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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music
The International Who's Who in Popular Music 2007 provides
biographical details on some of the most talented and influential
artists, as well as up-and-coming individuals from the world of
popular music. International in scope, this new edition provides
information on artists, varying from Eminem to Wynton Marsalis; Ray
Davies to Talvin Singh. Listed alphabetically by surname, entries
provide full biographical profiles, including personal information,
principal career details, recordings and compositions, and full
contact details, where available. An index of groups is provided
for ease of reference. Appendices include directories listing music
festivals, music organizations, music awards and digital music
sites providing legal downloads. The careers of pop, rock, folk,
jazz, dance, world and country music artists from around the world
are profiled in this new edition. New artists are included, as well
as established names in popular music. Entrants include Elvis
Costello, Carlos Santana, Wayne Shorter, Dizzee Rascal, Gil
Scott-Heron and Joss Stone. Over 6,000 alphabetically arranged
entries. Fully revised and updated for this ninth edition. Spans
the full range of popular music.
The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous
performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by
moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music
videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and
social media are now part of the contemporary listening experience.
In An Eye for Music, author John Richardson navigates key areas of
current thought - from music theory to film theory to cultural
theory - to explore what it means that the experience of music is
now cinematic, spatial, and visual as much as it is auditory.
Richardson maps out the terrain of recent audiovisual production
over a wide array of styles and practices, and sketches out a set
of common structures that inform how we experience sound and
vision. Whether examining Philip Glass or The Gorillaz, Richard
Linklater's Waking Life or Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind,
Richardson's arguments are both fascinating and provocative.
Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of
Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake
P tzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater,
tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a
ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present
day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican
politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates
choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis.
Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe,
Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex
processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and
tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic,
archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion
website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.
How does the immediate experience of musical sound relate to
processes of meaning construction and discursive mediation?
This question lies at the heart of the studies presented in
Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, a unique
multi-authored work that both draws on and contributes to current
debates in a wide range of disciplines, including ethnomusicology,
musicology, psychology, and cognitive science. Addressing a wide
range of musical practices from Indian raga and Afro-Brazilian
Congado rituals to jazz, rock, and Canadian aboriginal fiddling,
the coherence of this study is underpinned by its three main
themes: experience, meaning, and performance. Central to all of the
studies are moments of performance: those junctures when sound and
meaning are actually produced. Experience-what people do, and what
they feel, while engaging in music-is equally important. And
considered alongside these is meaning: what people put into a
performance, what they (and others) get out of it, and, more
broadly, how discourses shape performances and experiences of
music. In tracing trajectories from moments of musical execution,
this volume a novel and productive view of how cultural practice
relates to the experience and meaning of musical performance.
A model of interdisciplinary study, and including access to an
array of audio-visual materials available on an extensive companion
website, Experience and Meaning in Music Performance is essential
reading for scholars and students of ethnomusicology and music
psychology.
Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a
fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals
and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from
1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts
across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light
on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The
narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures,
including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don
McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near.
Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the
Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the
Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers.
Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and
aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals,
but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved.
For everyone who ever picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this
will be a book to give and cherish. Extensive notes, bibliography,
and discography, plus a photo section.
On January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman brought his swing orchestra to
America's venerated home of European classical music, Carnegie
Hall. The resulting concert - widely considered one of the most
significant events in American music history - helped to usher jazz
and swing music into the American cultural mainstream. This
reputation has been perpetuated by Columbia Records' 1950 release
of the concert on LP. Now, in Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie
Hall Jazz Concert, jazz scholar and musician Catherine Tackley
provides the first in depth, scholarly study of this seminal
concert and recording. Combining rigorous documentary and archival
research with close analysis of the recording, Tackley strips back
the accumulated layers of interpretation and meaning to assess the
performance in its original context, and explore what the material
has come to represent in its recorded form. Taking a complete view
of the concert, she examines the rich cultural setting in which it
took place, and analyzes the compositions, arrangements and
performances themselves, before discussing the immediate reception,
and lasting legacy and impact of this storied event and album. As
the definitive study of one of the most important recordings of the
twentieth-century, Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz
Concert is a must-read for all serious jazz fans, musicians and
scholars.
Music is one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of
Latin American countries. But, while many people in the United
States and Europe are familiar with musical genres such as salsa,
merengue, and reggaeton, the musical manifestations that young
people listen to in most Latin American countries are much more
varied than these commercially successful ones that have entered
the American and European markets. Not only that, the young people
themselves often have little in common with the stereotypical image
of them that exists in the American imagination.
Bridging this divide between perception and reality, Music and
Youth Culture in Latin America brings together contributors from
throughout Latin America and the US to examine the ways in which
music is used to advance identity claims in several Latin American
countries and among Latinos in the US. From young Latin American
musicians who want to participate in the vibrant jazz scene of New
York without losing their cultural roots, to Peruvian rockers who
sing in their native language (Quechua) for the same reasons, to
the young Cubans who use music to construct a post-communist social
identification, this volume sheds new light on the complex ways in
which music provides people from different countries and social
sectors with both enjoyment and tools for understanding who they
are in terms of nationality, region, race, ethnicity, class,
gender, and migration status. Drawing on a vast array of fields
including popular music studies, ethnomusicology, sociology, and
history, Music and Youth Culture in Latin America is an
illuminating read for anyone interested in Latin American music,
culture, and society."
Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in
the context of the growth and development of the art form's
instrumental and stylistic innovations. Rather than perpetuating
the glamorous worldwide conceptions that often only reflect the
tango that left Argentina nearly 100 years ago, authors Kacey Link
and Kristin Wendland trace tango's historical and stylistic musical
trajectory in Argentina, beginning with the guardia nueva's
crystallization of the genre in the 1920s, moving through tango's
Golden Age (1925-1955), and culminating with the "Music of Buenos
Aires" today. Through the transmission, discussion, examination,
and analysis of primary sources currently unavailable outside of
Argentina, including scores, manuals of style, archival audio/video
recordings, and live video footage of performances and
demonstrations, Link and Wendland frame and define Argentine tango
music as a distinct expression possessing its own musical legacy
and characteristic musical elements. Beginning by establishing a
broad framework of the tango art form, the book proceeds to move
through twelve in-depth profiles of representative tangueros (tango
musicians) within the genre's historical and stylistic trajectory.
Through this focused examination of tangueros and their music, Link
and Wendland show how the dynamic Argentine tango grows from one
tanguero linked to another, and how the composition techniques and
performance practices of each generation are informed by that of
the past.
Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential
pianists in jazz history. His TheKoln Concert stands among the most
important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only
because of the music on the record, but also because of the
remarkable reception it has received from musicians and
lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold
over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz
record, but an unprecedented feat for a two-disc set of solo piano
performances featuring no well-known songs.
In Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert, author Peter Elsdon seeks to
uncover what it is about this recording, about Keith Jarrett's
performance, that elicits such success. Recognizing The Koln
Concert as a multi-faceted text, Elsdon engages with it musically,
culturally, aesthetically, and historically in order to understand
the concert and album as a means through which Jarrett articulated
his own cultural and musical outlook, and establish himself as a
serious artist. Through these explorations of the concert as text,
of the recording and of the live performance, Keith Jarrett's The
Koln Concert fills a major hole in jazz scholarship, and is
essential reading for jazz scholars and musicians alike, as well as
Keith Jarrett's many fans."
In Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries,
ethnomusicologist Marc Gidal explains how and why a multi-faith
community in southern Brazil uses music to combine and segregate
three Afro-Brazilian religions: Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Batuque.
Spirit Song will be the first book in any language about the music
of Umbanda and its close relative Quimbanda-twentieth-century
fusions of European Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian religion, and Folk
Catholicism-as well as the first publication in English about the
music of the African-derived Batuque religion and "Afro-gaucho"
identity, a local term that celebrates the contributions of African
descendants to the cowboy culture of southernmost Brazil. Combining
ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary studies, Gidal advances a
theory of musical boundary-work: the use of music to reinforce,
bridge, or blur boundaries, whether for personal, social,
spiritual, or political purposes. The Afro-gaucho religious
community uses music and rituals to varisuly promote innovation and
egalitarianism in Umbanda and Quimbanda, whereas it reinforces
musical preservation and hierarchies in Batuque. Religious and
musical leaders carefully restrict the cosmologies, ceremonial
sequences, and sung prayers of one religion from affecting the
others so as to safeguard Batuque's African heritage. Members of
disenfranchised populations have also used the religions as
vehicles for empowerment, whether based on race-ethnicity, gender,
or religious belief; and innovations in ritual music reflect this
activism. Gidal explains these points by describing and
interpreting spirit-mediumship rituals and their musical
accompaniment, drawing on the perspectives of participants, with
video and audio examples available on the book's companion website.
The first book in English to explore music in Afro-Brazilian
religions, Spirit Song is a landmark study that will be of interest
to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and religious studies
scholars.
In this groundbreaking study, D. R. M. Irving reconnects the
Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern
Hispanic world. For some two and a half centuries, the Philippine
Islands were firmly interlinked to Latin America and Spain through
transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and
culture. The city of Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital
intercultural nexus and a significant conduit for the regional
diffusion of Western music. Within its ethnically diverse society,
imported and local musics played a crucial role in the
establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Philippines and
in propelling the work of Roman Catholic missionaries in
neighboring territories. Manila's religious institutions resounded
with sumptuous vocal and instrumental performances, while an annual
calendar of festivities brought together many musical traditions of
the indigenous and immigrant populations in complex forms of
artistic interaction and opposition.
Multiple styles and genres coexisted according to strict
regulations enforced by state and ecclesiastical authorities, and
Irving uses the metaphors of European counterpoint and enharmony to
critique musical practices within the colonial milieu. He argues
that the introduction and institutionalization of counterpoint
acted as a powerful agent of colonialism throughout the Philippine
Archipelago, and that contrapuntal structures were reflected in the
social and cultural reorganization of Filipino communities under
Spanish rule. He also contends that the active appropriation of
music and dance by the indigenous population constituted a
significant contribution to the process of hispanization. Sustained
"enharmonic engagement" between Filipinos and Spaniards led to the
synthesis of hybrid, syncretic genres and the emergence of
performance styles that could contest and subvert hegemony.
Throwing new light on a virtually unknown area of music history,
this book contributes to current understanding of the globalization
of music, and repositions the Philippines at the frontiers of
research into early modern intercultural exchange.
Modern Moves traces the movement of American social dance styles
between black and white cultural groups and between immigrant and
migrant communities during the early twentieth century. Its central
focus is New York City, where the confluence of two key demographic
streams - an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the
growth of the city's African American community particularly as it
centered Harlem - created the conditions of possibility for hybrid
dance forms like blues, ragtime, ballroom, and jazz dancing. Author
Danielle Robinson illustrates how each of these forms came about as
the result of the co-mingling of dance traditions from different
cultural and racial backgrounds in the same urban social spaces.
The results of these cross-cultural collisions in New York City, as
she argues, were far greater than passing dance trends; they in
fact laid the foundation for the twentieth century's social dancing
practices throughout the United States. By looking at dance as
social practice across conventional genre and race lines, this book
demonstrates that modern social dancing, like Western modernity
itself, was dependent on the cultural production and labor of
African diasporic peoples - even as they were excluded from its
rewards. A cornerstone in Robinson's argument is the changing role
of the dance instructor, which was transformed from the proprietor
of a small-scale, local dance school at the end of the nineteenth
century to a member of a distinct, self-identified social industry
at the beginning of the twentieth. Whereas dance studies has been
slow to connect early twentieth century dancing with period racial
politics, Modern Moves departs radically from prior scholarship on
the topic, and in so doing, revises social and African American
dance history of this period. Recognizing the rac(ial)ist
beginnings of contemporary American social dancing, it offers a
window into the ways that dancing throughout the twentieth century
has provided a key means through which diverse groups of people
have navigated shifting socio-political relations through their
bodily movement. Modern Moves asserts that the social practice of
modern dancing, with its perceived black origins, empowered
displaced people such as migrants and immigrants to grapple with
the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of
North American modernity. Far more than simple appropriation, the
selling and practicing of "black" dances during the 1910s and 1920s
reinforced whiteness as the ideal racial status in America through
embodied and rhetorical engagements with period black stereotypes.
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights
Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s,
Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music,
politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot
button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson
illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the
Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements
shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians
to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians'
quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led
to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting
ethos of social critique and transcendence.
Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance,
Freedom Sounds considers the discursive, structural, and practical
aspects of life in the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s. In
domestic politics, Monson explores the desegregation of the
American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to
segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of
jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic
empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects
of anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and
aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's
interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the
interaction of jazz musicians such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with
African and African diasporic aesthetics.
Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing
influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of
stylistic andcultural influences--African American music, popular
song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other
world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal
jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between
aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh
interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse
racism, and authenticity.
Freedom Sounds will be avidly read by students and academics in
musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music, African
American Studies, and African diasporic studies, as well as fans of
jazz, hip hop, and African American music.
Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect
of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as
Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia.
This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging
account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture
within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of
identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and
critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth
culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural
and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the
ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource
by young people, using as a springboard a series of original
ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock.
Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised
within a wider international literature on youth styles, local
spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically
how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are
appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social
spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young
people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve
to construct the social world in which their identities operate.
With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its
important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is
essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in
sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music
studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University
of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of
youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and
ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review,
Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently
co-editing a book on guitar cultures.
On New Year's Day 1953, Hank Williams-numbed by a deadly
combination of whiskey and narcotics-died in the back seat of his
Cadillac en route to a performance in Canton, Ohio. He was only
twenty nine years old at the time of his death and his passing
appeared to bring his rags-to-riches success and destructive
lifestyle to an abrupt end. Few figures before or since have cast
as long or as broad a shadow over American popular music. Today,
Hank Williams is considered by many to be the greatest singer and
songwriter in the history of country music, and it is the
combination of his remarkable musical achievements, his tumultuous
personal life, and his tragic and still-mysterious demise that make
him such a compelling historical figure. As volume demonstrates,
Williams's death was the beginning of an equally gripping second
act: for more than sixty years, an ever-lengthening parade of
journalists, family and friends, musical contemporaries,
biographers, historians and scholars, fans, and novelists have
attempted to capture in words the man, the artist, and the legend.
The Hank Williams Reader, the first book of its kind devoted to
this giant of American music, collects more than sixty of the most
compelling, insightful, and historically significant of these
writings. The selections cover a broad assortment of themes and
perspectives, ranging from heartfelt reminiscences and shocking
tabloid exposes to thoughtful meditations and critical essays.
Featured authors include Hank Williams, Jr., Bob Dylan, Steve
Earle, David Halberstam, Greil Marcus, Rick Bragg, and Lee Smith,
to name but a few. The Hank Williams Reader also features a lengthy
interpretive introduction and the most extensive bibliography of
Williams-related writings ever published. Over time, writers have
sought to explain Williams in a variety of ways, and in tracing
these shifting interpretations, this anthology chronicles his
cultural transfiguration from star-crossed hillbilly singer to
enduring American icon.
David Jacobs, Alan Freeman, John Peel, Tommy Vance and Roger Scott
were in their different ways five of the greatest pioneering
British disc jockeys of the last sixty years. All were accomplished
media personalities in their own right, and all were passionate and
well-informed about the music they presented on radio and sometimes
television. Jacobs, a much-respected broadcaster for over sixty
years, was the face of 'Juke Box Jury' and the maestro of easy
listening and songs from the shows; 'Fluff' Freeman the pop-picker,
who introduced the Top 20 rundown, later championing heavy and
progressive rock, followed by opera and the classics; Peel revelled
in the alternative music scene generally shunned by most daytime
presenters; Vance, 'the Music Vendor' the friend and lover of hard
rock and New Wave of British Heavy Metal; and Scott an eclectic mix
of genres in a career which sadly proved all too short. This book
examines the lives and careers of each.
In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible
cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new
practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the
sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant
ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity,
musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for
sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques
strategies that are currently employed to support endangered
musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between
language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language
endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in
which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new
pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the
first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level
of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for
the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It
will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate
the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible
benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat.
Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music
Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of
applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued
diversity of our global musical traditions.
Sixties British rock and pop changed music history. While American
popular music dominated the record industry in the late fifties and
early sixties, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who,
and numerous other groups soon invaded the world at large and put
Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me
offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording
industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on
personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant
data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social
context of postwar Britain. Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of
class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his
narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the
emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving
into the competition between performers and the recording industry
for control over the music. He interviews session musicians who
recorded anonymously with the Beatles, Hermans Hermits, and the
Kinks, professional musicians who toured with British bands
promoting records or providing dance music, songwriters, music
directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the
best-known performers of the era. The consequences of World War Two
for pop music in the late fifties and early sixties form the
backdrop for discussion of recording equipment, musical
instruments, and new jet-age transportation, all contributors to
the rise of British pop-music alongside the personalities that more
famously made entertainment news. And these famous personalities
traverse the pages of Please Please Me as well: performing
songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger
and Richards, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend took center stage
while the production teams and session musicians created the art of
recording behind the doors of Londons studios. Drawing his
interpretation of the processes at work during this musical
revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical
change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what
traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process.
Opening up important new historical and musical understandings in a
repertoire that is at the core of rock music's history, Please
Please Me will appeal to all students, scholars, and fans of
popular music.
Miles Davis was one of the musical giants of the twentieth century.
In a career that spanned more than five decades, Miles transformed
the face of jazz four or five times and his music resonates far
beyond the bounds of his genre. Miles made the most famous album in
the history of jazz, Kind of Blue, formed one of the greatest jazz
quintets in the 1960s and fused jazz with rock. Including unique
interviews with dozens of Miles' closest colleagues, many of whom
have never before been interviewed about their time with him, The
Last Miles concentrates on the final period of Miles' life, after
he had emerged from a five-year lay-off from the world of music.
Right up until the end of his life, he was still searching, still
exploring and still refusing to play it safe. The focus is on the
music Miles recorded and played, and how it evolved in the eyes of
the musicians he played with. Those interviewed include, George
Duke, Teo Macero, Tommy LiPuma, Marcus Miller, Darryl Jones and
Easy Mo Bee. There are also interviews with musicians who played
with Miles before the 1980s, including Dave Liebman, Pete Cosey,
Michael Henderson and Mike Zwerin, who give their own assessment of
the music Miles played during the final period of his life. Cheryl
Davies, Miles' only daughter, is also interviewed. The Last Miles
is full of fascinating new facts and stories about Miles. For the
first time, every member of the group of young musicians from
Chicago who helped bring Miles back into the music scene gives
their story. Music journalist George Cole also reveals for the
first time the full story behind a lost Miles Davis album recorded
in 1985, tells you about a song Miles co-wrote for Mick Jagger, how
he worked with Prince, and discovers new and unreleased music that
Miles recorded. If you've ever wanted to know how Miles recruited
his band members, what it was like working with Miles in the studio
or to play with him on-stage, The Last Miles has the answers. There
is at least one chapter devoted to each album that Miles recorded
during this period. Full track-by-track descriptions contain many
new and interesting tales behind the songs including how Sting came
to record on one of Miles' tracks, why Prince dropped a song slated
to appear on the Tutu album, how Gil Evans helped Miles compose
many of the tunes on the album Star People, what Splatch means and
who Ursula was.
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 knowledge, national
identity, and social transformation illuminate in the work of
singing: how to "sing the right way" and thereby realize the
fullness of their faith. In some parishes, this meant preserving a
local, Protestant-influenced tradition of congregational singing
from the 1920s and 30s. In others, it meant adapting Byzantine
melodies and vocal styles encountered abroad. In still others, it
meant continuing a bilingual, multi-ethnic Estonian-Russian oral
tradition despite ecclesiastical and political struggle. Based on a
decade of fieldwork and singing in choirs, Singing the Right Way
traces the sounds of Orthodoxy in Estonia through the Russian
Empire, interwar national independence, the Soviet-era, and
post-Soviet integration into the European Union to describe the
dynamics of religion and secularity in singing style and repertoire
- what Engelhardt calls secular enchantment. Ultimately, Singing
the Right Way is an innovative model of how the musical poetics of
contemporary religious forms are rooted in both sacred tradition
and the contingent ways individuals inhabit the secular. This
landmark study is sure to be an essential text for scholars
studying the ethnomusicology of religion.
The Great American Songbooks shows how popular music shapes and
permeates a host of modernism's hallmark texts. Austin Graham
begins his study of 20th-century texts with a discussion of
American popular music and literature in the 19th century. He
posits Walt Whitman as a proto-modernist who drew on his love of
opera to create the epic free-verse poetry that would heavily
influence his bardic successors. One can witness this in T. S.
Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land relies on Whitman's verse style to
emphasize how 19th-century structures of feeling regarding music
persist into the 20th century. From opera and standards of the
Victorian musical hall, Graham moves to the blues to reveal the
multifaceted ways it shaped works in the Harlem Renaissance, most
notably in the verse of Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer's
stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Cane. The second half of
Songbooks advances an argument for a musical eclecticism that arose
alongside rapid industrialization. Writers like Scott Fitzgerald
and John Dos Passos, Graham argues, developed a notion of musical
eclecticism to help them process-or cope-with the unprecedented
invasiveness of popular music, particularly in major cities. This
eclecticism runs counter to critics like Adorno who equate popular
music with mass produced mechanisms such as the phonograph and
radio, and thus with degraded, cultural forms. In conclusion,
Graham suggests how modernist writers experienced, and sometimes
theorized, a more nuanced, sophisticated, and fluid mode of
interaction with popular music.
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