Ethnomusicology category: 491 books
Ritual and Music of North China
Shawm Bands in Shanxi
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2016
The rich local traditions of musical life in rural China are still little known. Music-making in village society is largely ceremonial, and shawm bands account for a significant part of such music. This is the first major ethnographic study of Chinese shawm bands in their ceremonial and social context....
A Language of Song
Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora
Language: English
Release Date: May 6, 2009
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to...
The Music of the Plants
For whon the plants play
Language: English
Release Date: February 16, 2016
Plants perceive sound and love to play music.
This is demonstrated by studies and experiments conducted in academic research and, more importantly, by the experiences of many researchers and musicians who teach plants to use electronic, musical equipment to play and sing along with them.
The research...
Music and the Armenian Diaspora
Searching for Home in Exile
Language: English
Release Date: September 7, 2015
Survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and their descendants have used music to adjust to a life in exile and counter fears of obscurity. In this nuanced and richly detailed study, Sylvia Angelique Alajaji shows how the boundaries of Armenian music and identity have been continually redrawn: from...
Spiders of the Market
Ghanaian Trickster Performance in a Web of Neoliberalism
Language: English
Release Date: July 4, 2016
The Ghanaian trickster-spider, Ananse, is a deceptive figure full of comic delight who blurs the lines of class, politics, and morality. David Afriyie Donkor identifies social performance as a way to understand trickster behavior within the shifting process of political legitimization in Ghana, revealing...
by Maria Semi, translated by Timothy Keates
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2016
Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding...
War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan
The Ethnographer’s Tale
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2016
In the 1970s John Baily conducted extensive ethnomusicological research in Afghanistan, principally in the city of Herat but also in Kabul. Then, with Taraki’s coup in 1978, came conflict, war, and the dispersal of many musicians to locations far and wide. This new publication is the culmination...
Life's A Good Gig
A Gringo Musician's Journey Into The World Of Latin Music
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2007
Life’s a Good Gig,” takes us on an international romp from the ultimate groove to the infamous gig from hell with a band of brothers like no others, some cool cats, some downright deadbeats. It’s Jimmy Buffet gone Bill Bryson. Musician/adventurer John Cain, like chef Anthony Bourdain, samples each...
Musical Ritual in Mexico City
From the Aztec to NAFTA
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2009
On the Zcalo, the main square of Mexico City, Mexico's entire musical history is performed every day. "Mexica" percussionists drum and dance to the music of Aztec rituals on the open plaza. Inside the Metropolitan Cathedral, choristers sing colonial villancicos. Outside the National Palace, the Mexican...
Jews and Jazz
Improvising Ethnicity
Language: English
Release Date: October 14, 2016
Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity explores the meaning of Jewish involvement in the world of American jazz. It focuses on the ways prominent jazz musicians like Stan Getz, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, and Red Rodney have engaged with jazz in order to explore...
by Frances Wilkins
Language: English
Release Date: January 17, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: January 17, 2018
Following three years of ethnomusicological fieldwork on the sacred singing traditions of evangelical Christians in North-East Scotland and Northern Isles coastal communities, Frances Wilkins documents and analyses current singing practices in this book by placing them historically and contemporaneously...
Singing Saltwater Country
Journey to the songlines of Carpentaria
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2010
At twenty John Bradley was sent to teach Aboriginal children in a school at remote Borroloola, on the Gulf of Carpentaria in far north Australia.
But it is the teacher who is educated by the Yanyuwa elders and their families. Over three decades he learns their language and their country, becoming...
Towards a Global Music Theory
Practical Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Music Across Human Cultures
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2016
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the cross-pollenization of world musical materials and practices has accelerated precipitously, due in large part to advances in higher-speed communications and travel. We live now in a world of global musical practice that will only continue to blossom...
Aurality
Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2015
In this audacious book, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different...