BiblioVault - Books about Latin

Caribbean Currents

Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae

Peter Manuel

Temple University Press, 2016

First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage.

The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, sociopolitical background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the rich and diverse musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of this most dynamic aspect of Caribbean culture.

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Caribbean Currents

Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae

Peter Manuel

Temple University Press, 2006

Music is the most popular and dynamic aspect of Caribbean expressive culture. From the well-known genres—salsa, merengue, reggae, calypso, and bachata—to more localized forms like chutney and kaseko, this wide-ranging book surveys Caribbean music's prodigious diversity and colorful history. Enhanced with numerous illustrations and musical examples, Caribbean Currents is an up-to-date overview of the region's music, covering Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Suriname, and smaller islands like Martinique and Guadeloupe. Engaging descriptions of musical forms and innovations, festivals and dance halls, as well as musicians and fans, are situated in

This revised and expanded version features:

* Twenty-seven new illustrations

* Recent developments in the region's music, such as the emergence of reggaetón and timba

* A new and extensive study of Jamaican dancehall

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Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, Volume 8

Virginia Brown

Catholic University of America Press, 1960

Considered a definitive source for scholars and students, this highly acclaimed series illustrates the impact of Greek and Latin texts on the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

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Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, Volume 9

Virginia Brown

Catholic University of America Press, 1960

Considered a definitive source for scholars and students, this highly acclaimed series illustrates the impact of Greek and Latin texts on the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

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A Commentary on Aristophanes' Knights

Carl Arne Anderson and T. Keith Dix

University of Michigan Press, 2020

A Commentary on Aristophanes’ Knights presents a fresh look at the play that cemented Aristophanes’ reputation as a rising star in comic theater. Knights offers an examination of social and political life in ancient Athens during the empire-destroying Peloponnesian War, as well as giving us Aristophanes’ comic send-up of the dangerous populist demagogue Cleon. This is a thoroughly modern commentary on a key play in the theatrical genre of Old Comedy, which satirized virtually every aspect of Athenian life in a period when Athens was at the height of its power and international prestige.

In addition to the complete Greek text and commentary, this volume includes a substantial introduction to the playwright’s career and to the historical and political background of the play. It includes advice for students on grammar and syntax, meter, festivals and staging, as well as topical and literary references and allusions that will help guide students to a mature appreciation of the comedy’s humor, seriousness, and artistic quality. Priced and sized for classroom use, this is the first full commentary on Knights since 1901 and will be widely welcomed.

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The Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament

Frederick William Danker

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Frederick William Danker, a world-renowned scholar of New Testament Greek, is widely acclaimed for his 2000 revision of Walter Bauer’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. With more than a quarter of a million copies in print, it is considered the finest dictionary of its kind.

Danker’s Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament will prove to be similarly invaluable to ministers, seminarians, translators, and students of biblical Greek. Unlike other lexica of the Greek New Testament, which give only brief glosses for headwords, The Concise Greek-English Lexicon offers extended definitions or explanations in idiomatic English for all Greek terms.

Each entry includes basic etymological information, short renderings, information on usage, and plentiful biblical references. Greek terms that could have different English definitions, depending on context, are thoughtfully keyed to the appropriate passages. An overarching aim of The Concise Greek-English Lexicon is to assist the reader in recognizing the broad linguistic and cultural context for New Testament usage of words.

The Concise Greek-English Lexicon retains all the acclaimed features of A Greek-English Lexicon in a succinct and affordable handbook, perfect for specialists and nonspecialists alike.

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Contemporary Carioca

Technologies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene

Frederick Moehn

Duke University Press, 2012

Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture, given its history as a hub of Brazilian media and culture. In Contemporary Carioca, the ethnomusicologist Frederick Moehn introduces a generation of Rio-based musicians who collaboratively have reinvigorated Brazilian genres, such as samba and maracatu, through juxtaposition with international influences, including rock, techno, and funk. Moehn highlights the creativity of individual artists, including Marcos Suzano, Lenine, Pedro Luís, Fernanda Abreu, and Paulinho Moska. He describes how these artists manage their careers, having reclaimed some control from record labels. Examining the specific meanings that their fusions have in the Carioca scene, he explains that musical mixture is not only intertwined with nationalist discourses of miscegenation, but also with the experience of being middle-class in a country confronting neoliberal models of globalization. At the same time, he illuminates the inseparability of race, gender, class, place, national identity, technology, and expressive practice in Carioca music and its making. Moehn offers vivid depictions of Rio musicians as they creatively combine and reconcile local realities with global trends and exigencies.

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Cortijo's Wake / El entierro de Cortijo

Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá

Duke University Press, 2004

A bilingual edition of a renowned work of Puerto Rican literature, Cortijo’s Wake/El entierro de Cortijo is novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s vivid description of the funeral of legendary Puerto Rican musician Rafael Cortijo. El entierro de Cortijo became an immediate bestseller following its original publication in Puerto Rico in 1983. An unparalleled Afro-Puerto Rican percussionist and bandleader, Cortijo (1928–1982) revolutionized the country’s musical culture. His band, Cortijo y Su Combo, captivated Caribbean and Latin American audiences as it emerged in the mid-1950s. Immensely popular across Puerto Rican social classes, the band both “modernized” the traditional vernacular forms of bomba and plena and forcefully reestablished their African and working-class roots. The group’s innovations have been integral to salsa since the 1960s.

Winding through the streets of working-class San Juan with Cortijo’s funeral procession, Rodríguez Juliá’s autobiographical chronicle provides a rare portrait of the impoverished society from which Cortijo’s music emerged. Along with detailed renderings of grief-stricken mourners—including Cortijo’s childhood friend and fellow musician, the celebrated singer Ismael ("Maelo") Rivera—Rodríguez Juliá records his feelings as he, a light-skinned, middle-class writer, confronts the world of poor black Puerto Ricans. The author’s masterful shifting of linguistic registers, his acute sensitivity to Puerto Rican social codes, his broad knowledge of popular music, and his sardonic ruminations on death and immortality make this one of the most widely read books of modern Puerto Rican literature. Well-known critic and cultural historian Juan Flores has provided a scrupulous translation of Rodríguez Juliá’s text and an introduction situating the book in relation to Puerto Rican music and culture and the careers of Cortijo and Rodríguez Juliá.

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A Course on Words

Waldo E. Sweet and Glenn M. Knudsvig

University of Michigan Press, 1989

A great many students enter an etymology course with only one goal -- to learn new words with the hope that they will be more successful in classwork, in standardized exams, or in a variety of work-related situations. In A Course on Words students will indeed learn new words, but, more important, they will gain an understanding of how words are built and how they can use this information to analyze new words that they will encounter outside the classroom. They will spend most of the time learning elements of words that will enable them to determine the meanings of many new words in the future. As one student put it, this book seems to "sensitize us to words and get us to think about words."

The book is unusual in that it offers both programmed and nonprogrammed material. Each type of material is designed to provide students with the maximum amount of involvement and practice. The students do not simply read definitions of words, as is the case with some courses. Rather, they engage in many different activities; not only defining words but analyzing and building them, and learning to use context to derive meaning. The programmed approach enables students to do the work on their own and receive immediate checks of their answers. Classroom time, therefore, is free for review, reinforcement of programmed activities, work on the nonprogrammed material, and attention to the needs of individual students. The book also includes at the end a set of Supplementary Exercises for each unit. The nonprogrammed materials include "Review Exercises," "Words of Interesting Origin," "Easily Confused Words," and "Latin Phrases." These provide practice in concepts learned in the unit and an opportunity to explore a wide variety of topics, such as eponymous words and the literal meanings of Latin expressions used in English.

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Cuban Music from A to Z

Helio Orovio

Duke University Press, 2004

Available in English for the first time, Cuban Music from A to Z is an encyclopedic guide to one of the world’s richest and most influential musical cultures. It is the most extensive compendium of information about the singers, composers, bands, instruments, and dances of Cuba ever assembled. With more than 1,300 entries and 150 illustrations, this volume is an essential reference guide to the music of the island that brought the world the danzón, the son, the mambo, the conga, and the cha-cha-chá.

The life’s work of Cuban historian and musician Helio Orovio, Cuban Music from A to Z presents the people, genres, and history of Cuban music. Arranged alphabetically and cross-referenced, the entries span from Abakuá music and dance to Eddy Zervigón, a Cuban bandleader based in New York City. They reveal an extraordinary fusion of musical elements, evident in the unique blend of African and Spanish traditions of the son musical genre and in the integration of jazz and rumba in the timba style developed by bands like Afrocuba, Chucho Valdés’s Irakeke, José Luis Cortés’s ng La Banda, and the Buena Vista Social Club. Folk and classical music, little-known composers and international superstars, drums and string instruments, symphonies and theaters—it’s all here.

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Cumbia!

Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre

Héctor Fernández L Hoeste and Pablo Vila, eds.

Duke University Press, 2013

Cumbia is a musical form that originated in northern Colombia and then spread throughout Latin America and wherever Latin Americans travel and settle. It has become one of the most popular musical genre in the Americas. Its popularity is largely due to its stylistic flexibility. Cumbia absorbs and mixes with the local musical styles it encounters. Known for its appeal to workers, the music takes on different styles and meanings from place to place, and even, as the contributors to this collection show, from person to person. Cumbia is a different music among the working classes of northern Mexico, Latin American immigrants in New York City, Andean migrants to Lima, and upper-class Colombians, who now see the music that they once disdained as a source of national prestige. The contributors to this collection look at particular manifestations of cumbia through their disciplinary lenses of musicology, sociology, history, anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism. Taken together, their essays highlight how intersecting forms of identity—such as nation, region, class, race, ethnicity, and gender—are negotiated through interaction with the music.

Contributors. Cristian Alarcón, Jorge Arévalo Mateus, Leonardo D'Amico, Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste, Alejandro L. Madrid, Kathryn Metz, José Juan Olvera Gudiño, Cathy Ragland, Pablo Semán, Joshua Tucker, Matthew J. Van Hoose, Pablo Vila

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