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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music
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.
To serve the British nation in World War II, the BBC charged itself
with mobilizing popular music in support of Britain's war effort.
Radio music, British broadcasters and administrators argued, could
maintain civilian and military morale, increase industrial
production, and even promote a sense of Anglo-American cooperation.
Because of their widespread popularity, dance music and popular
song were seen as ideal for these tasks; along with jazz, with its
American associations and small but youthful audience, these genres
suddenly gained new legitimacy at the traditionally more
conservative BBC.
In Victory through Harmony, author Christina Baade both tells the
fascinating story of the BBC's musical participation in wartime
events and explores how popular music and jazz broadcasting helped
redefine notions of war, gender, race, class, and nationality in
wartime Britain. Baade looks in particular at the BBC's pioneering
Listener Research Department, which tracked the tastes of select
demographic groups including servicemen stationed overseas and
young female factory workers in order to further the goal of
entertaining, cheering, and even calming the public during wartime.
The book also tells how the wartime BBC programmed popular music to
an unprecedented degree with the goal of building national unity
and morale, promoting new roles for women, virile representations
of masculinity, Anglo-American friendship, and pride in a common
British culture. In the process, though, the BBC came into uneasy
contact with threats of Americanization, sentimentality, and the
creativity of non-white "others," which prompted it to regulate and
even censor popular music and performers.
Rather than provide the soundtrack for a unified "People's War,"
Baade argues, the BBC's broadcasting efforts exposed the divergent
ideologies, tastes, and perspectives of the nation. This
illuminating book will interest all readers in popular music, jazz,
and radio, as well as British cultural history and gender studies.
Singers are faced with a unique challenge among musicians: they
must express not just the music, but the lyrics too. To effectively
communicate the meaning behind these words, singers must understand
the many references embedded in the vast international repertoire
of great art songs. They must deal with the meaning of the lyrics,
frequently in a language not their own and of a culture unfamiliar
to them.
From Zelter and Schubert to Rorem and Musto, Researching the Song
serves as an invaluable guide for performers, teachers, and
enthusiasts to the art song repertoire. Its more than 2,000
carefully researched entries supply information on most of the
mythological, historical, geographical, and literary references
contained in western art song. The authors explain the meaning of
less familiar literary terms, figures, and authors referenced in
song while placing songs in the context of larger literary sources.
Readers will find entries dealing with art songs from the German,
French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, South American, Greek, Finnish,
Scandinavian, and both American and British English repertoires.
Sources, narratives, and explanations of major song cycles are also
given. Organized alphabetically, the lexicon includes brief
biographies of poets, lists of composers who set each poet's work,
bibliographic materials, and brief synopses of major works from
which song texts were taken, including the plots of all Restoration
theater works containing Purcell's vocal music.
The more performers know and understand the literary elements of a
song, the richer their communication will be. Researching the Song
is a vital aid for singers and teachers in interpreting art songs
and buildingsong recital programs.
Today, teachers and performers of Turkish classical music
intentionally cultivate melancholies, despite these affects being
typically dismissed as remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Melancholic
Modalities is the first in-depth historical and ethnographic study
of the practices socialized by musicians who enthusiastically teach
and perform a present-day genre substantially rooted in the musics
of the Ottoman court and elite Mevlevi Sufi lodges. Author Denise
Gill analyzes how melancholic music-making emerges as pleasurable,
spiritually redeeming, and healing for both the listener and
performer. Focusing on the diverse practices of musicians who
deploy and circulate melancholy in sound, Gill interrogates the
constitutive elements of these musicians' modalities in the context
of emergent neoliberalism, secularism, political Islamism, Sufi
devotionals, and the politics of psychological health in Turkey
today. In an essential contribution to the study of ethnomusicology
and psychology, Gill develops rhizomatic analyses to allow for
musicians' multiple interpretations to be heard. Melancholic
Modalities uncovers how emotion and musical meaning are connected,
and how melancholy is articulated in the world of Turkish classical
musicians. With her innovative concept of "bi-aurality," Gill's
book forges new possibilities for the historical and ethnographic
analyses of musics and ideologies of listening for music scholars.
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