Since first launching in 2015, Luminos has served as one of UC Press’s flagship open access programs. Having published more than seventy-five full length scholarly monographs—fully open and available to the public for free— in a variety of disciplines, Luminos embodies the University of California mission to provide high quality, innovative, peer reviewed research for widespread consumption and debate.

Given the recent need for increased remote work and academic participation, UC Press is delighted to highlight the breadth of Luminos’s scholarly disciplines.

Music of a Thousand Years
A New History of Persian Musical Traditions

by Ann E. Lucas

“Music of a Thousand Years presents an innovative narrative of Persian music history and also provides important new perspectives on how to analyze the meaning of music and culture in historical perspective. Ann E. Lucas’s research and analysis offer a new basis for understanding the significance of Persian music history in relation to the larger contexts that define Persian history.”
—Mohsen Mohammadi, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles

The Art of Fugue
Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750

by Joseph Kerman

“It is sweet and fitting that Joseph Kerman, who has given us such insight into William Byrd, one of music’s inspiring octogenarians, should have celebrated his own eightieth birthday by completing this rich and constantly surprising study of Bach’s fugues. As ever, Kerman’s hearing is sharp, his thinking precise and original, and his prose elegant and sapid. Who would have thought that one could write about fugues with such warmth and love, and with such an exhilarating sense of joy?”
—Michael Steinberg, author of The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide

Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels

by Christina Zanfagna

“While most scholarship on hip hop is focused on lyrical analysis, Zanfagna takes the sanctifying process of lyrical conversion in holy hip hop and situates it within the religious, cultural, and physical landscapes of LA. . . . Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels is a thorough and engaging account of race, religion, and personal striving for musical authenticity and spiritual movement within and across spaces that historically have denied and constrained both.”
—Reading Religion

Keys to Play
Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

by Roger Moseley

“With Keys to Play, ludomusicology has finally arrived on the scene. Moseley’s book cuts right across the traditional subdisciplines of music studies and offers new and challenging connections between them. Whether our interest is in performance, compositional technique, music theory, improvisation, notation, audiovisual media, historiography, or aesthetics, Moseley teaches us how much the field of music studies at large has to gain from taking play seriously. This wise book is full of brilliant aperçus and provocative observations, bursting with novel ideas. In a word: stunning.”
—Alexander Rehding, Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Harvard University

Instruments for New Music
Sound, Technology, and Modernism

by Thomas Patteson

“The smartest book on the German roots of what happened once electricity joined sound to make music and media. Amid profound historical events technological possibilities were hacked, recordings stopped repeating themselves to perform something new, and the innovative art forms with us today were born.”
—Douglas Kahn, author of Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts

Modernizing Composition
Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka

by Garrett Field

“Modernizing Composition uses nuanced readings of Sinhala song and poetry to rethink arguments on South Asian nationalism and modernity, which have until now largely focused on India and Pakistan. Garrett Field’s attention to poetics makes this book critical for understanding the larger literary culture of the region. His account of Sri Lankan modern song composers operating in relation to the dominant forces of Indian classical and film musics makes it a must-read for ethnomusicologists.”
—Richard K. Wolf, author of The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia