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Books > Music > Non-Western music, traditional & classical
Afrosonic Life explores the role sonic innovations in the African diaspora play in articulating methodologies for living the afterlife of slavery. Developing and extending debates on Afrosonic cultures, the book attends to the ways in which the acts of technological subversion, experimentation and production complement and interrupt the intellectual project of modernity. Music making processes such as dub, turntablism, hip-hop dj techniques and the remix, innovate methods of expressing subjecthoods beyond the dominant language of Western "Man" and the market. These sonic innovations utilize sound as a methodology to institute a rehumanizing subjectivity in which sound dislodges the hierarchical ordering of racial schemas. Afrosonic Life is invested in excavating and elaborating the nuanced and novel ways of music making and sound creation found in the African diaspora.
When Shostakovich Studies was published in 1995, archival research in the ex-Soviet Union was only just beginning. Since that time, research carried out in the Shostakovich Family Archive, founded by the composer's widow Irina Antonovna Shostakovich in 1975, and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture has significantly raised the level of international Shostakovich studies. At the same time, scholarly understanding of Soviet society and culture has developed significantly since 1991, and this has also led to a more nuanced appreciation of Shostakovich's public and professional identity. Shostakovich Studies 2 reflects these changes, focusing on documentary research, manuscript sources, film studies and musical analysis informed by literary criticism and performance. Contributions in this volume include chapters on Orango, Shostakovich's diary, behind-the-scenes events following Pravda's criticisms of Shostakovich in 1936 and a new memoir of Shostakovich by the Soviet poet Evgeniy Dolmatovsky, as well as analytical studies from a range of perspectives.
Opera in the Tropics is an engaging exploration of theater with music in Brazil from the mid 1500s to the early 1820s. Author Rogerio Budasz delves into the practices of the actors, singers, poets, and composers who created and performed Jesuit moral plays, Spanish comedias, and Portuguese vernacular operas and entremezes during the colonial period, as well as the Italian operas that celebrated the new independent nation in 1822. A Brazilian producer claimed in 1825 that the goal of music-theater was to instruct, entertain, and distract the population. Budasz argues that this threefold goal had in fact been present throughout the colonial period, in different combinations and with different purposes, at the hands of missionaries, intellectuals, bureaucrats, political leaders, and cultural producers. While Budasz demonstrates a continuity from Portuguese theatrical practices, primarily through the circulation of artists and repertory, he also examines a number of localized departures from the metropolitan model, particularly in the ethnic and gender profile of theatrical workers, in the modifications determined by local tastes, priorities, and materials, and in the political use of theater as an ideological and civilizing tool within the paradoxical context of a slave society. An eye-opening narrative of the transformations and uses of a colonial art form, Opera in the Tropics will be essential reading for all interested in the music and theater in Iberian and Latin American culture.
Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich provides a performer's perspective on Steve Reich's compositions from his iconic minimalist work, Drumming, to his masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians. It addresses performance issues encountered by the musicians in Reich's original ensemble and the techniques they developed to bring his compositions to life. Drawing comparisons with West African drumming and other non-Western music, the book highlights ideas that are helpful in the understanding and performance of rhythm in all pulse-based music. Through conversations and interviews with the author, Reich discusses his percussion background and his thoughts about rhythm in relation to the music of Ghana, Bali, India, and jazz. He explains how he used rhythm in his early compositions, the time feel he wants in his music, the kind of performer who seems to be drawn to his music, and the way perceptual and metrical ambiguity create interest in repetitive music.
What makes hundreds of listeners cheer ecstatically at the same instant during a live concert by Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum? What is the unspoken language behind a taqsim (traditional instrumental improvisation) that performers and listeners implicitly know? How can Arabic music be so rich and diverse without resorting to harmony? Why is it so challenging to transcribe Arabic music from a recording? Inside Arabic Music answers these and many other questions from the perspective of two "insiders" to the practice of Arabic music, by documenting a performance culture and a know-how that is largely passed on orally. Arabic music has spread across the globe, influencing music from Greece all the way to India in the mid-20th century through radio and musical cinema, and global popular culture through Raqs Sharqi, known as "Bellydance" in the West. Yet despite its popularity and influence, Arabic music, and the maqam scale system at its heart, remain widely misunderstood. Inside Arabic Music de-mystifies maqam with an approach that draws theory directly from practice, and presents theoretical insights that will be useful to practitioners, from the beginner to the expert - as well as those interested in the related Persian, Central Asian, and Turkish makam traditions. Inside Arabic Music's discussion of maqam and improvisation widens general understanding of music as well, by bringing in ideas from Saussurean linguistics, network theory, and Lakoff and Johnson's theory of cognition as metaphor, with an approach parallel to Gjerdingen's analysis of Galant-period music - offering a lens into the deeper relationships among music, culture, and human community.
Peking opera is one of the most distinctive traditions in Chinese culture - a tradition that can seem mysterious and complex to foreign eyes. In this illustrated introduction, Xu Chengbei explains the colourful make up, intricate costumes, characters, staging, stories and music associated with Peking opera, and discusses the origins and development of this unique performance art. Peking Opera is an essential starting point for all those interested in this intriguing part of China's cultural heritage.
How does the state separate music from noise? How can such filtering apparatus shape the content and form of sound production in the city? As a marker of co-presence to the hearing body, sound is always open to (or rather opens up) the politics of shared existence. In the throes of the post-dictatorship period, Brazil's legislative and executive branches implemented a series of sweeping measures to address quality of life concerns, including environmental pollution and urban inequality. In Sao Paulo, noise control became a recurrent controversy, growing in size and scale between the 1990s and 2010s. Together with the much-debated fear of crime and the socioeconomic and cultural tensions between the rich urban center and the poor peripheries, such ecological agendas against noise as a harmful pollutant have reconfigured the presence of environmental sounds in the city. In this book, Cardoso argues that the framing of specific sounds as unavoidable, unnecessary, or as harmful "noise" has been an effective strategy to organize spaces and administer group behavior in this rapidly expanding city. He focuses on two interrelated processes. First, the series of institutional regulatory mechanisms that turn sounds into the all-embracing "noise" susceptible to state intervention. Second, the constant attempts of interested groups in either attaching or detaching specific sounds (musical events, industrial noise, traffic noise, religious sounds, etc.) from regulatory scrutiny. Sound-politics is the dynamics that emerges from both processes - the channels through which sounds enter (and leave) the sphere of state regulation.
When Shostakovich Studies was published in 1995, archival research in the ex-Soviet Union was only just beginning. Since that time, research carried out in the Shostakovich Family Archive, founded by the composer's widow Irina Antonovna Shostakovich in 1975, and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture has significantly raised the level of international Shostakovich studies. At the same time, scholarly understanding of Soviet society and culture has developed significantly since 1991, and this has also led to a more nuanced appreciation of Shostakovich's public and professional identity. Shostakovich Studies 2 reflects these changes, focusing on documentary research, manuscript sources, film studies and musical analysis informed by literary criticism and performance. Contributions in this volume include chapters on Orango, Shostakovich's diary, behind-the-scenes events following Pravda's criticisms of Shostakovich in 1936 and a new memoir of Shostakovich by the Soviet poet Evgeniy Dolmatovsky, as well as analytical studies from a range of perspectives.
This volume of nine essays draws together leading scholars in anthropology, social history, musicology, and ethnomusicology to address the roles and functions of music in the Chinese ritual context. How does music, one of a constellation of essential performative elements in almost all rituals, empower an officiant, legitimate an officeholder, create a heightened state of awareness, convey a message, or produce a magical outcome, a transition, a transformation? After an introduction by the volume editors, Bell Yung proposes a theoretical framework for dealing with Chinese ritual sound. A group of three essays focuses on the music for rituals that create political and social legitimacy followed by a second group of essays considering the music associated with rites of passage. Two essays then deal with the music accompanying rituals of propitiation. In all these cases, music is seen to play a critical role, if not the core of the ritual.
This is the fifth volume in a series of books devoted to the history, documentation and analysis of music in Asia. The five essays each have a different focus ranging from historical change in the Turkish classical repertoire, speech-tones and vocal melody in Thai court song, ritual theatre music in ancient India, pieces for biwa in calendrically correct tunings and an investigation of the sources for Japanese flute scores from the fourteenth century.
This is the sixth volume in a series of books devoted to the history, documentation and analysis of music in Asia. Four essays are dedicated to documents from the past: fifth-century Korean tomb paintings; tenth-century Chinese scores for lute; eighth-century Japanese documents; early Chinese sutras on the perception of sound. The remainder concern contemporary documents: the notations of the Japanese end-blown flute (shakuhachi) and lute (biwa) and their relationship to performance; acoustical analysis of contemporary shakuhachi. The focus on musical documents, whether ancient or modern, provides a unifying thread which renders this volume unique in the ethnomusicological literature on East Asian music.
This volume brings to an end the transcription and historical description of items from the Court Entertainment Music of the Tang found in two collections of zither and lute scores from the end of the twelfth century. They are from two mode-key groups: twenty-three in the mode-key Ichikotsu-cho and eight in Sada-cho. Of particular interest is a tune that fits a birthplace-ode by the Taizong Emperor, composed in 632, and also music for a collective spear-throwing exercise and a piece perhaps imitating calls between sexual partners in a flock of geese. Important appendices discuss stylistic differences between music of the Tang and imitative Japanese compositions; relationships between Tang compositions with noble and military associations; and evidence of inter-relatedness between movements in suites from the Tang.
Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
The series of volumes of Music from the Tang Court considers a repertory of music at least 1400 years old. During the two centuries before 841 the Japanese Court borrowed a large amount of secular entertainment music from China. This 'Tang Music' (Togaku) survives in Japan in a substantial body of manuscripts, but is transformed in character in contemporary performance. This edition transcribes and comments on the music as it survives in its earliest sources. This process has revealed surprising evidence for ancient interconnections in Asian musics, and the essays in this seventh volume present aspects of this research to date. They provide evidence, for example, of music in a scale of four notes only from Bali and from Ancient China, as well as, most significantly, for the transportation from the Tang capital to Japan of 'several tens of scrolls of music in tablature'.
This anthology to accompany Gateways to Understanding Music is comprised of musical "texts." These broadly defined texts-primarily musical scores-facilitate the integration of score study and music theory into the ethno/musicology curriculum, a necessary focus in the training of the professional musician. As posed by the textbook, the last question in each modular "gateway" is "Where do I go from here?" This resource provides one more opportunity to go beyond the textbook to examine music scores and texts in even greater depth. This anthology is a combination of primary sources for study: musical scores and music transcriptions, along with a few primary source documents and musical exercises.
Musical Instruments presents the first comprehensive survey to explain how Western musical instruments work, how they developed historically, how they are manufactured, and how they are used to make music. After introducing the nature of sounds and production mechanisms, the authors survey each family in turn, covering acoustical features, historical development of instrument forms, sizes and shapes in current use, the manufacturing processes, and commonly-used playing techniques. The full index and glossary also contain definitions of technical terms and notes on instruments not included in the text, making this the essential reference for everyone researching and working with musical instruments and performance.
Taking as a thread the concept of national identity, this book elucidates the sound transformations that have taken place in the world of the Latin American art song since its appearance in the late nineteenth century to the present day. The book focuses in the art songs of Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. The book addresses the subject of performance practice of the Latin American song and ends with a proposal for its interpretation. In songs, spaces of representation and cathartic tools thought, language and music have been at the service of some interests, fulfilling specific functions in the construction of the nation. In them, we observe that the construction of identity is a continuous, constant and changing process in which different stories are superimposed. Seen this way, songs are historical texts where social interactions are reflected, and the past, the present and the future are constantly negotiated. The book also addresses the subject of performance practice of the Latin American song and ends with a proposal for its interpretation.
Megawattage sound systems have blasted the electronically enhanced
"riddims" and tongue-twisting lyrics of Jamaica's dancehall DJs
across the globe. This high-energy "raggamuffin" music is often
dissed by old-school roots reggae fans as a raucous degeneration of
classic Jamaican popular music. In this provocative study of
dancehall culture Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and
Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona,
Jamaica, offers a sympathetic account of the philosophy of a wide
range of dancehall DJs: Shabba Ranks, Lady Saw, Ninjaman, Capleton,
Buju Banton, Anthony B, Apache Indian. She demonstrates the ways in
which the language of dancehall culture, often devalued as mere
'noise, ' articulates a complex understanding of the border clashes
that characterise Jamaican society. Cooper also analyses the sound
clashes that erupt in the movement of Jamaican dancehall culture
across national borders.
In 1893 the composer Antonin Dvorak prophesied a "great and noble" school of American classical music based on the searing "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, he looks back to literary figures-Emerson, Melville and Twain-to ponder how American music can connect with a "usable past". The result is a new paradigm, that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson and Florence Price, to redefine the classical canon.
Music, Communities, Sustainability, edited thoughtfully by Huib Schippers and Anthony Seeger, traces the genesis, implementation, and development of the influential 2003 UNESCO Convention on Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and its impact on music practices around the world. With insights from established and emerging scholars who have been there from the early beginnings to those who work with it in communities today, this book tells a riveting story that celebrates the rise in awareness that approaching music as Intangible Cultural Heritage has brought. At the same time, it critiques the discrepancies between ideologies and realities as they emerged across the globe in its first twenty years, and provides perspectives for sound futures for the planet. Gathering such varied perspectives, this essential volume tells a crucial history and expands our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of interventions in music sustainability on a global scale.
For decades, ethnomusicologists across the world have considered how to affect positive change for the communities they work with. Through illuminating case studies and reflections by a diverse array of scholars and practitioners, Transforming Ethnomusicology aims to both expand dialogues about social engagement within ethnomusicology and, at the same time, transform how we understand ethnomusicology as a discipline. The second volume of Transforming Ethnomusicology takes as a point of departure the recognition that colonial and environmental damages are grounded in historical and institutional failures to respect the land and its peoples. Featuring Indigenous and other perspectives from Brazil, North America, Australia, Africa, and Europe this volume critically engages with how ethnomusicologists can support marginalized communities in sustaining their musical knowledge and threatened geographies.
In this fourth volume of studies in the historical musicology and organology of Asia, Jonathan Condit completes his survey of Korean scores in mensural notation, and Roger Blench examines the morphology and distribution of sub-Saharan musical instruments of North African, Middle Eastern, and Asian origin.
In Listening for Africa David F. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black music and dance's African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. Garcia examines the work of figures ranging from Melville J. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora to Duke Ellington, Damaso Perez Prado, and others who believed that linking black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernity's promises of freedom in the face of fascism and racism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the nuclear threat at the start of the Cold War. In analyzing their work, Garcia traces how such attempts to link black music and dance to Africa unintentionally reinforced the binary relationships between the West and Africa, white and black, the modern and the primitive, science and magic, and rural and urban. It was, Garcia demonstrates, modernity's determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.
Music, Communities, Sustainability, edited thoughtfully by Huib Schippers and Anthony Seeger, traces the genesis, implementation, and development of the influential 2003 UNESCO Convention on Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and its impact on music practices around the world. With insights from established and emerging scholars who have been there from the early beginnings to those who work with it in communities today, this book tells a riveting story that celebrates the rise in awareness that approaching music as Intangible Cultural Heritage has brought. At the same time, it critiques the discrepancies between ideologies and realities as they emerged across the globe in its first twenty years, and provides perspectives for sound futures for the planet. Gathering such varied perspectives, this essential volume tells a crucial history and expands our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of interventions in music sustainability on a global scale.
The journey that The Beatles made to India in 1968 is considered one of the key events for western pop culture. The journey that The Beatles made to India in 1968 caused an enormous stir in the international media and was fundamental in spreading a certain interest for the East that influenced music, literature, cinema, fashion and customs at the close of that decade. The title, Nothing Is Real, is a famous lyric in The Beatles' song Strawberry Fields Forever, inviting people to search beyond appearances with a spiritual and metaphysical tension. The book invokes that extraordinary moment through reports from the period, historical photographs, artworks by international artists such as Ettore Sottsass, Alighiero Boetti, Francesco Clemente, Luigi Ontani, Aldo Mondino and Julian Schnabel, as well as through album, book and magazine covers.. |
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