Ethnomusicology

In Listening for Africa David F. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black music and dance's African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. Garcia examines the work of figures ranging...

Audible Empire rethinks the processes and mechanisms of empire and shows how musical practice has been crucial to its spread around the globe. Music is a means of comprehending empire as an audible formation, and the contributors highlight how it has...

The study of 'Celtic' culture has been locked within modern nationalist paradigms, shaped by contemporary media, tourism, and labor migration. Celtic Modern collects critical essays on the global circulation of Celtic music, and the place of music in the...

First Nations, Inuit, and Metis music in Canada is dynamic and diverse, reflecting continuities with earlier traditions and innovative approaches to creating new musical sounds. Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada narrates a story of resistance and...

El Sistema is a nationwide, state-funded music education program in Venezuela. Founded in 1975 by economist and musician Jose Antonio Abreu, the institution has weathered seven jolting changes in government. Hugo Chavez and, after his death, president...

Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes...

Ilmatar gave birth to the bard who sang the Finnish landscape into being in the "Kalevala" (the Finnish national epic). In "Ilmatar's Inspirations", Tina K. Ramnarine explores creative processes and the critical role that music has played in Finnish...

Calypso music is an integral part of Trinidad's national identity. When, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the great Trinidadian musician Roaring, Lion where he was from, Lion famously replied "the land of calypso." But in a nation as diverse as...

This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs...

Music Downtown Eastside draws on two decades of research in one of North America's poorest urban areas to illustrate how human rights can be promoted through music. Harrison's examination of how gentrification, grant funding, and community organizations...

What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain,...

In the twenty-first century, Senegalese hip hop--"Rap Galsen"--has reverberated throughout the world as an exemplar of hip hop resistance in its mobilization against government corruption during a series of tumultuous presidential elections. Yet...

What makes hundreds of listeners cheer ecstatically at the same instant during a live concert by Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum? What is the unspoken language behind a taqsim (traditional instrumental improvisation) that performers and listeners implicitly...

Sense and Sadness is an innovative study of music modality in relation to human emotion and the aesthetics of perception. It is also a musical story of survival through difficulty and pain. Focusing on chant at St George's Syrian Orthodox Church of...

Sense and Sadness is a study of music modality in relation to human emotion and the aesthetics of perception. It is also a musical story of survival through difficulty and pain. Focusing on chant at St George's Syrian Orthodox Church of Aleppo, author...

Ethnomusicology is an academic discipline with a very broad mandate: to understand why and how human beings are musical through the study of music in all its geographical and historical diversity. Ethnomusicological scholarship, however, has been remiss...

Drawing on ethnographic research and often deeply personal experiences with musical cultures, Queering the Field: Sounding out Ethnomusicology unpacks a history of sentiment that veils the treatment of queer music and identity within the field of...

The sustainability of music and other intangible expressions of culture has been high on the agenda of scholars, governments and NGOs in recent years. However, there is a striking lack of systematic research into what exactly affects sustainability...

Tackling the myriad issues raised by Sander L. 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...

Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean guitarist, vocalist, and composer, has performed worldwide and released some 50 albums. One of a handful of artists to have a beat named after him, Mtukudzi blends Zimbabwean traditional sounds with South African...

How conflicts between science and the humanities have shaped our understanding of the line between art and animal behavior Over the past century and a half, the voices and bodies of animals have been used by scientists and music experts as a...

In Sounds of the Underground, Stephen Graham examines the largely unexplored terrain of underground music-exploratory forms of music-making, such as noise, free improvisation, and extreme metal, that exist outside or on the fringes of mainstream culture,...

Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified...

The Art of Emergency charts the maneuvers of art through conflict zones across the African continent. Advancing diverse models for artistic and humanitarian alliance, the volume urges conscientious deliberation on the role of aesthetics in crisis through...

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound...

Since 1997, the war in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has taken more than 6 million lives and shapes the daily existence of the nation's residents. While the DRC is often portrayed in international media as an unproductive failed state,...

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media dissemination-from phonograph cylinders to MP3s-each subjected to the...

WInner of the Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre ResearchReimagining...

Kirin Narayan's imagination was captured the very first time, as a girl visiting the region, that 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...

Ilmatar gave birth to the bard who sang the Finnish landscape into being in the "Kalevala" (the Finnish national epic). In "Ilmatar's Inspirations", Tina K. Ramnarine explores creative processes and the critical role that music has played in Finnish...

Although scholars have long been aware of the crucial roles that gender plays in music, and vice versa, the contributors to this volume are among the first to systematically examine the interactions between the two. This book is also the first to explore...

Tigers of a Different Stripe takes readers inside the unique world of merengue tipico, a traditional music of the Dominican Republic. While in most genres of Caribbean music women usually participate as dancers or vocalists, in merengue tipico they are...

Voices of the Magi explores the popular Catholic musical ensembles of southeastern Brazil known as folias de reis (companies of kings). Composed predominantly of low-income workers, the folias reenact the journey of the Wise Men to Bethlehem and back to...

In music studies, Timothy D. Taylor is known for his insightful essays on music, globalization, and capitalism. Music and the World is a collection of some of Taylor's most recent writings essays concerned with questions about music in capitalist...

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...

Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunisia that invoke the healing powers of long-deceased Muslim saints through music-driven trance rituals. Richard C. Jankowsky illuminates the virtually...

Arsenio Rodríguez was one of the most important Cuban musicians of the twentieth century. In this first scholarly study, ethnomusicologist David F. García examines Rodríguez's life, including the conjunto musical combo he led and the highly influential...

Klezmer in Europe has been a controversial topic ever since this traditional Jewish wedding music made it to the concert halls and discos of Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. Played mostly by non-Jews and for non-Jews, it was hailed as "fakelore,"...

Though cultural hybridity is celebrated as a hallmark of U.S. American music and identity, hybrid music is all too often marked and marketed under a single racial label.Tamara Roberts' book Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that foreground...

How does the state separate music from noise? How can such filtering apparatus shape the content and form of sound production in the city? As a marker of co-presence to the hearing body, sound is always open to (or rather opens up) the politics of shared...