<P>This collection of essays provides the first in-depth examination of camp as it relates to a wide variety of twentieth and twenty-first century music and musical performances. Located at the convergence of popular and queer musicology, the book provides new research into camp's presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including: musical theatre, classical music, fil ...
<P>The South Korean percussion genre, samul nori, is a world phenomenon whose rhythmic form is the key to its popularity and mobility. Based on both ethnographic research and close formal analysis, author Katherine In-Young Lee focuses on the kinetic experience of samul nori, drawing out the concept of dynamism to show its historical, philosophical, and pedagogical dimensions. Breaking with traditional approaches to the study of wo ...
<P>Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco—a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands. The book's focus on samba de coco families, marked as bearers of tradition, and the band Cordel do Fogo Encantado, marketed as pop iconoclasts, offers a revealing portrait of performers engaged in new forms of cultural preservation during a post-dictators ...
<P>Positioned on a major trade route, the Toba Batak people of Sumatra have long witnessed the ebb and flow of cultural influence from India, the Middle East, and the West. Living as ethnic and religious minorities within modern Indonesia, Tobas have recast this history of difference through interpretations meant to strengthen or efface the identities it has shaped. Antiphonal Histories examines Toba musical performance as a legacy ...
<P>Music and violence have been linked since antiquity in ritual, myth, and art. Considered together they raise fundamental questions about creativity, discourse, and music's role in society. The essays in this collection investigate a wealth of issues surrounding music and violence—issues that cross political boundaries, time periods, and media—and provide cross-cultural case studies of musical practices ranging from large-sc ...
<P>In clear and elegant prose, Music of the Common Tongue, first published in 1987, argues that by any reasonable reckoning of the function of music in human life the African American tradition, that which stems from the collision between African and European ways of doing music which occurred in the Americas and the Caribbean during and after slavery, is the major western music of the twentieth century. In showing why this is so, ...
<P>In 1964, Bernard Stollman launched the independent record label ESP-Disk' in New York City to document the free jazz movement there. A bare-bones enterprise, ESP was in the right place at the right time, producing albums by artists like Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra, as well as folk-rock bands like the Fugs and Pearls Before Swine. But the label quickly ran into difficulties and, due to the politically subversiv ...
<P>This is the first account of the evolution of music at Wesleyan University, a campus known since the mid-nineteenth century for its musical life—first as the «Singing College of New England» and then, after 1960, as the home of a renowned undergraduate and graduate department that integrates world music studies with more traditional Western and experimental musical forms. Through excerpts from accounts in the campus newspaper ov ...
<P>A scholar and trained performer of Balinese vocal music and dance, ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst brings unique talents to bear in this provocative book. The lessons of his Balinese masters enable him to offer fresh insight to this culture's aesthetics and cultural elements. Appropriating John Cage's effective style of «mixing theory, anecdote, context, philosophy, and humor,» Herbst crafts an accessible body of work, ...