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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > World music
In 1997 the rap group Racionais MCs (the 'Rational' MCs) recorded
the album Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), subsequently
changing the hip-hop scene in Sao Paulo and firmly establishing
itself as the point of reference for youth across Brazil. In an era
when rappers needed to defend the very idea that their work was
indeed music and a time when neighborhoods such as Capao Redondo,
from where Racionais frontman Mano Brown hailed, often topped
homicide statistics, Sobrevivendo empowered as it provoked. As one
journalist noted, "the underworld of Sao Paulo's working-class
suburbs is dominated by cheap thrills and provides little space for
representation." Sobrevivendo changed all of that; a brutal but
invigorating imagination was born. The lure of Sobrevivendo is the
particular combination of word and sound that powerfully involves
listeners, especially those millions of young Brazilians who live
in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Brazil's megacities. This
book celebrates the 25-year anniversary of Sobrevivendo by
representing the album's power not only within the hip-hop
community but also in other cultural domains such as cinema and
literature. The author also provides his own narrative spins on the
sentiment of Sobrevivendo, thus making the book a creative mix of
cultural analysis and inspired testimony.
This ground-breaking book is the first-ever study of the role
played in musical history by song collectors. This is the
first-ever book about song collectors, music's unsung heroes. They
include the Armenian priest who sacrificed his life to preserve the
folk music which the Turks were trying to erase in the 1915
Genocide; the prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who secretly
noted down the songs of doomed Jewish inmates; the British singer
who went veiled into Afghanistan to learn, record and perform the
music the Taliban wanted to silence. Some collectors have been
fired by political idealism - Bartok championing Hungarian peasant
music, the Lomaxes bringing the blues out of Mississippi
penitentiaries, and transmitting them to the world. Many collectors
have been priests - French Jesuits noting down labyrinthine forms
in eighteenth-century Beijing, English vicars tracking songs in
nineteenth-century Somerset. Others have been wonderfully colourful
oddballs. Today's collectors are striving heroically to preserve
endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the
wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony
of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and
Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world's
musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk
music's 'end of history'. Old forms are dying as the conditions for
their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages
means the death of village musical culture. This ground-breaking
book is the sequel to the author's award-winning The Other
Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics
now under threat, or already lost for ever.
Ofrece ejercicios y melodA-as para: Estudios del Pedal * Escalas
cromAticas y menores * Arreglos fAciles de algunas piezas clAsicas
* Ejercicios rA-tmicos y mAs. [Spanish]
[The Michael Aaron Piano Course Lesson books have been completely
re-engraved, expanded (adding more definitions of musical terms and
more musical pieces), updated (with modernized artwork), and
re-edited (with less emphasis on fingerings and more on
note-reading)].
Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the
globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected
religions, cultures, languages and nations throughout world
history. The chapters in this History take readers to foundational
historical moments - in Europe, Oceania, China, India, the Muslim
world, North and South America - in search of the connections
provided by a truly world music. Historically, world music emerged
from ritual and religion, labor and life-cycles, which occupy
chapters on Native American musicians, religious practices in India
and Indonesia, and nationalism in Argentina and Portugal. The
contributors critically examine music in cultural encounter and
conflict, and as the critical core of scientific theories from the
Arabic Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism.
Overall, the book contains the histories of the music of diverse
cultures, which increasingly become the folk, popular and classical
music of our own era.
Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not
only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and
creative participants. Eric Charry and an international group of
contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of
hip hop in Africa, the embrace of other contemporary genres,
including reggae, ragga, and gospel music, and the continued
vitality of drumming. Covering Senegal, Mali, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana,
Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa, this volume
offers unique perspectives on the presence and development of hip
hop and other music in Africa and their place in global music
culture."
This volume provides a transnational study of the impact of musical
cultures in the Eastern Baltics-Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and
Russia-at the end of the Cold War and in the early post-Communist
period. Throughout the book, the contributors explore and
conceptualize transnational musical collaboration and the diffusion
of information, people, and ideas focusing on musical activity
which shaped the moral and artistic outlook of several generations.
The volume sheds light on the transformative power of politically
and socially engaged music and offers a deeper understanding of the
artistic potential of societies and its impact on social and
political change.
To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is,
among other things, to have listened to it-and to have listened
through it. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in
Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of
listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of
ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and
Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq,
author J. Martin Daughtry reveals how these populations learned to
extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while
struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their
ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. Daughtry
examines the dual-edged nature of sound-its potency as a source of
information and a source of trauma-within a sophisticated
conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and
the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing
violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of
violence, Daughtry provides a productive new vantage point for
examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters
dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and U.S. military contexts show
how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign
and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war. A
landmark work within the study of conflict, sound studies, and
ethnomusicology, Listening to War will expand your understanding of
the experience of armed violence, and the experience of sound more
generally. At the same time, it provides a discrete window into the
lives of individual Iraqis and Americans struggling to orient
themselves within the fog of war.
In recent years, girls' and mixed-gender ensembles have challenged
the tradition of male-dominated gamelan performance. The change
heralds a fundamental shift in how Balinese think about gender
roles and the gender behavior taught in children's music education.
It also makes visible a national reorganization of the arts taking
place within debates over issues like women's rights and cultural
preservation. Sonja Lynn Downing draws on over a decade of
immersive ethnographic work to analyze the ways Balinese musical
practices have influenced the processes behind these dramatic
changes. As Downing shows, girls and young women assert their
agency within the gamelan learning process to challenge entrenched
notions of performance and gender. One dramatic result is the
creation of new combinations of femininity, musicality, and
Balinese identity that resist messages about gendered behavior from
the Indonesian nation-state and beyond. Such experimentation
expands the accepted gender aesthetics of gamelan performance but
also sparks new understanding of the role children can and do play
in ongoing debates about identity and power.
Russian composer Alexander Skryabin's life spanned the late
romantic era and the momentous early years of the twentieth
century, but was cut short before the end of the first world war.
In a predominantly conservative era in the Russian musical scene,
he drew inspiration from poets, philosophers, and dramatists of the
Silver Age, a period of radical artistic renewal in Russia.
Possessed by an apocalyptic vision of transformation, aspects of
which he shared with other Russian thinkers and artists of the
period, Skryabin transformed his musical language from a ripe
Romantic style into a far-reaching, radical instrument for the
expression of his ideas. This newly translated collection of the
composer's writings and letters allows readers to experience and
understand Skryabin's worldview, personality, and life as never
before. The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin features commentary
based on original materials and accounts by the composer's friends
and associates, dispelling popular misconceptions about his life
and revealing the dazzling constellation of philosophies that
comprised his world of ideas, from Ancient Greek and German
Idealist philosophy to the writings of Nietzsche, and Indian
culture to the Theosophical writings of H. P. Blavatsky. Close
textual readings and new biographical insights converge to present
a vivid impression of Skryabin's thought and its impact on his
musical compositions.
The distinctive sound of the Cuban tres underpins many Cuban styles
of music. Here is a unique method that explains all aspects related
to learning this traditional Cuban instrument. You'll also find an
extensive introduction to son and the other Cuban styles, including
nengon, changui, danzon, gauguanco and mambo! Discover the
traditional technique and true essence of this Cuban folk
instrument. In English and Spanish. Also includes a specially
recorded CD with demonstration tracks.
Since 1997, the war in the east of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo has taken more than 6 million lives and shapes the daily
existence of the nation's residents. While the DRC is often
portrayed in international media as an unproductive failed state,
the Congolese have turned increasingly to art-making to express
their experience to external eyes. Author Cherie Rivers Ndaliko
argues that cultural activism and the enthusiasm to produce art
exists in Congo as a remedy for the social ills of war and as a way
to communicate a positive vision of the country. Ndaliko introduces
a memorable cast of artists, activists, and ordinary people from
the North-Kivu province, whose artistic and cultural interventions
are routinely excluded from global debates that prioritize
economics, politics, and development as the basis of policy
decision about Congo. Rivers also shows how art has been mobilized
by external humanitarian and charitable organizations, becoming the
vehicle through which to inflict new kinds of imperial domination.
Written by a scholar and activist in the center of the current
public policy debate, Necessary Noise examines the uneasy balance
of accomplishing change through art against the unsteady background
of civil war. At the heart of this book is the Yole!Africa cultural
center, which is the oldest independent cultural center in the east
of Congo. Established in the aftermath of volcano Nyiragongo's 2002
eruption and sustained through a series of armed conflicts, the
cultural activities organized by Yole!Africa have shaped a
generation of Congolese youth into socially and politically engaged
citizens. By juxtaposing intimate ethnographic, aesthetic, and
theoretical analyses of this thriving local initiative with case
studies that expose the often destructive underbelly of charitable
action, Necessary Noise introduces into heated international
debates on aid and sustainable development a compelling case for
the necessity of arts and culture in negotiating sustained peace.
Through vivid descriptions of a community of young people
transforming their lives through art, Ndaliko humanizes a dire
humanitarian disaster. In so doing, she invites readers to reflect
on the urgent choices we must navigate as globally responsible
citizens. The only study of music or film culture in the east of
Congo, Necessary Noise raises an impassioned and vibrantly
interdisciplinary voice that speaks to the theory and practice of
socially engaged scholarship.
The voice of Amália Rodrigues (1920-1999), the “Queen of Fadoâ€
and Portugal’s most celebrated diva, was extraordinary for its
interpretive power, soul wrenching timbre, and international reach.
Amalia à l’Olympia (1957) is an album made from recordings
of her first performances at the fabled Olympia Music Hall in Paris
in 1956. This album, which was issued for multiple national markets
(including: France; USA; Japan; Britain; the Netherlands)
catapulted Amália Rodrigues into the international limelight.
During its time, this album held the potential for international
listeners, outside of Portugal, to represent Portugal, while also
standing in for cosmopolitanism, the glamorous city of Paris, and
to present a sonorous voyage in sound. This book introduces readers
to the voice of Amália Rodrigues and to the genre of the
Portuguese fado, offering a primer in how to listen to both. It
unpacks this iconic album and the voice, sound, style, and
celebrity of Amália Rodrigues. It situates this album within a
historical context marked by cold war Atlanticist diplomacy,
Portugal’s dictatorial regime, and the emergence of new forms of
media, travel, and tourism.In so doing, it examines processes that
shaped the internationalization of peripheral popular musics and
the making of female vocal stardom in the mid-20th century.
Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a
history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society.
In Remixing Reggaeton, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton
musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and
concealment of racism by expressing identities that center
blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego
Calderon criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise
black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black
population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman,
disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that
support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship
campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its
subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau
traces reggaeton's origins and its transformation from the music of
San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaeton, she
demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence
in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the
African diaspora.
As part of the Gottingen-based research project Minor Transmission
of Polyphonic Music Before 1550 in German-Speaking Areas, Martin
Staehelin, has systematically indexed previously unknown late
medieval sources from Germany and Switzerland."
Popular music and digital media are constantly entwined in
elementary and middle-school children's talk, interactions, and
relationships, and offer powerful cultural resources to children in
their everyday struggles over institutionalized language, literacy,
and expression in school. In Schooling New Media, author Tyler
Bickford considers how digital music technologies are incorporated
into children's expressive culture, their friendships, and their
negotiations with adults about the place of language, music, and
media in school. Schooling New Media is a groundbreaking study of
children's music and media consumption practices, examining how
transformations in music technologies influence the way children,
their peers, and adults relate to one another. Based on long-term
ethnographic research with a community of schoolchildren in
Vermont, Bickford focuses on portable digital music devices - i.e.
MP3 players - to reveal their key role in mediating intimate,
face-to-face relationships and structuring children's interactions
both with music and with each other. Schooling New Media provides
an important ethnographic and theoretical intervention into
ethnomusicology, childhood studies, and music education,
emphasizing the importance-and yet under-appreciation-of
interpersonal interactions and institutions like schools as sites
of musical activity. Bickford explores how headphones facilitate
these school-centered interactions, as groups of children share
their earbuds with friends and listen to music together while
participating in the dense overlap of talk, touch, and gesture of
their peer groups. He argues that children treat MP3 players more
like toys than technology, and that these devices expand the
repertoires of childhood communicative practices such as passing
notes and whispering-all means of interacting with friends beyond
the reach of adults. These connections afforded by digital music
listening enable children to directly challenge the language and
literacy goals of classroom teachers. Bickford's Schooling New
Media is unique in its intensive ethnographic attention to everyday
sites of musical consumption and performance, and offers a
sophisticated conceptual approach for understanding the problems
and possibilities of children's uses of new media in schools.
The world of Sub-Saharan African music is immensely rich and
diverse, containing a plethora of repertoires and traditions. In
The African Imagination in Music, renowned music scholar Kofi Agawu
offers an introduction to the major dimensions of this music and
the values upon which it rests. Agawu leads his readers through an
exploration of the traditions, structural elements, instruments,
and performative techniques that characterize the music. In
sections that focus upon rhythm, melody, form, and harmony, the
essential parts of African music come into relief. While
traditional music, the backbone of Africa's musical thinking,
receives the most attention, Agawu also supplies insights into
popular and art music in order to demonstrate the breadth of the
African musical imagination. Close readings of a variety of songs,
including an Ewe dirge, an Aka children's song, and Fela's
'Suffering and Smiling' supplement the broader discussion. The
African Imagination in Music foregrounds a hitherto under-reported
legacy of recordings and insists on the necessity of experiencing
music as sound in order to appreciate and understand it fully.
Accordingly, a Companion Website features important examples of the
music discussed in detail in the book. Accessibly and engagingly
written for a general audience, The African Imagination in Music is
poised to renew interest in Black African music and to engender
discussion of its creative underpinnings by Africanists,
ethnomusicologists, music theorists and musicologists.
Iannis Xenakis' Persepolis stood as witness to one of the most
important events in modern human history, the Iranian Revolution in
1979. Its existence is owed to an invitation to participate in the
1971 Shiraz Arts Festival, which was overseen by Empress Farah
Pahlavi. Like the Festival, and the extravagant celebratory party
held the same year, Xenakis' symbolic paean to Persian history was
polarizing. Many loved it, others detested it. Overwhelming but
also subtle and precise in its non-harmonic shifts in texture and
density, listeners and critics simply did not know what to make of
it. This book tells the story of Xenakis' early history and
involvement in the Resistance against the Axis occupation of Greece
during the Second World War, escape and re-settlement in Paris,
work as an architect with Le Corbusier, and distinct views on world
history and politics that all led to his 1972 electro-acoustic
album Persepolis.
This is the only book on the market designed to show guitarists how
to play authentic accompaniments in all the main Brazilian styles.
On the accompanying CD, Nelson plays each exercise so the student
can clearly hear and see what his role in this beautiful music is.
There are also fingerboard diagrams for people who are not great
readers. Nelson has been singer/songwriter Joao Bosco's accompanist
for many years, one of the most prestigious gigs in Brazil.
Endorsed by Tonino Horta and Joe Diorio, among others.
Sin Documentos is a landmark album in Spanish popular culture and
continues to maintain considerable popularity more than two decades
after its release. The characteristic guitar riff of the title
song, a kind of rumba-rock, still occupies a place at every party
in Spain. Los Rodriguez's success came after a decade characterized
by the rise and fall of local-language punk and new wave bands. By
the time Sin Documentos appeared, however, rock journalism was
fascinated by the thriving indie scene, where the bands were
singing in English and had turned to grunge and noise rock. This
book evaluates the influence of Latin American pop-rock in the
modernization of Spanish popular music from the 1950s, despite the
Anglophilia of Spanish rock scenes, especially in the 1990s.
Through interviews with members of the band and members of the
record label DRO, analysis of the media coverage of the album and a
cultural analysis of its meanings, it delves into the cultural
trends of Spain throughout the 1990s and beyond.
This book explores an album of popular music with a remarkable
significance to a violent wave of postcolonial tensions in the
Netherlands in the 1970s. Several "actions" were claimed by a small
number of first-generation descendants of ca. 12,500 reluctant
migrants from the young independent state of Indonesia (former
Dutch East Indies). Transferred in 1951, this culturally coherent
group consisted of ex-Royal Dutch Colonial Army personnel and their
families. Their ancient roots in the Moluccan archipelago and their
protestant-christian faith defined their minority image. Their
sojourn should have been temporary, but frustratingly turned out to
be permanent. At the height of strained relations, Massada rose to
the occasion. Astaganaga (1978) is a telling example of the will to
negotiate a different diasporic Moluccan identity through uplifting
contemporary sounds.
Music and Traditions of the Arabian Peninsula provides a pioneering
overview of folk and traditional urban music, along with dance and
rituals, of Saudi Arabia and the Upper Gulf States of Kuwait,
Bahrain, and Qatar. The nineteen chapters introduce variegated
regions and subcultures and their rich and dynamic musical arts,
many of which heretofore have been unknown beyond local
communities. The book contains insightful descriptions of genres,
instruments, poetry, and performance practices of the desert
heartland (Najd), the Arabian/Persian Gulf shores, the great
western cities including Makkah and Medinah, the southwestern
mountains, and the hot Red Sea coast. Musical customs of
distinctive groups such as Bedouin, seafarers, and regional women
are explored. The book is packaged with downloadable resources and
almost 200 images including a full color photo essay, numerous
music transcriptions, a glossary with over 400 specialized terms,
and original Arabic script alongside key words to assist with
further research. This book provides a much-needed introduction and
organizational structure for the diverse and complex musical arts
of the region.
In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible
cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new
practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the
sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant
ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity,
musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for
sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques
strategies that are currently employed to support endangered
musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between
language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language
endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in
which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new
pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the
first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level
of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for
the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It
will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate
the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible
benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat.
Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music
Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of
applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued
diversity of our global musical traditions.
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