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Books > Music > Folk music
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.
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.
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.
Who are "the folk" in folk music? This book traces the musical culture of these elusive figures in Britain and the US during a crucial period of industrialization from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary range of scholarship, The Folk examines the political dimensions of a recurrent longing for folk culture and how it was called upon for radical and reactionary ends at the apex of empire. It follows an insistent set of disputes surrounding the practice of collecting, ideas of racial belonging, nationality, the poetics of nostalgia, and the pre-history of European fascism. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Ross Cole provides us with a biography of a people who exist only as a symptom of the modern imagination, and the archaeology of a landscape directing flows of global populism to this day.
The tradition of Persian art music embodies twelve modal systems, known as dastgahs. Each dastgah represents a complex of skeletal melodic models on the basis of which a performer produces extemporised pieces. The dastgahs revolve around unspecified central nuclear melodies which the individual musician comes to know through experience and absorption. It is a personal and elusive tradition of great subtlety and depth. Through extensive research, including interviews with leading musicians and recording over one hundred hours of music, Hormoz Farhat has unravelled the art of the dastgah. In his study Professor Farhat analyses the intervallic structure, melodic patterns, modulations, and improvisations within each dastgah, and examines the composed pieces which have become a part of the classical repertoire in recent times.
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.
ADGE CUTLER died on his way home from a gig in 1974, at a time when a major TV breakthrough was within his grasp but before his group the Wurzels reached the top of the charts. In 2012 the Wurzels continue to pack venues all over the West Country and beyond, with Adge's band-mates Tommy Banner and Pete Budd still flourishing - but what of the man who set the whole Scrumpy and Western scene under way? This, the long-overdue first Adge Cutler biography, brings him vividly back to life, not only in his eight crazy Wurzels years but from early days in his beloved Nailsea to the lively camaraderie of Portishead B power station's labourers, the thriving Bristol jazz and folk scenes of the Fifties and Sixties and his spell as Acker Bilk's 'worst roadie in the world'. All played their part in moulding his unique talent. JOHN HUDSON is the author, compiler or editor of more than thirty books of social history, regional interest and biography.
For almost 50 years, Dave Hadfield has followed the genres of music that grabbed his youthful heart and mind. Now, in 'All the Wrong Notes' he has written not just a musical memoir, but a personal and social history of the last half-century. Like a Zelig with a finger in his ear, he has been where folk music has happened and describes it, affectionately but warts-and-all, in a way it has never been described before.
From the primeval age of Ayanagalu (the Yoruba pioneer-drummer-turned-deity-of-drumming) to the modern era, Yoruba musical traditions have been shaped by individual performers: drummers, dancers, singers, and chanters, wself-mediated visions of their social and cultural environment. Yoruba Music in the Twentieth Century explores the role of the performer and the performing group in creating these traditions, contributing to the ongoing reorientation of scholarship on African music toward individual creativity within a larger social network. Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional Yoruba genres such as bata and dundun drumming as well as more contemporary genres such as Yoruba popular music. The book also addresses a spectrum of social issues, ranging from gender inequality to the impactianity and Islam on Yoruba musical practice. Throughout, Omojola emphasizes the interrelatedness of the different components of the Yoruba musical landscape, as well as the role of specific individuals and groups of musicians, whohave continued to draw from indigenous Yoruba musical resources to create new musical forms in the process of engaging the social dynamics of a rapidly changing environment. Awarded honorable mention in the 2014 Kwabena Nketia Book Competition of the African Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Bode Omojola is a Five College Associate Professor of Music at Mt. Holyoke College.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other people locked themselves away and hid from their demons. Townes flung open his door and said 'Come on in.' So writes Harold Eggers Townes Van Zandt's longtime road manager and producer in EMy Years with Townes Van Zandt: Music Genius and RageE a a gripping memoir revealing the inner core of an enigmatic troubadour whose deeply poetic music was a source of inspiration and healing for millions but was for himself a torment struggling for dominance among myriad personal demons.THTownes Van Zandt often stated that his main musical mission was to write the perfect song that would save someone's life. However his life was a work in progress he was constantly struggling to shape and comprehend. Eggers says of his close friend and business partner that like the master song craftsman he was he was never truly satisfied with the final product but always kept giving it one more shot one extra tweak one last effort. THA vivid firsthand account exploring the source of the singer's prodigious talent widespread influence and relentless path toward self-destruction EMy Years with Townes Van ZandtE presents the truth of that all-consuming artistic journey told by a close friend watching it unfold.
When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa.
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. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it." Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.
Cape Town’s public cultures can only be fully appreciated through a recognition of its deep and diverse soundscape. We have to listen to what has made and makes a city. The ear is an integral part of the ‘research tools’ one needs to get a sense of any city. We have to listen to the sounds that made and make the expansive ‘mother city’. One of its various constituent parts is the sound of the singing men and their choirs (or “teams” as they are called) in preparation for the longstanding annual Malay choral competitions. The lyrics from the various repertoires they perform are hardly ever written down. […] There are texts of the hallowed ‘Dutch songs’ but these do not circulate easily and widely. Researchers dream of finding lyrics from decades ago, not to mention a few generations ago – back to the early 19th century. This work by Denis Constant Martin and Armelle Gaulier provides us with a very useful selection of these songs. More than that, it is a critical sociological reflection of the place of these songs and their performers in the context that have given rise to them and sustains their relevance. It is a necessary work and is a very important scholarly intervention about a rather neglected aspect of the history and present production of music in the city, collaborations increasingly fair, sustainable and mutually beneficial.
From the oldest surviving Japanese manuscripts in tablature (ninth- fourteenth-centuries) the book provides transcripts into staff-notation of (largely) entertainment-music, played at banquets at the Chinese Court in the Tang period, borrowed by the Japanese not later than 841. The music has never been transcribed before and has not been heard for 800 years or more, so drastically has it been transformed in Japanese performance. The history of each piece of music, as given in Chinese and Japanese historical sources, is investigated. The music itself is subjected to formal analysis, revealing its structure, its modal dynamics, and the methods of composition. For much of the music, ballet-scores survive from the mid-thirteenth century, and it is hoped that these may be associated fascicles with the music as transcribed in future fascicles. Fascicle 5 offers one immense suite, the origins of which lie in sixth-century China: 'The King of the Grave-Mound' (Ryo-o), together with single-stave versions and analyses of upwards of twenty items from previous fascicles and a summary essay restating views on the nature of 'Tang Music' (Togaku). |
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