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RESEARCH ARTICLES
Musical instruments are more than just tools for producing sound. They also exist as cultural objects that are given extramusical significance by their associations with particular repertoires and social contexts. These associations, which are constantly renegotiated in response to musical and social developments, inevitably influence how composers, performers and listeners think about music. The electric guitar is an instrument with a particularly strong cultural identity, and is one of the most iconic cultural objects of the twentieth century. Its versatility has allowed it to be used in genres ranging from country to free jazz (as well as its adoption in various non-western musical traditions), but it is perhaps most ubiquitous in rock music, along with its associated subgenres and offshoots. Since the 1950s guitar-driven rock and pop has provided the soundtrack for several countercultural youth movements, leading the instrument often to be associated in the popular imagination with youthful rebellion and social upheaval. However, as Steve Waksman argues, in its role as 'a privileged signifier of white male power and potency' the electric guitar has also contributed to reinforcing established social orders (such as the marginalisation of women and ethnic minorities, or the influence of commercialism in music).1The electric guitar therefore has a complex and sometimes contradictory cultural identity, which shapes how we understand music performed on this instrument.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its ubiquity in popular culture, the electric guitar has only slowly been accepted into the 'classical' concert hall. Although the first hollow body electric guitars were developed in the 1930s, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that composers started to see the instrument's value, at first particularly as an ensemble instrument in works such as Stockhausen's Gruppen (1955-57). In earlier works for the electric guitar composers rarely engaged with the instrument's associations with popular music or referenced playing styles idiomatic to popular genres. In recent decades, though, as the electric guitar has gained wider acceptance in contemporary concert music, its associations with rock and pop have in fact appealed to composers who wish to engage with contemporary culture. Composers representing a variety of aesthetics (ranging from the punk-minimalism of 'no wave' pioneers Glenn Branca and...