Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music, where a love song dedication can cost 6,000 dollars and a simple name check can trade for 500 or 600 dollars. Tracing this system of prestige through networks of musicians and patrons - who include gangsters based in Europe, kleptocratic politicians in Congo, and lawless diamond dealers in northern Angola - this book offers insights into ideologies of power and value in central Africa's troubled post-colonial political economy, as well as a glimpse into the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.

Ned Rorem, composer and writer, is both a gifted memoirist and one of our most acerbic cultural commentators. This anthology of his musings on music, people, and life surveys the full range of his literary achievement and reflects the evolution of his sensibilities. The first part of the book is devoted to writing of an autobiographical nature, including ruminations on being alone and on becoming a composer. The second part focuses on music and individuals from Bartok and Ravel to Edith Piaf and the Beatles. The final part consists of portraits and memorials of such figures as Martha Graham, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Truman Capote. The book also includes a lengthy conversation on the art of the diary.

This book charts the growth of the Indonesian nationalistic musical genre of lagu seriosa in relation to the archipelago's history in the 1950s and 1960s, examining how folk songs were implemented as a valuable tool for promoting government propaganda. The author reveals how the genre was shaped to fit state ideologies and agendas in the Sukarno and Soeharto eras. It also reveals the very significant role played by Radio Republik Indonesia in the genre's development and dissemination. Little research has been done to investigate how Indonesian music contributed to nation-building during Indonesia's immediate post-colonial period. Emulating the European art song, the genre was adapted to compose songs with the purpose of promoting a strengthened collective Indonesian identity, fostered by a group of musicians who functioned as gatekeepers, monitoring and devising various mechanisms for songs to conform to the propagandistic needs of the Indonesian government at the time. The result was the development of classical style of singing and the cultivation of a patriotic collection of music during the Guided Democracy period (1959-1965), which peaked at the height of the Konfrontasi (1963-1966). Lagu seriosa lost popularity as popular music infiltrated Indonesia in the 1970s, but it remains an iconic yet understudied aspect of the nationalistic agenda in Indonesia. The case studies of selected songs reflected continuity and change in musical style and over time. This book is of interest to scholars studying the intersection between history, politics, identity, arts and cultural studies in Indonesia. It is also of interest to researchers investigating the role of music in identity formation and nation-building more widely.

Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist-oriented parties in Uruguay, or para-socialist movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of social change was in the air. Although this topic has been explored from a political and social point of view, there is an aspect that has remained fairly unexplored. The cultural-and especially musical-dimension of this movement, so vital in order to comprehend the extent of its emotional appeal, has not been fully documented. Without an account of how music was pervasively used in the construction of the emotional components that always accompany political action, any explanation of what occurred in Latin America during that period will be always partial. This book is an initial attempt to overcome this deficit. In this collection of essays, we examine the history of the militant song movement in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina at the peak of its popularity (from the mid-1960s to the coup d'etats in the mid-1970s), considering their different political stances and musical deportments. Throughout the book, the contribution of the most important musicians of the movement (Violeta Parra, Victor Jara, Patricio Manns, Quilapayun, Inti-Illimani, etc., in Chile; Daniel Viglietti, Alfredo Zitarrosa, Los Olimarenos, etc., in Uruguay; Atahualpa Yupanqui, Horacio Guarany, Mercedes Sosa, Marian Farias Gomez, Armando Tejada Gomez, Cesar Isella, Victor Heredia, Los Trovadores, etc., in Argentina) are highlighted; and some of the most important conceptual extended oeuvres of the period (called "cantatas") are analyzed (such as "La Cantata Popular Santa Maria de Iquique" in the Chilean case and "Montoneros" in the Argentine case). The contributors to the collection deal with the complex relationship that the aesthetic of the movement established between the political content of the lyrics and the musical and performative aspects of the most popular songs of the period.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Music recommendation systems are becoming more and more popular. The increasing amount of personal data left by users on social media contributes to more accurate inference of the user's musical preferences and the same to quality of personalized systems. Health recommendation systems have become indispensable tools in decision making processes in the healthcare sector. Their main objective is to ensure the availability of valuable information at the right time by ensuring information quality, trustworthiness, authentication, and privacy concerns. Medical doctors deal with various kinds of diseases in which the music therapy helps to improve symptoms. Listening to music may improve heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure in people with heart disease. Sound healing therapy uses aspects of music to improve physical and emotional health and well-being. The book presents a variety of approaches useful to create recommendation systems in healthcare, music, and in music therapy.

The book presents selected papers at the 8th Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT) held in November 2020, at Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. CSMT is a multidisciplinary conference focusing on audio processing and understanding with bias on music and acoustic signals. The primary aim of the conference is to promote the collaboration between art society and technical society in China. In this proceeding, the paper included covers a wide range topic from speech, signal processing, music understanding, machine learning and signal processing for advanced medical diagnosis and treatment applications; which demonstrates the target of CSMT merging arts and science research together.its content caters to scholars, researchers, engineers, artists, and education practitioners not only from academia but also industry, who are interested in audio/acoustics analysis signal processing, music, sound, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Last Supper illustrates the definition of an Eat Greedy Girl. You will see that the definition applies to any mini, but how they apply it to themselves is totally different than each other. The Last Supper, illustrates four women with the same purpose going about it in different Eat Greedy Ways . Open this book and see which lady is the Eat Greediest to you, and by the way are you an Eat Greedy Girl?

This volume is the first book-length account of Yves Montand's controversial tour of the Soviet Union at the turn of the years 1956/57. It traces the mixed messages of this internationally visible act of cultural diplomacy in the middle of the turbulent Cold War. It also provides an account of the celebrated French singer-actor's controversial career, his dedication to music and to peace activism, as well as his widespread fandom in the USSR. The book describes the political background for the events of the year 1956, including the changing Soviet atmosphere after Stalin's death, portrays the rising transnational stardom of Montand in the 1940s and 1950s, and explores the controversies aroused by his plan to visit Moscow after the Hungarian Uprising. The book pays particular attention to Montand's reception in the USSR and his concert performances, drawing on unique archival material and oral history interviews, and analyses the documentary Yves Montand Sings (1957) released immediately after his visit.

From the delectable Conchita Supervia (who made her debut at fourteen!) to the divine Maria Callas; from the gentle Elisabeth Schumann to the fiery Maria Jeritza (adored by the public, feared by several leading tenors and spat at by a fellow diva); from the giant Lauritz Melchior to the versatile Richard Tauber - More Legendary Voices mixes biography, anecdote, opinion, and penetrating analysis of each singer's strengths and weaknesses. Once more Nigel Douglas, the international tenor and well-known radio presenter, brings to this collection his professional knowledge of the world of opera, his infectious enthusiasm for the subject, and a natural gift for distilling the essence of a singer's life and career into one entertaining and instructive chapter.

"It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions." Miles Davis's Kind of Blue is the best-selling piece of music in jazz history and, for many listeners, among the most haunting works of the twentieth century. It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Richard Williams's "richly informative" (The Guardian) history considers the album within its wider cultural context, showing how the record influenced such diverse artists as Steve Reich and the Velvet Underground. In the tradition of Alex Ross and Greil Marcus, the "effortlessly versatile" Williams (The Times) "connects these seemingly disparate phenomena with purpose, finesse and journalistic flair" (Financial Times), making masterly connections to painting, literature, philosophy, and poetry while identifying the qualities that make the album so uniquely appealing and surprisingly universal.

Studies of Latin American music often overlook its Cuban roots and the political policies that brought the musicians to the United States. This work rectifies that omission by examining the Afro-Cuban influence upon Latin American music and its various idioms. A brief history of Afro-Cuban musicians in the United States provides the background and context for the study. Influential pre-revolutionary Afro-Cuban immigrant musicians, such as Mongo SantamarIa, Jesus Caunedo, Charanga and Pup Legarreta, Juan Carlos Formell, and Alfredo Chocolate Armenteros, discuss both their music and their attitudes toward the political policies that led them to flee Cuba. Speaking from firsthand experience, founding figures of Latin music in the United States present unique insights into the Afro-Cuban experience within the Latin musical community.

Adding to the musicians' stories, Gerard provides a history of relations between Cubans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans in the Latin music community. He also discusses the impact of the mass emigration in the 1980s that brought many more Cubans to the States. This multicultural approach to Latin American music will appeal to music and Latin American history scholars and to jazz and Latin music enthusiasts. An appendix includes album listings for the musicians interviewed."

This set of four volumes draws together extended material from across the topics of music in Britain in the long nineteenth century, particularly focussing on documents not readily accessible or not commonly quoted in the literature. Together they will form an important resource for students and scholars of music and culture. The general introduction explores the state of research into music in nineteenth-century Britain from a historiographical perspective, as well as an assessment of the most pressing themes for the immediate future of the discipline. Introductions to each thematic section briefly review the relevant literature and the most important points of concern, while a short preface to each document points out particular points of note, context, and explanations of any unusual phrases. Each sub-topic includes four or five documents drawn from newspapers, journals, pamphlets and, where possible, archival material. Documents will span the full length of the nineteenth century and a significant number will be drawn from the writings of Scottish, Welsh and Irish authors.

This book is a survey and analysis of how deep learning can be used to generate musical content. The authors offer a comprehensive presentation of the foundations of deep learning techniques for music generation. They also develop a conceptual framework used to classify and analyze various types of architecture, encoding models, generation strategies, and ways to control the generation. The five dimensions of this framework are: objective (the kind of musical content to be generated, e.g., melody, accompaniment); representation (the musical elements to be considered and how to encode them, e.g., chord, silence, piano roll, one-hot encoding); architecture (the structure organizing neurons, their connexions, and the flow of their activations, e.g., feedforward, recurrent, variational autoencoder); challenge (the desired properties and issues, e.g., variability, incrementality, adaptability); and strategy (the way to model and control the process of generation, e.g., single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, decoder feedforward, sampling). To illustrate the possible design decisions and to allow comparison and correlation analysis they analyze and classify more than 40 systems, and they discuss important open challenges such as interactivity, originality, and structure. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in all related research, technical, performance, and business aspects. The book is suitable for students, practitioners, and researchers in the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and music creation domains. The reader does not require any prior knowledge about artificial neural networks, deep learning, or computer music. The text is fully supported with a comprehensive table of acronyms, bibliography, glossary, and index, and supplementary material is available from the authors' website.

This book examines the intersection between sound and modernity in dramatic and musical performance in Manila and the Asia-Pacific between 1869 and 1948. During this period, tolerant political regimes resulted in the globalization of capitalist relations and the improvement of transcontinental travel and worldwide communication. This allowed modern modes of theatre and music consumption to instigate the uniformization of cultural products and processes, while simultaneously fragmenting societies into distinct identities, institutions, and nascent nation-states. Taking the performing bodies of migrant musicians as the locus of sound, this book argues that the global movement of acoustic modernities was replicated and diversified through its multiple subjectivities within empire, nation, and individual agencies. It traces the arrival of European travelling music and theatre companies in Asia which re-casted listening into an act of modern cultural consumption, and follows the migration of Manila musicians as they engaged in the modernization project of the neighboring Asian cities.