Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzon first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. Danzon: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon.
Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzon in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to analyze the danzon, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes. Danzon is a significant addition to the literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture; it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this music alike."

Dawn ot the DAW tells the story of how the dividing line between the traditional roles of musicians and recording studio personnel (producers, recording engineers, mixing engineers, technicians, etc.) has eroded throughout the latter half of the twentieth century to the present. Whereas those equally adept in music and technology such as Raymond Scott and Les Paul were exceptions to their eras, the millennial music maker is ensconced in a world in which the symbiosis of music and technology is commonplace. As audio production skills such as recording, editing, and mixing are increasingly co-opted by musicians teaching themselves in their do-it-yourself (DIY) recording studios, conventions of how music production is taught and practiced are remixed to reflect this reality. Dawn ot the DAW first examines DIY recording practices within the context of recording history from the late nineteenth century to the present. Second, Dawn ot the DAW discusses the concept of "the studio as musical instrument" and the role of the producer, detailing how these constructs have evolved throughout the history of recorded music in tandem. Third, Dawn ot the DAW details current practices of DIY recording-how recording technologies are incorporated into music making, and how they are learned by DIY studio users in the musically-chic borough of Brooklyn. Finally, Dawn ot the DAW examines the broader trends heard throughout, summarizing the different models of learning and approaches to music making. Dawn ot the DAW concludes by discussing the ramifications of these new directions for the field of music education.

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny. Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.

Arguably the world's most popular partnered social dance form, salsa's significance extends well beyond the Latino communities which gave birth to it. The growing international and cross-cultural appeal of this Latin dance form, which celebrates its mixed origins in the Caribbean and in Spanish Harlem, offers a rich site for examining issues of cultural hybridity and commodification in the context of global migration. Salsa consists of countless dance dialects enjoyed by varied communities in different locales. In short, there is not one dance called salsa, but many. Spinning Mambo into Salsa, a history of salsa dance, focuses on its evolution in three major hubs for international commercial export-New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The book examines how commercialized salsa dance in the 1990s departed from earlier practices of Latin dance, especially 1950s mambo. Topics covered include generational differences between Palladium Era mambo and modern salsa; mid-century antecedents to modern salsa in Cuba and Puerto Rico; tension between salsa as commercial vs. cultural practice; regional differences in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami; the role of the Web in salsa commerce; and adaptations of social Latin dance for stage performance. Throughout the book, salsa dance history is linked to histories of salsa music, exposing how increased separation of the dance from its musical inspiration has precipitated major shifts in Latin dance practice. As a whole, the book dispels the belief that one version is more authentic than another by showing how competing styles came into existence and contention. Based on over 100 oral history interviews, archival research, ethnographic participant observation, and analysis of Web content and commerce, the book is rich with quotes from practitioners and detailed movement description.

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, the Congolese have turned increasingly to art-making to express their experience to external eyes. Author Cherie Rivers Ndaliko argues that cultural activism and the enthusiasm to produce art exists in Congo as a remedy for the social ills of war and as a way to communicate a positive vision of the country. Ndaliko introduces a memorable cast of artists, activists, and ordinary people from the North-Kivu province, whose artistic and cultural interventions are routinely excluded from global debates that prioritize economics, politics, and development as the basis of policy decision about Congo. Rivers also shows how art has been mobilized by external humanitarian and charitable organizations, becoming the vehicle through which to inflict new kinds of imperial domination. Written by a scholar and activist in the center of the current public policy debate, Necessary Noise examines the uneasy balance of accomplishing change through art against the unsteady background of civil war. At the heart of this book is the Yole!Africa cultural center, which is the oldest independent cultural center in the east of Congo. Established in the aftermath of volcano Nyiragongo's 2002 eruption and sustained through a series of armed conflicts, the cultural activities organized by Yole!Africa have shaped a generation of Congolese youth into socially and politically engaged citizens. By juxtaposing intimate ethnographic, aesthetic, and theoretical analyses of this thriving local initiative with case studies that expose the often destructive underbelly of charitable action, Necessary Noise introduces into heated international debates on aid and sustainable development a compelling case for the necessity of arts and culture in negotiating sustained peace. Through vivid descriptions of a community of young people transforming their lives through art, Ndaliko humanizes a dire humanitarian disaster. In so doing, she invites readers to reflect on the urgent choices we must navigate as globally responsible citizens. The only study of music or film culture in the east of Congo, Necessary Noise raises an impassioned and vibrantly interdisciplinary voice that speaks to the theory and practice of socially engaged scholarship.

Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries explores several styles performed in the vital aboriginal musical scene in the western Canadian province of Manitoba, focusing on fiddling, country music, Christian hymnody, and step dancing. In considering these genres and the contexts in which they are performed, author Byron Dueck outlines a compelling theory of musical publics, examines the complex, overlapping social orientations of contemporary musicians, and shows how music and dance play a central role in a distinctive indigenous public culture.
Dueck considers a wide range of contemporary aboriginal performances and venues--urban and rural, secular and sacred, large and small. Such gatherings create opportunities for the expression of distinctive modes of northern Algonquian sociability and for the creative extension of indigenous publicness. In examining these interstitial sites--at once places of intimate interaction and spaces oriented to imagined audiences--this volume considers how Manitoban aboriginal musicians engage with audiences both immediate and unknown; how they negotiate the possibilities mass mediation affords; and how, in doing so, they extend and elaborate indigenous sociability.
Musical Intimacies brings theories of public culture from anthropology and literary criticism into musicological and ethnomusicological discussions while introducing productive new ways of understanding North American indigenous engagement with mass mediation. It is a unique work that will appeal to students and scholars of popular music, musicology, music theory, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It will be necessary reading for students of American ethnomusicology, First Nations and Native American studies, and Canadian music studies.

During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such. Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that combines the actions of individuals and the practices of industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the gravitational center of media production as well as social actors who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their images are used.

A keen critic of culture in modern Indonesia, Andrew N. Weintraub shows how a genre of Indonesian music called dangdut evolved from a denigrated form of urban popular music to a prominent role in Indonesian cultural politics and the commercial music industry. Dangdut--named onomatopoetically for the music's characteristic drum sounds "dang" and "dut"--is Indonesia's most popular music, heard in streets and homes, public parks and narrow alleyways, stores and restaurants, and all forms of public transportation. Despite dangdut's tremendous popularity in Indonesia and other parts of Asia, it has seldom received the serious critical attention it deserves.
Dangdut Stories is a social and musical history of dangdut within a range of broader narratives about class, gender, ethnicity, and nation in post-independence Indonesia (1945-present). Quoted material from interviews, detailed analysis of music and song texts, and ethnography of performance illuminate the stylistic nature of the music and its centrality in public debates about Islam, social class relations, and the role of women in postcolonial Indonesia.
Dangdut Stories is the first musicological study to examine the stylistic development of dangdut music itself, using vocal style, melody, rhythm, form, and song texts to articulate symbolic struggles over meaning. Throughout the book the voices and experiences of musicians take center stage in shaping the book's narrative. Dangdut was first developed during the early 1970s, and an historical treatment of the genre's musical style, performance practice, and social meanings is long overdue.

Moving back through Dewey, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Rousseau, the lineage of Western music education finds its origins in Plato and Pythagoras. Yet theories not rooted in the ancient Greek tradition are all but absent. A Way of Music Education provides a much-needed intervention, integrating ancient Chinese thought into the canon of music education in a structured, systematized, and philosophical way. The book's three central sources - the Yijing (The Book of Changes), Confucianism, and Daoism - inform author C. Victor Fung's argument: that the human being exists as an entity at the center of an organismic world in which all things and events, including music and music education, are connected. Fung ultimately proposes a new educational philosophy based on three key ideas in Chinese thought: change, balance, and liberation. A unique work, A Way of Music Education offers a universal approach engrained in a specific and ancient cultural tradition.

Again and again people turn to music in order to assist them make sense of traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. While the last decade has seen a surge in academic studies on trauma and loss in both the humanities and social sciences, how music engages suffering has not often been explored. Performing Pain uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers repeatedly negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality both during glasnost and the years prior. In the copious amount of scholarship devoted to cultural politics during this era, the activities of avant-garde composers stands largely silent. Performing Pain considers how works by Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, literary and cultural studies, this book offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices-such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis-provide musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief. The physical realities of embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation while these works' inclusion as film music interprets contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. Performing Pain promises to garner wide attention from academic professionals in music studies as well as an interdisciplinary audience interested in Eastern Europe and aesthetic articulations of suffering.

Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being human means being viable in a capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. But musicians from Nicki Minaj to Future to Rae Sremmurd deploy queerness and sonic blackness as they imagine different ways of being human. Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Lester Spence, LH Stallings, and a broad swath of queer and critical race theory, Posthuman Rap turns an ear especially toward hip hop that is often read as apolitical in order to hear its posthuman possibilities, its construction of a humanity that is blacker, queerer, more feminine than the norm.

Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music presents intriguing explanations of extraordinary musical creations from diverse cultures across the world. All the authors are experts, deeply engaged in the traditions they describe. They recount the contexts in which the music is created and performed, and then hone in on elucidating how the music works as sound in process. Accompanying the explanatory prose is a wealth of diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures--court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia--much of which has never been so thoroughly analyzed before. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book's companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising provocative questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today's interconnected world. For everyone listening in wonderment to the richness of world music, whether listener, creator, or performer, this book will be an invaluable resource and a fount of inspiration.

In the nearly eight decades since his death from tuberculosis at age thirty-five, singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers has been an inspiration for numerous top performers--from Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Bill Monroe and Hank Williams to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, and Beck. How did this Mississippi-born vaudevillian, a former railroad worker who performed so briefly so long ago, produce tones, tunes, and themes that have had such broad influence and made him the model for the way American roots music stars could become popular heroes?
In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of "The Singing Brakeman" from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as "Blue Yodel" and "In the Jailhouse Now." As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed, whether tough or sentimental, comic or sad. His wistful singing, falsetto yodels, bold flat-picking guitar style, and sometimes censorable themes---sex, crime, and other edgy topics--set him apart from most of his contemporaries. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to such a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed him.
Mazor goes beyond Rodgers's own life to map the varied places his music has gone, forever changing not just country music but also rock and roll, blues, jazz, bluegrass, Western, commercial folk, and muchmore. In reconstructing this far-flung legacy, Mazor enables readers to meet Rodgers and his music anew--not as an historical figure, but as a vibrant, immediate force.

In June of 1964, three young, white blues fans set out from New York City in a Volkswagen, heading for the Mississippi Delta in search of a musical legend. So begins Preachin' the Blues, the biography of American blues signer and guitarist Eddie James "Son" House, Jr. (1902 - 1988). House pioneered an innovative style, incorporating strong repetitive rhythms with elements of southern gospel and spiritual vocals. A seminal figure in the history of the Delta blues, he was an important, direct influence on such figures as Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.
The landscape of Son House's life and the vicissitudes he endured make for an absorbing narrative, threaded through with a tension between House's religious beliefs and his spells of commitment to a lifestyle that implicitly rejected it. Drinking, womanizing, and singing the blues caused this tension that is palpable in his music, and becomes explicit in one of his finest performances, "Preachin' the Blues." Large parts of House's life are obscure, not least because his own accounts of them were inconsistent. Author Daniel Beaumont offers a chronology/topography of House's youth, taking into account evidence that conflicts sharply with the well-worn fable, and he illuminates the obscurity of House's two decades in Rochester, NY between his departure from Mississippi in the 1940s and his "rediscovery" by members of the Folk Revival Movement in 1964. Beaumont gives a detailed and perceptive account of House's primary musical legacy: his recordings for Paramount in 1930 and for the Library of Congress in 1941-42. In the course of his research Beaumont has unearthed not only connections among the many scattered facts and fictions but new information about a rumoured murder in Mississippi, and a charge of manslaughter on Long Island - incidents which bring tragic light upon House's lifelong struggles and self-imposed disappearance, and give trenchant meaning to the moving music of this early blues legend.

The vast majority of films produced by Mumbai's commercial Hindi language film industry - known world-wide as Bollywood - feature songs as a central component of the cinematic narrative. While many critics have addressed the visual characteristics of these song sequences, very few have engaged with their aurality and with the meanings that they generate within the film narrative and within Indian society at large. Because the film songs operate as powerful sonic ambassadors to individual and cultural memories in India and abroad, however, they are significant and carefully-constructed works of art. Bollywood Sounds focuses on the songs of Indian films in their historical, social, and commercial contexts. Author Jayson Beaster-Jones walks the reader through the highly collaborative songs, detailing the contributions of film directors, music directors and composers, lyricists, musicians, and singers. A vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, Bollywood songs are distributed on soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the most popular music genre in India - even among listeners who rarely see the movies. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark compositions, Bollywood Sounds illustrates how the producers of Indian film songs mediate a variety of influences, musical styles, instruments, and performance practices to create this distinctive genre. Beaster-Jones argues that, even from the moment of its inception, the film song genre has always been in the unique position of demonstrating cosmopolitan orientations while maintaining discrete sound and production practices over its long history. As a survey of the music of seventy years of Hindi films, Bollywood Sounds is the first monograph to provide a long-term historical insights into Hindi film songs, and their musical and cinematic conventions, in ways that will appeal both to scholars and newcomers to Indian cinema.

At its most intimate, music heals our emotional wounds and inspires us; at its most public, it unites people across cultural boundaries. But can it rebuild a city? Renowned music writer John Swenson asks that question with New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans, a story about America's most colorful and troubled city and its indominable will to survive. Under sea level, repeatedly harangued by fires, crime, and most devastatingly, by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has the potential to one day become a "New Atlantis," a lost metropolis under the waves. But this threat has failed to prevent its stalwart musicians and artists from living within its limits, singing its praises and attracting the economic growth needed for its recovery. New Atlantis records how the city's jazz, Cajun, R&B, Bourbon Street, second line, brass band, rock and hip hop musicians are reconfiguring the city's unique artistic culture, building on its historic content while reflecting contemporary life in New Orleans. New Atlantis is a city's tale made up of citizen's tales. It's the story of Davis Rogan, a songwriter, bandleader and schoolteacher who has become an integral part of David Simon's new HBO series Treme (as compelling a story about New Orleans as The Wire was about Baltimore). It's the story of trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, who lost his father in the storm and has since become an important political and musical force shaping the future of New Orleans. It's the story of Bo Dollis Jr., chief of the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians, as he tries to fill the shoes of his ailing father Bo Dollis, one of the most charismatic figures in Mardi Gras Indian history. It is also the author's own story; each musician profiled will be contextualized by Swenson's three-decades-long coverage of the New Orleans music scene.

Critiques and calls for reform have existed for decades within music education, but few publications have offered concrete suggestions as to how things might be done differently. Motivated by a desire to do just that, College Music Curricula for a New Century considers what a more inclusive, dynamic, and socially engaged curriculum of musical study might look like in universities. Editor Robin Moore creates a dialogue among faculty, administrators, and students about what the future of college music instruction should be and how teachers, institutions, and organizations can transition to new paradigms. Including contributions from leading figures in ethnomusicology, music education, theory/composition, professional performance, and administration, College Music Curricula for a New Century addresses college-level curriculum reform, focusing primarily on performance and music education degrees, and offer ideas and examples for a more inclusive, dynamic, and socially engaged curriculum of applied musical study. This book will appeal to thoughtful faculty looking for direction on how to enact reform, to graduate students with investment in shaping future music curricula, and to administrators who know change is on the horizon and seek wisdom and practical advice for implementing change. College Music Curricula for a New Century reaches far beyond any musical subdiscipline and addresses issues pertinent to all areas of music study.

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 racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the face of the hypocrisy of the culture industry. Resounding Afro Asia traces a genealogy of black/Asian engagements through four contemporary case studies from Chicago, New York, and California: Funkadesi (Indian/funk/reggae), Yoko Noge (Japanese folk/blues), Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble (jazz/various Asian and African traditions), and Red Baraat (Indian brass band and New Orleans second line). Roberts investigates Afro Asian musical settings as part of a genealogy of cross-racial culture and politics. These musical settings are sites of sono-racial collaboration: musical engagements in which participants pointedly use race to form and perform interracial politics. When musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their racial identities, thus splintering the expectations of cultural determinism. The dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Through improvisation and composition, artists can articulate new identities and subjectivities in conversation with each other. Resounding Afro Asia offers a glimpse into how artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit yet exceed multicultural frameworks built on racial essentialism and segregation. It joins a growing body of literature that seeks to write Asian American artists back into U.S. popular music history and will surely appeal to students of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those curious about the relationship between race and popular music.

From "The Heart of Saturday Night" through "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards," a rare look at the creative process of the Grammy-winning visionary artist Via exclusive interviews with engineers and producers and quoted commentary from Tom Waits himself, this book investigates the artistic process behind his unique sound--a sound which has mutated over his career and proved nearly impossible to mimic, although many have tried. One of the most fascinating singers and songwriters working today and considered by many to be a genius, Waits has ridden his own trends for the better part of 40 years, defying any and all notion of convention outside the context of his own sub-genre. An investigatory thread runs throughout the book, and the treasure trove of information and insight will prove a must for any fan of this most enigmatic and revered of craftsmen. A complete discography is included.

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo shifts attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, subservient wives, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of Hip-Hop's regulation, the "euphemism," as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism - the zombie, hero, robot, and judge - constitute a way of seeing Filipino Hip-Hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and U.S. global power. Choreographing in Color therefore reveals how the Filipino dancing body has come to be, paradoxically, both globally recognized and indiscernible.

For the modern West, Bali has long served as an icon of exotic pre-modern innocence. Yet the reality of modern Bali stands in stark contrast to this prevailing and enduring image, a contrast embodied by a movement of local musical experimentation, musik kontemporer, which emerged in the 1970s and which still thrives today. In Radical Traditions, author Andrew Clay McGraw shows how music kontemporer embodies the tensions between culture as represented and lived, between the idea of Balinese culture and the experience of living it. Through a highly interdisciplinary approach informed by ethnomusicology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and theater studies, McGraw presents an all-encompassing social and musical history of musik kontemporer, and its intersections with class, ethnicity, and globalization. As the first English language monograph on this important Indonesian musical genre, Radical Traditions is an essential resource for anyone fascinated by modern Indonesian and Balinese music and culture.

In Arranging Gershwin, author Ryan Banagale approaches George Gershwin's iconic piece Rhapsody in Blue not as a composition but as an arrangement -- a status it has in many ways held since its inception in 1924, yet one unconsidered until now. Shifting emphasis away from the notion of the Rhapsody as a static work by a single composer, Banagale posits a broad vision of the piece that acknowledges the efforts of a variety of collaborators who shaped the Rhapsody as we know it today. Arranging Gershwin sheds new light on familiar musicians such as Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington, introduces lesser-known figures such as Ferde Grofe and Larry Adler, and remaps the terrain of this emblematic piece of American music. At the same time, it expands on existing approaches to the study of arrangements -- an emerging and insightful realm of American music studies -- as well as challenges existing and entrenched definitions of composer and composition.
Based on a host of newly discovered manuscripts, the book significantly alters existing historical and cultural conceptions of the Rhapsody. With additional forays into visual media, including the commercial advertising of United Airlines and Woody Allen's Manhattan, it moreover exemplifies how arrangements have contributed not only to the iconicity of Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue, but also to music-making in America -- its people, their pursuits, and their processes."

The myth of Orpheus articulates what social theorists have known since Plato: music matters. It is uniquely able to move us, to guide the imagination, to evoke memories, and to create spaces within which meaning is made. Popular music occupies a place of particular social and cultural significance. Christopher Partridge explores this significance, analyzing its complex relationships with the values and norms, texts and discourses, rituals and symbols, and codes and narratives of modern Western cultures. He shows how popular musics power to move, to agitate, to control listeners, to shape their identities, and to structure their everyday lives is central to constructions of the sacred and the profane. In particular, he argues that popular music can be important edgework, challenging dominant constructions of the sacred in modern societies. Drawing on a wide range of musicians and musical genres, as well as a number of theoretical approaches from critical musicology, cultural theory, sociology, theology, and the study of religion, The Lyre of Orpheus reveals the significance and the progressive potential of popular music.

This insightful biography looks at the turbulent lives, groundbreaking music and lyrics, and powerful brand of hip hop's infamous Wu-Tang Clan. The Wu-Tang Clan and RZA: A Trip through Hip Hop's 36 Chambers chronicles the rise of the Wu-Tang Clan from an underground supergroup to a globally recognized musical conglomerate. Enhanced by the author's one-on-one interviews with group members, the book covers the entire Wu-Tang Clan catalog of studio albums, as well as albums that were produced or heavily influenced by producer/rapper RZA. Wu-Tang Clan's albums are analyzed and discussed in terms of their artistry as well as in terms of their critical, cultural, and commercial impact. By delving into the motivation behind the creation of pivotal songs and albums and mining their dense metaphor and wordplay, the book provides an understanding of what made a team of nine friends and relatives from Staten Island with a love of Kung Fu movies into not just a music group, but a powerful cultural movement. A chronology of important events and milestones pertaining to the Wu-Tang Clan Photographs of the group and its individual members A glossary of slang words and colloquial jargon used in Wu-Tang Clan's lyrics

For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.