front cover of Enchanting Powers
Enchanting Powers
Music in the World’s Religions
Lawrence E. Sullivan
Harvard University Press, 1997
The Confucian Sacrificial Ceremony, the Choctaw ball game, the "drum history" of the Dagbamba, the chanting of the Qur'an--these are some of the topics addressed in this collection of essays by eminent musicologists, anthropologists, historians, and religionists as they consider the intersection of musics and religions in different world cultures.
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Let Jasmine Rain Down
Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
University of Chicago Press, 1998
When Jews left Aleppo, Syria, in the early twentieth century and established communities abroad, they carried with them a repertory of songs (pizmonim) with sacred Hebrew texts set to melodies borrowed from the popular Middle Eastern Arab musical tradition. Let Jasmine Rain Down tells the story of the pizmonim as they have continued to be composed, performed, and transformed through the present day; it is thus an innovative ethnography of an important Judeo-Arabic musical tradition and a probing contribution to studies of the link between collective memory and popular culture.

Shelemay views the intersection of music, individual remembrances, and collective memory through the pizmonim. Reconstructing a century of pizmon history in America based on research in New York, Mexico, and Israel, she explains how verbal and musical memories are embedded in individual songs and how these songs perform both what has been remembered and what otherwise would have been forgotten. In confronting issues of identity and meaning in a postmodern world, Shelemay moves ethnomusicology into the domain of memory studies.

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Pain and Its Transformations
The Interface of Biology and Culture
Sarah Coakley
Harvard University Press, 2008

Pain is immediate and searing but remains a deep mystery for sufferers, their physicians, and researchers. As neuroscientific research shows, even the immediate sensation of pain is shaped by psychological state and interpretation. At the same time, many individuals and cultures find meaning, particularly religious meaning, even in chronic and inexplicable pain.

This ambitious interdisciplinary book includes not only essays but also discussions among a wide range of specialists. Neuroscientists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, musicologists, and scholars of religion examine the ways that meditation, music, prayer, and ritual can mediate pain, offer a narrative that transcends the sufferer, and give public dignity to private agony. They discuss topics as disparate as the molecular basis of pain, the controversial status of gate control theory, the possible links between the relaxation response and meditative practices in Christianity and Buddhism, and the mediation of pain and intense emotion in music, dance, and ritual. The authors conclude by pondering the place of pain in understanding--or the human failure to understand--good and evil in history.

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Sing and Sing On
Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A sweeping history of Ethiopian musicians during and following the 1974 Ethiopian revolution.

Sing and Sing On is the first study of the forced migration of musicians out of the Horn of Africa dating from the 1974 Ethiopian revolution, a political event that overthrew one of the world’s oldest monarchies and installed a brutal military regime. Musicians were among the first to depart the region, their lives shattered by revolutionary violence, curfews, and civil war. Reconstructing the memories of forced migration, Sing and Sing On traces the challenges musicians faced amidst revolutionary violence and the critical role they played in building communities abroad.

Drawing on the recollections of dozens of musicians, Sing and Sing On details personal, cultural, and economic hardships experienced by musicians who have resettled in new locales abroad. Kay Kaufman Shelemay highlights their many artistic and social initiatives and the ways they have offered inspiration and leadership within and beyond a rapidly growing Ethiopian American diaspora. While musicians held this role as sentinels in Ethiopian culture long before the revolution began, it has taken on new meanings and contours in the Ethiopian diaspora. The book details the ongoing creativity of these musicians while exploring the attraction of return to their Ethiopian homeland over the course of decades abroad. Ultimately, Shelemay shows that musicians are uniquely positioned to serve this sentinel role as both guardians and challengers of cultural heritage.
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front cover of A Song of Longing
A Song of Longing
AN ETHIOPIAN JOURNEY
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
University of Illinois Press, 1992
"A rich, descriptive account. . . . Shelemay presents extraordinary personal experiences that shaped her research process and make reading this text pleasurable."
-- Library Journal
 
"Highly recommended to generalists in music as well as to specialists interested in Ethiopia. . . . Also makes an excellent case study text for university-level courses examining fieldwork issues and conditions."
-- Notes
"Highly recommended for both undergraduate and graduate collections in ethnomusicology, anthropology, African, and Judaic studies."
-- Choice
 
 
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