, and feedback. jointly, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem