Singing the Right Way enters the world of Orthodox Christianity in Estonia to explore the significance of musical style in worship, cultural identity, and social imagination. Through a series of ethnographic and historical chapters, author Jeffers Engelhardt focuses on how Orthodox Estonians give voice to the religious absolute in secular society to live Christ-like lives. Approaching Orthodoxy through local understandings of correct practice and correct belief, Engelhardt shows how religious k...
Efforts within the past decade to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa have dealt with HIV/AIDS principally as a medical concern-despite the fact that doctors continue to be confronted with the complex relationship of the disease to broader social issues. When medical and governmental institutions fail, artists step in. Contemporary performances in Uganda often focus on gender and health-related issues specific to women and youths, in which song texts warn against risky sexual env...
Soundscapes from the Americas (SOAS Musicology)
Dedicated to the late Gerard Behague (1937-2005), whose pioneering work in Latin American music, popular culture, and performance studies contributed extensively to ethnomusicological discourse in the 1970s-1990s, this anthology offers comparative perspectives on the evolving legacy of performance ethnography in socio-musical analysis. President of the Society for Ethnomusicology from 1979-81, editor of its journal, Ethnomusicology, from 1974-78, and founder and editor of the trilingual Latin Am...
City of Mirrors (South Asia Research)
Carol Salomon dedicated over thirty years of her life to researching, translating, and annotating this compilation of songs by the Bengali poet and mystical philosopher Lalan Sai (popularly transliterated as Lalon) who lived in the village of Cheuriya in Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One major objective of his lyrical riddles was to challenge the restrictions of cultural, political, and sexual identity, and his songs accordingly express a longing to understand humanity, it...
The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (Gift of Bob Edwards)
by Fred Bronson
Now updated through 1991, this popular volume lists every single to appear in the top spot on the Hot 100 chart since 1955, along with anecdotes, interviews, and chart data.
Modern Noise, Fluid Genres (New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies)
by Jeremy Wallach
What happens to 'local' sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia's chaotic and momentous transition to democracy, Wallach takes us to recording studios, music stores, concert venues, university campuses, video shoots, and urban neighborhoods.Integr...
The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music (No-Nonsense Guides)
by Louise Gray
'World Music' is an awkward phrase. Used to describe the hugely multifaceted nature of a range of, typically, non-English language popular musics from the world over, it's a tag that throws up as many problems as it does solutions. Louise Gray's "No-Nonsense Guide to World Music" attempts to go behind the phrase to explore the reasons for the contemporary interest in world music, who listens to it and why? Through chapters that focus on specific areas of music, such as rembetika, fado, trance mu...
Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, is one of the case study volumes in the Global Music Series, edited by Bonnie Wade and Patricia Shehan Campbell. This volume describes the social, cultural, and economic circumstances surrounding mariachi music in the United States. Massive immigrations of Mexicans to the U.S., the power of the international recording industry, and the fluid travel of mariachi musicians back and forth between the two countries have maintained a s...
Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. The virtual medium seemingly provides us with ample opportunities to behave and act out with relative safety and impunity. Or does it? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. Author William Cheng shows how the simulated environments of...
An account of the unique century-old reconciliation of two disparate traditions: black Australia and American country music.
Shaping Ceremony (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)
by Mary B Hollinshead
Offering a fresh approach to ancient Greek architecture, Shaping Ceremony focuses on the overlooked subject of monumental steps. Written in a clear and readable style, the book presents three complementary ways of studying steps: examining how the human body works on steps; theoretical perspectives on the relationship between architecture and human behavior; and the socio-political effects of steps' presence. Although broad steps are usually associated with emperors and political dominance, Mary...
The Music of Multicultural America (American Made Music)
The Music of Multicultural America explores the intersection of performance, identity, and community in a wide range of musical expressions. Fifteen essays explore traditions that range from the Klezmer revival in New York, to Arab music in Detroit, to West Indian steelbands in Brooklyn, to Kathak music and dance in California, to Irish music in Boston, to powwows in the midwestern plains, to Hispanic and native musics of the Southwest borderlands. Many chapters demonstrate the processes involve...
Focus: Music of Northeast Brazil examines the historical and contemporary manifestations of the music of Brazil, a country with a musical landscape that is layered with complexity and diversity. Based on the author's field research during the past twenty years, the book describes and analyzes the social/historical contexts and contemporary musical practices of Afro-Brazilian religion, selected Carnival traditions, Bahia's black cultural renaissance, the traditions of rural migrants, and currents...
Global Tarantella (Folklore Studies in Multicultural World)
by Incoronata Inserra
Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre. Examining tarantella's changing image and rol...
Danzon
by Associate Professor of Music Alejandro L Madrid and Professor of Ethnomusicology Robin D Moore
Czech Bluegrass (Folklore Studies in Multicultural World)
by Lee Bidgood
Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music’s emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Cze...