Saibara ('Drover's Songs') is the title of a genre of measured Japanese court song, traditionally believed to have been derived from the songs of pack-horse drivers bringing tribute from the provinces to the Heian capital and known to have formed part of the official court repertory at least since AD 859. From literature of the Heian period (782 1184) it is evident that these songs enjoyed great popularity at court as entertainment music practised by noble amateurs. Six songs are still performed today, albeit vastly modified. As well as being of value to musicologists, these volumes will interest readers concerned with early Japanese literature and paleography.

Saibara ('Drover's Songs') is the title of a genre of measured Japanese court song, traditionally believed to have been derived from the songs of pack-horse drivers bringing tribute from the provinces to the Heian capital and known to have formed part of the official court repertory at least since AD 859. From literature of the Heian period (782 1184) it is evident that these songs enjoyed great popularity at court as entertainment music practised by noble amateurs. Six songs are still performed today, albeit vastly modified. As well as being of value to musicologists, these volumes will interest readers concerned with early Japanese literature and paleography.

Koreans of the fifteenth century recorded for posterity a large body of music which has been preserved to the present day. This book presents that music in transcription, with an introductory section providing detailed background on the music itself and on the sources, the song texts, court dances, musical instruments and possibilities for performance on western instruments. The fact that the song texts are translated makes this the largest published anthology of early Korean verse in translation. The book concludes with a detailed bibliography and glossaries including the original Chinese for the titles of the pieces, names of the instruments, etc. Though its origins are distant from us in both time and place, the fifteenth-century Korean repertoire is immediately appealing to the occidental ear: hence this collection will be of interest not only to the student of Asian music but also to any musician with a taste for the unusual.

This book is a wide-ranging study of the varieties of gamelan music in contemporary Java seen from a regional perspective. While the focus of most studies of Javanese music has been limited to the court-derived music of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, Sutton goes beyond them to consider also gamelan music of Banyumas, Semarang and east Java as separate regional traditions with distinctive repertoires, styles and techniques of performance and conceptions about music. Sutton's description of these traditions, illustrated with numerous musical examples in Javanese cipher notation, is based on extensive field experience in these areas and is informed by the criteria that Javanese musicians judge to be most important in distinguishing them.

A traveling salesman with little formal education, Max Hunter gravitated to song catching and ballad hunting while on business trips in the Ozarks. Hunter recorded nearly 1600 traditional songs by more than 200 singers from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, all the while focused on preserving the music in its unaltered form. Sarah Jane Nelson chronicles Hunter's song collecting adventures alongside portraits of the singers and mentors he met along the way. The guitar-strumming Hunter picked up the recording habit to expand his repertoire but almost immediately embraced the role of song preservationist. Being a local allowed Hunter to merge his native Ozark earthiness with sharp observational skills to connect--often more than once--with his singers. Hunter's own ability to be present added to that sense of connection. Despite his painstaking approach, ballad collecting was also a source of pleasure for Hunter. Ultimately, his dedication to capturing Ozarks song culture in its natural state brought Hunter into contact with people like Vance Randolph, Mary Parler, and non-academic folklorists who shared his values.

Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career.
Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation.
Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order todemonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.

A series of little books of short carefully graded folk tunes beginning with the simplest passages and progressing to more difficult leaps, rhythms, chromatics, and modulations. The later books introduce two-part sight singing.

A SUNDAY TIMES AND TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE

THE BOOKSELLER'S Most Picked Book in General Non-Fiction Round Ups of 2017

Peggy Seeger is one of folk music's most influential artists and songwriters. Born in New York City in 1935, she enjoyed a childhood steeped in music and left-wing politics - they remain her lifeblood. After college, she travelled to Russia and China - against US advice - before arriving in London, where she met the man with whom she would raise three children and share the next thirty-three years: Ewan MacColl. Together, they helped lay the foundations of the British folk revival, through the influential Critics Group and the landmark BBC Radio Ballads series. And as Ewan's muse, she inspired one of the twentieth century's most popular love songs, 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'.

With a clear eye and generous spirit, Peggy writes of a rollercoaster life - of birth and abortion, sex and infidelity, devotion and betrayal - in a luminous, beautifully realised account.

This new edition of "Journeyman," Ewan MacColl's vivid and entertaining autobiography, has been re-edited from the original manuscript, and includes a new introduction by Peggy Seeger, for whom he wrote the unforgettable "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." MacColl, a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and broadcaster, begins this fascinating account with his working class Salford childhood, traces the founding and life of Theatre Workshop, one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies, then moves on to his work with folksingers, the Radio Ballads and his ascent into old age. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were among the main leaders of the UK folksong revival. "Journeyman" documents their struggle to secure the integrity of that revival as the popular media appropriated and re-created traditional music for commercial gain. An entertaining and thought-provoking slice of British history, it will appeal to those interested in the histories of folk music, theatre, radio, left-wing politics and the Manchester area.

A series of little books of short carefully graded folk tunes beginning with the simplest passages and progressing to more difficult leaps, rhythms, chromatics, and modulations. The later books introduce two-part sight singing.

This study of Polish folk music is especially enlightening as it reveals both the history and practice of a musical tradition and offers an illuminating view of a culture and its social activities. Within her study, Anna Czekanowska analyses the vocal and instrumental traditions of Polish folk music, tracing the background history, the influences of geography and politics, and the practice, often within contemporary society, of such social events as the harvest, the solstice and weddings. The function of folk culture within contemporary life, for both Polish and non-Polish inhabitants of the country, is also examined. Professor Czekanowska also discusses the birth of Polish ethno- musicology as a discipline and details some methodological aspects for research. This study contributes to a greater understanding and appreciation of Polish music and, in a wider aspect, of Slavonic culture. The book contains numerous illustrations of instruments and cultural events, music examples, maps, a discography and bibliography.

At the height of the blues revival, Marina Bokelman and David Evans, young graduate students from California, made two trips to Louisiana and Mississippi and short trips in their home state to do fieldwork for their studies at UCLA. While there, they made recordings and interviews and took extensive field notes and photographs of blues musicians and their families. Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s presents their experiences in vivid detail through the field notes, the photographs, and the retrospective views of these two passionate researchers. The book includes historical material as well as contemporary reflections by Bokelman and Evans on the times and the people they met during their southern journeys. Their notes and photographs take the reader into the midst of memorable encounters with many obscure but no less important musicians, as well as blues legends, including Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Al Wilson (cofounder of Canned Heat), Babe Stovall, Reverend Ruben Lacy, and Jack Owens. This volume is not only an adventure story, but also a scholarly discussion of fieldwork in folklore and ethnomusicology. Including retrospective context and commentary, the field note chapters describe searches for musicians, recording situations, social and family dynamics of musicians, and race relations and the racial environment, as well as the practical, ethical, and logistical problems of doing fieldwork. The book features over one hundred documentary photographs that depict the field recording sessions and the activities, lives, and living conditions of the artists and their families. These photographs serve as a visual counterpart equivalent to the field notes. The remaining chapters explain the authors' methodology, planning, and motivations, as well as their personal backgrounds prior to going into the field, their careers afterwards, and their thoughts about fieldwork and folklore research in general. In this enlightening book, Bokelman and Evans provide an exciting and honest portrayal of blues field research in the 1960s.

David Schiller's study of the Jewish music of Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein reveals how, in the mid-twentieth century, the problem of assimilation was acutely felt as the unfinished business of European Jewry, at a time when American Jewry was creating its own distinctive culture (albeit with European roots). He shows how the business of 'assimilating Jewish music' is as much a process audiences themselves engage in when they listen to Jewish music as it is something critics and musicologists do when they write about it. He reveals how this process of assimilation is performed by the music itself - that Jewish music assimilates into the Western tradition of art music when it appears in the form of concert genres like the oratorio, cantata, and symphony. This incisive study sheds new light on an important aspect of the cultural and aesthetic achievements of these seminal Jewish composers.

This collection of poems rooted in the wild and beautiful lands that lie between England and Scotland describes a traditionally lawless area whose inhabitants owed allegiance first to kin and laird and then to the authorities in London or Edinburgh. Recording a violent, clannish world of fierce hatreds and passionate loyalties, the ballads tell vivid tales of raids, feuds and betrayals, romances and acts of revenge.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Songbook). Grammy Award winner for Album of the Year This unique songbook features piano/vocal arrangements of 11 selections from the critically-acclaimed Coen brothers film. The traditional songs for this film were selected by T-Bone Burnett to capture the sound of the early-'30s South, and the movie soundtrack has done much to rekindle interest in the folk/blues/bluegrass/gospel genres. Songs include: Big Rock Candy Mountain (Harry McClintock) * You Are My Sunshine (Norman Blake) * I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow (The Soggy Bottom Boys/Norman Blake) * Keep on the Sunny Side (The Whites) * I'll Fly Away (Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch) * and more. Includes great photos from the film. Also available: 00313182 Guitar Tab/Melody/Lyrics/Chords Edition $14.95

This is a full biography of the talented American woman composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. She was a prominent member of the American avant-garde composers in the 1920s, then married Charles Seeger and became very involved in the American folk song movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which also included Seeger's son Peter and John Lomax. The book also discusses the dilemma of a creative woman who was caught in domestic life and thus could never fully realize her musical potential.

Since the 18th century, Western scholars and musicians have been fascinated by the music of India. Whether in the realms of musicological enquiry, or as an exotic flavour on the stage, or in popular songs, Indian music has been part of the West's consciousness for over two hundred years. Indian Music and the West traces the fascinating history of this complex cultural and musical encounter.

Carnival, charivari, mumming plays, peasant festivals, and even early versions of the Santa Claus myth--all of these forms of entertainment influenced and shaped blackface minstrelsy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his fascinating study Demons of Disorder, musicologist Dale Cockrell studies issues of race and class by analyzing their cultural expressions, and investigates the roots of still-remembered songs such as "Jim Crow," "Zip Coon," and "Dan Tucker." The first book on the blackface tradition written by a leading musicologist, Demons of Disorder is an important achievement in music history and culture.

A moving portrait of the contemporary experiences of migrant Moroccan men. Umbria is known to most Americans for its picturesque rolling hills and medieval villages, but to the many migrant Moroccan men who travel there, Umbria is better known for the tobacco fields, construction sites, small industries, and the outdoor weekly markets where they work. Marginalized and far from their homes, these men turn to Moroccan traditions of music and poetry that evoke the countryside they have left- l-'arubiya, or the rural. In this book, Alessandra Ciucci takes us inside the lives of Moroccan workers, unpacking the way they share a particular musical style of the rural to create a sense of home and belonging in a foreign and inhospitable nation. Along the way, she uncovers how this culture of belonging is not just the product of the struggles of migration, but also tied to the reclamation of a noble and virtuous masculine identity that is inaccessible to Moroccan migrants in Italy. The Voice of the Rural allows us to understand the contemporary experiences of migrant Moroccan men by examining their imagined relationship to the rural through sound, shedding new light on the urgent issues of migration and belonging.

This is an exploration of the region's music - its forms and innovations, musicians, festivals, and dance halls, its fans - and traces its African, Asian and European roots.

Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music.

After describing the processes of history at work on ordinary people (i.e. Bill's immediate ancestors) in Glimpses of Far Off Things, the second volume finds Bill settling in at Topic Records and collaborating with Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd, the architects of the folk revival. It is set in the period of the Cold War, 'Ban the Bomb' and lingering austerity. Yet the small pond of UK folk is about to be stirred by breezes blowing from the USA. The folk revival was more advanced over there, and the influx of US visitors, the craving for diversity generated by the Stateside Hi-Fi craze, the irresistible rise of Lonnie Donegan and skiffle, all cleared the path for the UK folk revival proper. It becomes clear with Horizons For Some that the author's mission is to return its cultural inheritance to a nation that has somehow mislaid it, and may indeed be running the other way in hot denial. It also shows how tradition is not set in stone, but infinitely adaptable. The present volume anatomises how the folk demotic was influenced by the so-called special relationship. In his quiet way, Bill was central to these developments. Sounding the Century is rich in character studies of the remarkable people Bill (and the author) encounter, and wonderfully conveys the joy and absurdity of it all.