Music-Ethnomusicology

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and...

Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle,...

Hip hop has long been a vehicle for protest in the United States, used by its primarily African American creators to address issues of prejudice, repression, and exclusion. But the music is now a worldwide phenomenon, and outside the United States it has been...

Erudite and exhaustive, Gerhard Kubik's Theory of African Music provides an authoritative account of its subject. Over the course of two volumes, Kubik, one of the most prominent experts in the field, draws on his extensive travels and three decades of study throughout Africa...

Responding to growing international interest in the Yorùbá culture of southwestern Nigeria, practitioners of bàtá--a centuries-old drumming, dancing, and singing tradition--have recast themselves as traditional performers in a global market. As the Nigerian market for ritual bàtá has been declining, international opportunities for performance...

Kirin Narayan's imagination was captured the very first time that, as a girl visiting the Himalayas, she heard Kangra women join their voices together in song. Returning as an anthropologist, she became fascinated by how they spoke of singing as a form of enrichment,...

In Argentina, tango isn't just the national music--it's a national brand. But ask any contemporary Argentine if they ever really listen to it and chances are the answer is no: tango hasn't been popular for more than fifty years. In this book, Morgan James...

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country's urban black youth developed kwaito--a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it...

For more than a century, urban North Africans have sought to protect and revive Andalusi music, a prestigious Arabic-language performance tradition said to originate in the "lost paradise" of medieval Islamic Spain. Yet despite the Andalusi repertoire's enshrinement as the national classical music of...

With its irresistible dance beat, strong bass line, and straightforward harmonies and lyrics, zouk has become wildly popular in the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. This book--complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples--provides a thorough introduction to the sound, lyrics, choreography,...

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson's second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites...

Tackling the myriad issues raised by Sander Gilman's provocative opening salvo--"Are Jews Musical?"--this volume's distinguished contributors present a series of essays that trace the intersections of Jewish history and music from the late nineteenth century to the present. Covering the sacred and the secular,...

Centring the voices of Indigenous scholars at the intersection of music and education, this co-edited volume contributes to debates about current colonising music education research and practices, and offers alternative decolonising approaches that support music education imbued with Indigenous perspectives. This unique collection is...

Based on more than thirty years' fieldwork, this book aims to increase the understanding of music played on elaborate wooden floats which form vital components in Japanese festivals with a religious dimension. The focus is on float-festivals in Aichi prefecture in central Japan, butinternational...

While we are used to looking around us, we are less used to listening to what happens around us. And yet, the noises we produce reveal our way of life, and learning to master them is a necessity. This book aims at drawing the...

Music as Agency: Diversities of Perspectives on Artistic Citizenship focuses on the concept, application, interpretation and manifestation of Artistic Citizenship in diverse contexts. Author: Maria WestvallISBN-10: 1032577576ISBN-13: 9781032577579Publisher: RoutledgeLanguage: EnglishPublished: 12/26/2025Pages: 146Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.52lbsSize: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.35d

In this book, over 40 contributors collectively tune in to how sound-and its absence-can function as a source of power that enables isolation, control and harm, as well as connection, healing and resistance. Sound and Detention explores soundscapes in places, processes and systems of...

Keeping Time: Dialogues on music and archives in Honour of Linda Barwick explores current issues in ethnomusicology and the archiving and repatriation of ethnographic field recordings.The 19 chapters by 36 authors consider archiving practices as a site of interaction between researchers and cultural heritage...

An in-depth exploration of Tyler, The Creator's evolution as an artist and cultural force, positioning his audiovisual productions as a watershed in American hip hop. Through close analysis of his music videos, lyrics, and performances-as rapper, producer and director-it examines how Tyler redefines race,...

The author takes Greil Marcus's capacious category of "weirdness" in new directions to examine a tension in certain expressions of American music and music communities since the 1980s. It locates this tension in the space between the artists' striving for authenticity in the values...

This gathering of seventeen specially commissioned essays and two original editions of music honours the manifold achievements of Gerard Gillen as organist, church musician, university professor and scholar. 'A musical offering' includes new research on the history of church music in Ireland, a sequence...

Author: Lisa GilmanISBN-10: 159213985XISBN-13: 9781592139859Publisher: Temple University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/01/2009Pages: 268Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.10lbsSize: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.00dReview Citation(s): Chronicle of Higher Education 05/29/2009 pg. 17Choice 02/01/2010

Author: Peter ManuelISBN-10: 1592137342ISBN-13: 9781592137343Publisher: Temple University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/01/2009Pages: 288Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.20lbsSize: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.00dReview Citation(s): Chronicle of Higher Education 09/04/2009 pg. 16Choice 01/01/2010

"Masters of the Sabar" is the first book to examine the music and culture of Wolof griot percussionists, masters of the vibrant sabar drumming tradition. Based on extensive field research in Senegal, this book is a biographical study of several generations of percussionists in...

In the first book to account for the growing prominence of Asians in the world of Western classical music, Mari Yoshihara grapples with the significance of this trend. This is a book about the about the origins of a social and cultural phenomenon, but...

Christopher Fox (1955) has emerged as one of the most fascinating composers of the post-war generation. His spirit of experimentalism pervades an oeuvre in which he has blithely created his own version of a range of contemporary musical practices. In his work many of...

Music and Coexistence: A Journey across the World in Search of Musicians Making a Difference is both study and travelogue, as author Osseily Hanna explores the courageous work of musicians who compose and perform with their ostensible enemies or in extraordinary social situations. He...

aThe image of the aging rock-and-roller is not just Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger on stage in their sixties. aIn his timely book "Music, Style, and Aging," cultural sociologist Andy Bennett explains how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular...

Sonic Spaces of the Karoo is a pioneering study of the sacred music of three coloured (the apartheid designation for people not white or native) people's church congregations in the rural town of Graaff-Reinet, South Africa. Jorritsma's fieldwork involves an investigation of the choruses,...

How class divisions shape the definition of Ecuador's national music and identityAuthor: Ketty WongISBN-10: 1439900574ISBN-13: 9781439900574Publisher: Temple University PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/06/2012Pages: 268Format: HardcoverWeight: 1.05lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.20w x 0.90d

Intrigued by "texted" sonorities--the rhythms, musics, ordinary noises, and sounds of language in narratives--Julie Huntington examines the soundscapes in contemporary Francophone novels such as Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood (Senegal), and Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent (Martinique). Through an ethnomusicological perspective, Huntington argues in...

Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience explores the processes and experiences of attending live music events from the initial decision to attend through to audience responses and memories of a performance after it has happened. The book brings together international researchers who consider the...

Music theory is often seen as independent from - even antithetical to - performance. While music theory is an intellectual enterprise, performance requires an intuitive response to the music. But this binary opposition is a false one, which serves neither the theorist nor the...

This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of...

Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice brings together internationally renowned scholars and practitioners to explore the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music. Through various theoretical positions...

The dawn of the twenty-first century marked a turning period for American Yiddish culture. The 'Old World' of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe was fading from living memory - yet at the same time, Yiddish song enjoyed a renaissance of creative interest, both among a younger...

The complexity of the various forms of knowledge and practices that are encountered by teachers, university lecturers, teacher trainers, student teachers, policy makers and researchers, demands careful thought and reflection. Professional Knowledge in Music Teacher Education focuses on how knowledge is understood, what theories...

Turkish Metal journeys deep into the heart of the Turkish heavy metal scene, uncovering the emergence, evolution, and especially the social implications of this controversial musical genre in a Muslim society. The book applies an ethnographic approach in order to study social and cultural...

Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham (a.k.a. 'Bonnie Prince Billy'), and Devendra Banhart are perhaps the best known of a generation of independent artists who use elements of folk music in contexts that are far from traditional. These (and other) so called 'new folk' artists challenge...

The musicological study of popular music has developed, particularly over the past twenty years, into an established aspect of the discipline. The academic community is now well placed to discuss exactly what is going on in any example of popular music and the theoretical...

What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories)...

Presenting the latest research in the area, this volume explores the fundamental concept of qupai 曲牌, melodic models upon which most traditional Chinese instrumental music (and some vocal music) is based. The greater part of the traditional instrumental repertoire has emerged from qupai models...

This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl's voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls' online media culture. While girls' voices are more prominent...

Few other nations have undergone as profound a change in their social, political, and cultural life as Mongolia did in the twentieth century. Beginning the century as a largely rural, nomadic, and tradition-oriented society, the nation was transformed by the end of this century...

In Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China's Sonic Nationalism, Joshua Howard explores the role the songwriter Nie Er played in the 1930s proletarian arts movement and the process by which he became a nationalist icon. Composed only months before his untimely death...

Networking the Russian Diaspora is a fascinating and timely study of interwar Shanghai. Aside from the vacated Orthodox Church in the former French Concession where most Russian émigrés resided, Shanghai today displays few signs of the bustling settlement of those years. Russian musicians established...

When itinerant singers from China's countryside become iconic artists, worlds collide. The lives and performances of these representative singers become sites for conversations between the rural and urban, local and national, folk and elite, and traditional and modern. In Song King: Connecting People, Places,...

By providing a focused examination of the historical development of Black music artistry, William C. Banfield formulates a usable philosophy tied to how such music is made, shaped, and functions. He explores Black music culture from three angles: history, education, and the creative work...

The Conjectural Body combines continental philosophy with musicology, popular music studies, and feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to offer a unique perspective on issues of gender, race, and the philosophy of music. It is one of the few books in philosophy to take...

New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the city's jazz scene is more important now than ever before. Blowin' the Blues Away examines how jazz has thrived in New York following its popular resurgence...