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316 books match the query 'Ethnomusicology' and 48 start with m

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Macau and Catholic Sacred Music Across the Sino-Western Divide

Jen-yen Chen

University of Michigan Press, 2026

For three centuries, the former Portuguese colony of Macau served as the gateway into mainland China and the locale for the development of an Asian Catholic culture that encompassed distinctive musical practices and styles. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide draws extensively upon historical documents in Chinese and Portuguese for a polylingual approach to Catholic sacred music. Jen-yen Chen follows this music from the sixteenth century through the twentieth by reading literary accounts of sound, primary source documents, and musical notation to examine the impacts of linguistic, political, and cultural divides and the ways sounds have traveled across these divides. Chen covers Chinese responses to Western sounds in Macau and southern China, illuminating the strategies for the use of sounds and musicking adopted by Jesuit missionaries; and the complexities of identity formation negotiated by Macau Catholics who confront exceptionalist historical discourses of Chinese or Portuguese “greatness.”

Drawing from sound studies and musicological methods, Chen argues that Chinese descriptions of Catholic sounds in Macau, including the ringing of church bells, the playing of the organ, and choral singing, illuminate spatial, sonic, and ideological mobilities that reconfigure Chinese and European identities. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide also extends to contemporary times to explore how present day members of Macau’s Catholic community position themselves in relation to the historical narratives often told about their city, cultivating a rich individuality of identity that refuses conformity to fixed notions of Asianness or Westernness.

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Making It Up Together

The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond

Leslie A. Tilley

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes.

Through two contrasting Balinese case studies—of the reyong gong chime’s melodic norot practice and the interlocking drumming tradition kendang arja—Tilley proposes and tests analytical frameworks for examining collectively improvised performance. At the micro-level, Tilley’s analyses offer insight into the note-by-note decisions of improvising performers; at the macro-level, they illuminate larger musical, discursive, structural, and cultural factors shaping those decisions. This multi-tiered inquiry reveals that unpacking how performers play and imagine as a collective is crucial to understanding improvisation and demonstrates how music analysis can elucidate these complex musical and interactional relationships.

Highlighting connections with diverse genres from various music cultures, Tilley’s examinations of collective improvisation also suggest rich potential for cross-genre exploration. The surrounding discussions point to larger theories of communication and interaction, creativity and cognition that will be of interest to a range of readers—from ethnomusicologists and music theorists to cognitive psychologists, jazz studies scholars, and improvising performers. Setting new parameters for the study of improvisation, Making It Up Together opens up fresh possibilities for understanding the creative process, in music and beyond.

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Making Mexican Rock

Censorship, Journalism, and Popular Music after Avándaro

Andrew J. Green

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

The history of Mexican rock is one of censorship. A number of cultural histories recount how rock was repressed, censored, and marginalized by Mexico’s single-party regime in the twentieth century, often focusing on the authoritarian crackdown that followed a mediatized moral panic after the Avándaro Festival of 1971. The popular 2020 Netflix documentary Break It All, for example, positions Mexican rock as a potent expression of resistance in the late twentieth century, forging a strong association with Mexico’s transition away from authoritarian rule and toward neoliberal democracy.

Yet in light of the failures of successive democratically elected governments in Mexico, these histories are worth critically revisiting and updating. What stories about music censorship can be told after Mexico’s transition to multi-party democracy? Placing history and ethnography into dialogue, Making Mexican Rock explores historical and recent experiences of censorship and repression against popular music, focusing on the independent rock scene (or “escena independiente”) in Mexico City.

Informed by the so-called new censorship theory, ethnomusicologist Andrew J. Green challenges historical accounts that equate acts of censorship with state activity. The open-ended account of censorship assumed here helps us to understand, instead, how conceptions of censorship and expressive freedom transformed toward the end of single-party rule; how practices of policing live rock adapted to neoliberal securitization; and how histories of rock censorship have been invoked by those seeking to construct and protect emergent music scenes. Making Mexican Rock thus both decenters histories of music censorship from the state, and extends them into the country’s recent history.

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Making Music Indigenous

Popular Music in the Peruvian Andes

Joshua Tucker

University of Chicago Press, 2019

When thinking of indigenous music, many people may imagine acoustic instruments and pastoral settings far removed from the whirl of modern life. But, in contemporary Peru, indigenous chimaycha music has become a wildly popular genre that is even heard in the nightclubs of Lima. In Making Music Indigenous, Joshua Tucker traces the history of this music and its key performers over fifty years to show that there is no single way to “sound indigenous.” The musicians Tucker follows make indigenous culture and identity visible in contemporary society by establishing a cultural and political presence for Peru’s indigenous peoples through activism, artisanship, and performance. This musical representation of indigeneity not only helps shape contemporary culture, it also provides a lens through which to reflect on the country’s past. Tucker argues that by following the musicians that have championed chimaycha music in its many forms, we can trace shifting meanings of indigeneity—and indeed, uncover the ways it is constructed, transformed, and ultimately recreated through music.

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Making Value

Music, Capital, and the Social

Timothy D. Taylor

Duke University Press, 2024

In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people’s conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music’s economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically. He covers the creation and exchange of value in a wide range of contexts: indie rock scenes, an Irish traditional music session, the work of music managers, how supply chains function to create various forms of value, how trendspotters seek out and create value, and how musical performances act as media of value. Taylor shows that to focus on value is to attend to what is meaningful to people as they move through their worlds. Ultimately, Taylor demonstrates that theorizing value aids us in moving beyond the music itself toward understanding how musicians, workers in the music business, and audiences struggle to make and maintain what they value.

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Mande Music

Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa

Eric Charry

University of Chicago Press, 2000

With Mande Music, Eric Charry offers the most comprehensive source available on one of Africa's richest and most sophisticated music cultures. Using resources as disparate as early Arabic travel accounts, oral histories, and archival research as well as his own extensive studies in Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia, Charry traces this music culture from its origins in the thirteenth-century Mali empire to the recording studios of Paris and New York. He focuses on the four major spheres of Mande music—hunter's music, music of the jelis or griots, jembe and other drumming, and guitar-based modern music—exploring how each evolved, the types of instruments used, the major artists, and how each sphere relates to the others. With its maps, illustrations, and musical transcriptions as well as an exhaustive bibliography, discography, and videography, this book is essential reading for those seeking an in-depth look at one of the most exciting, innovative, and deep-rooted phenomena on the world music scene. A compact disc is available separately.

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Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song

MPB, 1965-1985

By Charles A. Perrone

University of Texas Press, 1993

Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song is a critical study of MPB (música popular brasileira), a term that refers to varieties of urban popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, incorporating samba, Bossa Nova, and new materials.

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Masters of the Sabar

Wolof Griot Percussionists of Senegal

Patricia Tang

Temple University Press, 2006

Masters of the Sabar is the first book to examine the music and culture of Wolof griot percussionists, masters of the vibrant sabar drumming tradition. Based on extensive field research in Senegal, this book is a biographical study of several generations of percussionists in a Wolof griot (géwël) family, exploring and documenting their learning processes, repertories, and performance contexts—from life-cycle ceremonies to sporting events and political meetings. Patricia Tang examines the rich history and changing repertories of sabar drumming, including dance rhythms and bàkks, musical phrases derived from spoken words. She notes the recent shift towards creating new bàkks which are rhythmically more complex and highlight the virtuosity and musical skill of the percussionist. She also considers the burgeoning popular music genre called mbalax. The compact disc that accompanies the book includes examples of the standard sabar repertory, as well as bàkks composed and performed by Lamine Touré and his family drum troupe.

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Maya Achi Marimba Music In Guatemala

Sergio Navarrete Pellicer

Temple University Press, 2005

For the Achi, one of the several Mayan ethnic groups indigenous to Guatemala, the music of the marimba serves not only as a form of entertainment but also as a form of communication, a vehicle for memory, and an articulation of cultural identity. Sergio Navarrete Pellicer examines the marimba tradition—the confluence of African musical influences, Spanish colonial power, and Indian ethnic assimilation—as a driving force in the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in Rabinal, the heart of Achi culture and society. By examining the performance and consumption of marimba music as essential parts of a system of social interaction, religious practice, and ethnic identification, Navarrete Pellicer reveals how the strains of the marimba resonate with the spiritual yearnings and cultural negotiations of the Achi as they try to come to terms with the violence and economic hardship wrought by their colonial past.

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Mbira's Restless Dance

An Archive of Improvisation

Paul F. Berliner and Cosmas Magaya

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Growing out of the collaborative research of an American ethnomusicologist and Zimbabwean musician, Paul F. Berliner and Cosmas Magaya’s Mbira’s Restless Dance documents the repertory for a keyboard instrument known generally as mbira. At the heart of this work lies the analysis of the improvisatory processes that propel mbira music’s magnificent creativity.

Mbira’s Restless Dance is written to be played. This two-volume, spiral-bound set features musical transcriptions of thirty-nine compositions and variations, annotated with the master player’s advice on technique and performance, his notes and observations, and commentary by Berliner. Enhanced with extensive website audiovisuals, Mbira’s Restless Dance is in effect a series of masterclasses with Magaya, suitable for experienced mbira players and those learning the fundamentals.

Together with Berliner's The Art of Mbira, in which he provides an indispensable historical and cultural guide to mbira in a changing world, Mbira's Restless Dance breaks new ground in the depth and specificity of its exploration of an African musical tradition, and in the entwining of the authors’ collaborative voices. It is a testament to the powerful relationship between music and social life—and the rewards of lifelong musical study, performance, and friendship.

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Men and Popular Music in Algeria

The Social Significance of Raï

By Marc Schade-Poulsen

University of Texas Press, 1999

Raï music is often called the voice of the voiceless in Algeria, a society currently swept by tragic conflict. Raï is the voice of Algerian men, young men caught between generations and classes, in political strife, and in economic inequality. In a ground-breaking study, anthropologist Marc Schade-Poulsen uses this popular music genre as a lens through which he views Algerian society, particularly male society. He situates raï within Algerian family life, moral codes, and broader power relations.

Schade-Poulsen did his research in the 1990s, in clubs, recording studios, at weddings, and with street musicians. He describes the history of raï, which emerged in the late 1970s and spread throughout North Africa at the same time the Islamist movement was growing to become the most potent socio-political movement in Algeria.

Outsiders consider raï to be Western in origin, but Schade-Poulsen shows its Islamic roots as well. The musicians do use Western instruments, but the music itself mixes Algerian popular songs and rhythms with the beat of American disco, Egyptian modalities, Moroccan wedding tunes, and the songs of Julio Iglesias. The lyrics deal with male-female relationships but also with generational relationships and the problems of youth, as they struggle to find a place in a conflicted society.

The study, in its innovative approach to music as a template of society, helps the reader understand the two major movements among today's Algerian youth: one toward the mosque and the other toward the West.

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Mishearing Home

A Sinophone Poetics of Sound

Yun Emily Wang

Duke University Press, 2027

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Modern Noise, Fluid Genres

Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001

Jeremy Wallach

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

What happens to “local” sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s chaotic and momentous transition to democracy, Wallach takes us to recording studios, music stores, concert venues, university campuses, video shoots, and urban neighborhoods.

Integrating ground-level ethnographic research with insights drawn from contemporary cultural theory, he shows that access to globally circulating music and technologies has neither extinguished nor homogenized local music-making in Indonesia. Instead, it has provided young Indonesians with creative possibilities for exploring their identity in a diverse nation undergoing dramatic changes in an increasingly interconnected world. Ultimately, he finds, the unofficial, multicultural nationalism of Indonesian popular music provides a viable alternative to the religious, ethnic, regional, and class-based extremism that continues to threaten unity and democracy in that country.

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Mongolian Sound Worlds

Edited by Jennifer C. Post, Sunmin Yoon, and Charlotte D'Evelyn

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Music cultures today in rural and urban Mongolia and Inner Mongolia emerge from centuries-old pastoralist practices that were reshaped by political movements in the twentieth century. Mongolian Sound Worlds investigates the unique sonic elements, fluid genres, social and spatial performativity, and sounding objects behind new forms of Mongolian music--forms that reflect the nation’s past while looking towards its globalized future. Drawing on fieldwork in locations across the Inner Asian region, the contributors report on Mongolia’s genres and musical landscapes; instruments like the morin khuur, tovshuur, and Kazakh dombyra; combined fusion band culture; and urban popular music. Their broad range of concerns include nomadic herders’ music and instrument building, ethnic boundaries, heritage-making, ideological influences, nationalism, and global circulation.

A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture.

Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D’Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon

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More Than Friends

Muslim-Jewish Intimacy in Algerian Music

Jonathan Glasser

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Explores the Muslim-Jewish relationship through music in Algeria and its diaspora.

Today, more than six decades after the departure of Jews from Algeria to France at the moment of decolonization, music remains a compelling site for remembering Muslim-Jewish intimacy before the moment of rupture. In this way, music works against dominant discourses of Muslim-Jewish conflict and Jewish outsider status, instead presenting music as a sign of Muslim-Jewish brotherhood and of Jewish rootedness in North Africa. Yet digging deeper into the lived past and its relation to contemporary memory uncovers the fragility of brotherhood as well as competing ways to read Muslim-Jewish intimacy around music, some of which edge into rivalry, hierarchy, and difference. In More than Friends, Jonathan Glasser draws on historical archives and ethnographic research in Algeria and in France to weigh these multiple interpretations of the Muslim-Jewish past, ultimately offering an alternative, more resilient way of imagining what it means to be intimate through music.

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Moving Away from Silence

Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration

Thomas Turino

University of Chicago Press, 1993

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Music Grooves

Essays and Dialogues

Charles Keil and Steven Feld

University of Chicago Press, 1994

A collaboration between two of the most interesting voices in ethnomusicology, this volume explores two powerful themes: the "groove" of firsthand experience and participation in music and the "groove" of musical mediation and commodification through recordings. A number of the authors' most important essays, all revised and updated, are introduced and framed by dialogues that supply additional context, introduce retrospective concerns, and reveal connections. This format signals the authors' desire for a more reflexive, experimental discourse on music and society and invites readers to join their conversations.

Music Grooves ranges from jazz, blues, polka, soul, rock, world beat, rap, karaoke, and other familiar genres to major scholarly debates in music theory, ethnomusicology, and popular culture studies. The authors develop and create links between the fields of ethnomusicology and popular culture studies and relate the contents of musics from America, Greece, Cuba, Africa, and Papua New Guinea to artists as diverse as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, L'il Wally Jagiello, Bo Diddley, Walt Solek, Madonna, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday.

Keil and Feld offer a fascinating view of the shaping of central ideas and terms in ethnomusicology such as "engendered feeling," "interpretive moves," "participatory discrepancies," "iconicity of style," "people's music," "schizophonia," and "lift-up-over sounding." From Keil's critique of Leonard Meyer's musicological approach to Feld's recent work on world beat, this volume covers an array of vital issues in media studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, popular culture, anthropology, and sociology. It will interest anyone concerned with the nature and meaning of music in the modern world.

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Music Making Community

Edited by Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better.

Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras

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Music Scenes

Local, Translocal, and Virtual

Andy Bennett

Vanderbilt University Press, 2004

These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of music scenes, those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few--New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hip-hop--achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect.

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Music Talent & Performance

Conservatory Cultural System

Henry Kingsbury

Temple University Press, 2001

A provocative, perceptive study of the cultural dynamics of classical music in American society, Music, Talent, and Performance describes music as a metaphor of the society in which it takes place.

Author Henry Kingbury, a conservatory-trained pianist and music educator turned anthropologist forgoes the traditional ethnomusicologist approach of looking at a non-Western musical culture to focus on the "field" of an American conservatory. The result is a penetrating look at the distinction between teaching music and the nurturing of musicality. Kingsbury offers an innovative anthropological analysis of the western notion of "talent" and its cultural character, noting that many non-western societies have no such concept. Furthermore, he examines various contexts in which music is produced, experienced, and evaluated. His discussion includes the dynamics of orchestra rehearsals in the conservatory, "master class" lessons with a distinguished performer-pedagogue, the ritual characteristics of solo recitals, and an interpretive analysis of stage fright.

Ultimately, Kingsbury argues that music "is highly shifting and indeterminate in meaning," a concept that has important implications for all interpreters of culture and for the artists themselves.

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Music and Conflict

Edited by John Morgan O'Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castello-Branco

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This volume charts a new frontier of applied ethnomusicology by highlighting the role of music in both inciting and resolving a spectrum of social and political conflicts in the contemporary world. Examining the materials and practices of music-making, contributors detail how music and performance are deployed to critique power structures and to nurture cultural awareness among communities in conflict.

The essays here range from musicological studies to ethnographic analyses to accounts of practical interventions that could serve as models for conflict resolution. Music and Conflict reveals how musical texts are manipulated by opposing groups to promote conflict and how music can be utilized to advance conflict resolution. Speaking to the cultural implications of globalization and pointing out how music can promote a shared musical heritage across borders, the essays discuss the music of Albania, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, North and South Korea, Uganda, the United States, and the former Yugoslavia. The volume also includes dozens of illustrations, including photos, maps, and musical scores.

Contributors are Samuel Araujo, William Beeman, Stephen Blum, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, David Cooper, Keith Howard, Inna Naroditskaya, John Morgan O'Connell, Svanibor Pettan, Anne K. Rasmussen, Adelaida Reyes, Anthony Seeger, Jane C. Sugarman, and Britta Sweers.

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Music and Cultural Rights

Edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bell Yung

University of Illinois Press, 2009

Framing timely and pressing questions concerning music and cultural rights, this collection illustrates the ways in which music--as a cultural practice, a commercial product, and an aesthetic form--has become enmeshed in debates about human rights, international law, and struggles for social justice. The essays in this volume examine how interpretations of cultural rights vary across societies; how definitions of rights have evolved; and how rights have been invoked in relation to social struggles over cultural access, use, representation, and ownership. The individual case studies, many of them based on ethnographic field research, demonstrate how musical aspects of cultural rights play out in specific cultural contexts, including the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Peru, Ukraine, and Brazil.

Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Adriana Helbig, Javier F. Leon, Ana María Ochoa, Silvia Ramos, Helen Rees, Felicia Sandler, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, Ricardo D. Trimillos, Andrew N. Weintraub, and Bell Yung.

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Music and Digital Media

A Planetary Anthropology

Edited by Georgina Born

University College London, 2022

The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music.

Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.

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Music and Gender

Perspectives from the Mediterranean

Edited by Tullia Magrini

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Although scholars have long been aware of the crucial roles that gender plays in music, and vice versa, the contributors to this volume are among the first to systematically examine the interactions between the two. This book is also the first to explore the diverse, yet often strikingly similar, musics of the areas bordering the Mediterranean from comparative anthropological perspectives.

From Spanish flamenco to Algerian raï, Greek rebetika to Turkish pop music, Sephardi and Berber songs to Egyptian belly dancers, the contributors cover an exceedingly wide range of geographic and musical territories. Individual essays examine musical behavior as representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of gender identities; compare men's and women's roles in specific musical practices and their historical evolution; and explore how music and gender relate to such issues as ethnicity, nationality, and religion. Anyone studying the musics or cultures of the Mediterranean, or more generally the relations between gender and the arts, will welcome this book.

Contributors:
Caroline Bithell, Joaquina Labajo, Jane C. Sugarman, Carol Silverman, Goffredo Plastino, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Edwin Seroussi, Marie Virolle, Terry Brint Joseph, Deborah Kapchan, Karin van Nieuwkerk, Svanibor Pettan, Martin Stokes, Philip V. Bohlman

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Music and Genre

New Directions

Georgina Born and David Brackett, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

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Music and German National Identity

Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Is it merely a coincidence that the three "Bs" of classical music—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—are all German composers? Why do concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire? Over the past three centuries, supporters of German music ranging from music scholars to politicians have nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music.

This book explores the questions of how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated as "the most German art." Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars in German history, musicology, and German literature, the essays assembled here examine philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents, as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, and pop to explore the ways in which music has continued to play a central role in the German national imagination and in shaping German identity.

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Music and Musical Thought in Early India

Lewis Rowell

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal patterns, and genres of Indian music from Vedic times to the thirteenth century, presenting not so much a history as a thematic analysis and interpretation of India's magnificent musical heritage.

In Indian culture, music forms an integral part of a broad framework of ideas that includes philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. Rowell works with the known theoretical treatises and the oral tradition in an effort to place the technical details of musical practice in their full cultural context. Many quotations from the original Sanskrit appear here in English translation for the first time, and the necessary technical information is presented in terms accessible to the nonspecialist. These features, combined with Rowell's glossary of Sanskrit terms and extensive bibliography, make Music and Musical Thought in Early India an excellent introduction for the general reader and an indispensable reference for ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, and Indologists.

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Music and Social Change in South Africa

Maskanda Past and Present

Kathryn Olsen

Temple University Press, 2014

Music and Social Change in South Africa looks at contemporary maskanda-a folk musical genre distinguished by fast guitar picking and blues-style vocal intonation-against the backdrop of South Africa's history. A performance practice that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century among Zulu migrant workers, maskanda is strongly associated with young Zulu men's experiences of repression and dislocation during imperial and, more particularly, apartheid rule.

Working closely with translated song lyrics and musical notation-and applying musical and socio-political analysis to this music and its cultural context-Olsen argues that maskanda offers insight into how the post-apartheid ideal of social transformation is experienced by those who were marginalized for most of the twentieth century.

Drawing on a decade of research, Olsen strives to demystify the Zulu part of contemporary experience in South Africa and to reveal some of the complexities of the social, economic, and political landscape of contemporary South Africa.

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Music and the Making of Portugal and Spain

Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Iberian Peninsula

Edited by Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, Salwa el-Shawan Castelo-Branco, and Samuel Llano

University of Illinois Press, 2023

How music embodies and contributes to historical and contemporary nationalism

What does music in Portugal and Spain reveal about the relationship between national and regional identity building? How do various actors use music to advance nationalism? How have state and international heritage regimes contributed to nationalist and regionalist projects? In this collection, contributors explore these and other essential questions from a range of interdisciplinary vantage points. The essays pay particular attention to the role played by the state in deciding what music represents Portuguese or Spanish identity. Case studies examine many aspects of the issue, including local recording networks, so-called national style in popular music, and music’s role in both political protest and heritage regimes. Topics include the ways the Salazar and Franco regimes adapted music to align with their ideological agendas; the twenty-first-century impact of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage program on some of Portugal and Spain's expressive practices; and the tensions that arise between institutions and community in creating and recreating meanings and identity around music.

Contributors: Ricardo Andrade, Vera Marques Alves, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, José Hugo Pires Castro, Paulo Ferreira de Castro, Fernán del Val, Héctor Fouce, Diego García-Peinazo, Leonor Losa, Josep Martí, Eva Moreda Rodríguez, Pedro Russo Moreira, Cristina Cruces Roldán, and Igor Contreras Zubillaga

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Music and the New Global Culture

From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age

Harry Liebersohn

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and the New Global Culture, Harry Liebersohn traces the origins of global music to a handful of critical transformations that took place between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Britain, the arts and crafts movement inspired a fascination with non-Western music; Germany fostered a scholarly approach to global musical comparison, creating the field we now call ethnomusicology; and the United States provided the technological foundation for the dissemination of a diverse spectrum of musical cultures by launching the phonograph industry. This is not just a story of Western innovation, however: Liebersohn shows musical responses to globalization in diverse areas that include the major metropolises of India and China and remote settlements in South America and the Arctic. By tracing this long history of world music, Liebersohn shows how global movement has forever changed how we hear music—and indeed, how we feel about the world around us.

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Music and the Racial Imagination

Edited by Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman

University of Chicago Press, 2001

"A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself.

Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

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Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec

Performing Tradition

Laura Risk

University of Illinois Press, 2026

The story of a cultural touchstone and its impact

Fiddlers, step dancers, storytellers, traditional singers, and folklorists staged Montreal’s first veillée in 1919. All that was missing, announced one of the organizers, was a magic carpet to transport the audience into the countryside and a kiss of forgetfulness to erase the woes of modern life.

Laura Risk tells the story of the veillées and explores how these commercial performances of idealized rural life became part of Quebec’s cultural heritage. Her in-depth examinations of key performances and recordings follow traditional music and dance from the stage onto radio, records and other audio media, and television. Throughout, Risk documents how veillées redefined folklore in twentieth-century Quebec and illuminates how their distinctive framing of traditional musicians and repertoire impacts the performance and reception of the music to the present day.

Astute and evocative, Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec reveals the music, dancing, call-and-response songs, and extramusical associations winding through century-long conversations about nation, culture, and identity in Quebec.

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Music as Mao's Weapon

Remembering the Cultural Revolution

Lei X. Ouyang

University of Illinois Press, 2022

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022

China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) produced propaganda music that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. Lei X. Ouyang uses selections from revolutionary songbooks to untangle the complex interactions between memory, trauma, and generational imprinting among those who survived the period of extremes. Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork and surveys to explore both the Cultural Revolution's effect on those who lived through it as children and contemporary remembrance of the music created to serve the Maoist regime. As Ouyang shows, the weaponization of music served an ideological revolution but also revolutionized the senses. She examines essential questions raised by this phenomenon, including: What did the revolutionization look, sound, and feel like? What does it take for individuals and groups to engage with such music? And what is the impact of such an experience over time?

Perceptive and provocative, Music as Mao's Weapon is an insightful look at the exploitation and manipulation of the arts under authoritarianism.

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Music as Social Life

The Politics of Participation

Thomas Turino

University of Chicago Press, 2008

People around the world and throughout history have used music to express their inner emotions, reach out to the divine, woo lovers, celebrate weddings, inspire political movements, and lull babies to sleep. In Music as Social Life, Thomas Turino explores why it is that music and dance are so often at the center of our most profound personal and social experiences.
Turino begins by developing tools to think about the special properties of music and dance that make them fundamental resources for connecting with our own lives, our communities, and the environment. These concepts are then put into practice as he analyzes various musical examples among indigenous Peruvians, rural and urban Zimbabweans, and American old-time musicians and dancers. To examine the divergent ways that music can fuel social and political movements, Turino looks at its use by the Nazi Party and by the American civil rights movement. Wide-ranging, accessible to anyone with an interest in music’s role in society, and accompanied by a compact disc, Music as Social Life is an illuminating initiation into the power of music.

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Music in the World

Selected Essays

Timothy D. Taylor

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In music studies, Timothy D. Taylor is known for his insightful essays on music, globalization, and capitalism. Music in the World is a collection of some of Taylor’s most recent writings—essays concerned with questions about music in capitalist cultures, covering a historical span that begins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continues to the present. These essays look at shifts in the production, dissemination, advertising, and consumption of music from the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century to the globalized neoliberal capitalism of the past few decades.

In addition to chapters on music, capitalism, and globalization, Music in the World includes previously unpublished essays on the continuing utility of the concept of culture in the study of music, a historicization of treatments of affect, and an essay on value and music. Taken together, Taylor’s essays chart the changes in different kinds of music in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and culture from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

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Music of Death and New Creation

Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur

Michael B. Bakan

University of Chicago Press, 1999

For centuries the gamelan beleganjur percussion orchestra has been an indispensable part of political, social, and spiritual life on the island of Bali. Traditionally associated with warfare and rituals for the dead, the music has recently given rise to an exciting new musical style featured in contests that are attended by thousands. Ethnomusicologist Michael Bakan draws us into these intensely competitive events, in which political corruption, conflicting notions of identity, and irrepressible creativity rupture the smooth surface of cultural order.

Building from his own experiences as a beleganjur drummer, Bakan also takes us inside a distant musical world and into the lives of musicians connecting across vast cultural divides. Rich with musical examples, photographs, and an accompanying compact disc, Music of Death and New Creation is an unprecedented exploration of how music embodies and shapes life in contemporary Indonesia and beyond.

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Music of Hindu Trinidad

Songs from the India Diaspora

Helen Myers

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora.

Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.

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Music of the First Nations

Tradition and Innovation in Native North America

Edited by Tara Browner

University of Illinois Press, 2009

This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to an ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this collection promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods.

Contributors are T. Christopher Aplin, Tara Browner, Paula Conlon, David E. Draper, Elaine Keillor, Lucy Lafferty, Franziska von Rosen, David Samuels, Laurel Sercombe, and Judith Vander.

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Music, Culture, and Experience

Selected Papers of John Blacking

John Blacking

University of Chicago Press, 1995

One of the most important ethnomusicologists of the century, John Blacking achieved international recognition for his book, How Musical Is Man? Known for his interest in the relationship of music to biology, psychology, dance, and politics, Blacking was deeply committed to the idea that music-making is a fundamental and universal attribute of the human species. He attempted to document the ways in which music-making expresses the human condition, how it transcends social divisions, and how it can be used to improve the quality of human life.

This volume brings together in one convenient source eight of Blacking's most important theoretical papers along with an extensive introduction by the editor. Drawing heavily on his fieldwork among the Venda people of South Africa, these essays reveal his most important theoretical themes such as the innateness of musical ability, the properties of music as a symbolic or quasi-linguistic system, the complex relation between music and social institutions, and the relation between scientific musical analysis and cultural understanding.

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Music, Race, and Nation

Musica Tropical in Colombia

Peter Wade

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Long a favorite on dance floors in Latin America, the porro, cumbia, and vallenato styles that make up Colombia's música tropical are now enjoying international success. How did this music—which has its roots in a black, marginal region of the country—manage, from the 1940s onward, to become so popular in a nation that had prided itself on its white heritage? Peter Wade explores the history of música tropical, analyzing its rise in the context of the development of the broadcast media, rapid urbanization, and regional struggles for power. Using archival sources and oral histories, Wade shows how big band renditions of cumbia and porro in the 1940s and 1950s suggested both old traditions and new liberties, especially for women, speaking to a deeply rooted image of black music as sensuous. Recently, nostalgic, "whitened" versions of música tropical have gained popularity as part of government-sponsored multiculturalism.

Wade's fresh look at the way music transforms and is transformed by ideologies of race, nation, sexuality, tradition, and modernity is the first book-length study of Colombian popular music.

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Music, Research, and Activism

Prospects and Projects in Northern Europe

Edited by Kim Ramstedt, Susanna Välimäki, Sini Mononen, and Kaj Ahlsved

Intellect Books, 2025

A radical exploration of how music educators and artists are using research as a tool for justice in an era of crisis and transformation.

Can music research drive social and ecological change? Music, Research, and Activism: Prospects and Projects in Northern Europe argues that it can—and must. This bold collection studies the emerging activist turn in music studies, where researchers and artists engage directly in public debates and cultural movements.

By questioning systemic inequalities in the music industry and exploring the role of music education in an era of climate crisis, the contributors to this volume reflect on how their work can serve eco-social justice. Drawing on their diverse experiences as educators, critics, DJs, producers, and community organizers, they offer a compelling vision of music research as an agent of transformation.

Rooted in the independent research network Suoni, this volume speaks to music scholars and students eager to rethink the role of music in shaping a more equitable world. Engaging and accessible, it challenges us to ask: What does social responsibility look like in music research today?

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Music, Style, and Aging

Growing Old Disgracefully?

Andy Bennett

Temple University Press, 2013

The image of the aging rock-and-roller is not just Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger on stage in their sixties. In his timely book Music, Style, and Aging, cultural sociologist Andy Bennett explains how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular music.

For many aging followers of rock, punk, and other contemporary popular genres, music is ingrained in their identities. Its meaning is highly personal and intertwined with the individual's biographical development. Bennett studies these fans and how they have changed over time--through fashions, hairstyles, body modification, career paths, political orientations, and perceptions of and by the next generation.

The significance of popular music for these fans is no longer tied exclusively to their youth. Bennett illustrates how the music? that "mattered" to most people in their youth continues to play an important role in their adult lives--a role that goes well beyond nostalgia.

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Musica Nortena

Mexican Americans Creating a Nation Between Nations

Cathy Ragland

Temple University Press, 2009

Música norteña, a musical genre with its roots in the folk ballad traditions of northern Mexico and the Texas-Mexican border region, has become a hugely popular musical style in the U.S., particularly among Mexican immigrants. Featuring evocative songs about undocumented border-crossers, drug traffickers, and the plight of immigrant workers, música norteña has become the music of a "nation between nations." Música Norteña is the first definitive history of this transnational music that has found enormous commercial success in norteamérica.

Cathy Ragland, an ethnomusicologist and former music critic, serves up the fascinating fifty-year story of música norteña, enlivened by interviews with important musicians and her own first-hand observations of live musical performances. Beyond calling our attention to musical influences, ragland shows readers the social and economic forces at work behind the music. By comparing música norteña with other popular musical forms, including conjunto tejano, she helps us understand and appreciate the musical ties that bind the Mexican diaspora.

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Musical Ethics and Islam

The Art of Playing the Ney

Banu Senay

University of Illinois Press, 2020

After the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkey's secularized society disdained the ney, the Sufi reed flute long associated with Islam. The instrument's remarkable revival in today's cities has inspired the creation of teaching and learning sites that range from private ney studios to cultural and religious associations and from university clubs to mosque organizations.

Banu &Scedil;enay documents the years-long training required to become a neyzen—a player of the ney. The process holds a transformative power that invites students to create a new way of living that involves alternative relationships with the self and others, changing perceptions of the city, and a dedication to craftsmanship. &Scedil;enay visits reed harvesters and travels from studios to workshops to explore the practical processes of teaching and learning. She also becomes an apprentice ney-player herself, exploring the desire for spirituality that encourages apprentices and masters alike to pursue ney music and its scaffolding of Islamic ethics and belief.

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Musical Journeys in Sumatra

Margaret Kartomi

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Although Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world and home to an estimated 44 million Indonesians, its musical arts and cultures have not been the subject of a book-length study until now. Documenting and explaining the ethnographic, cultural, and historical contexts of Sumatra's performing arts, Musical Journeys in Sumatra also traces the changes in their style, content, and reception from the early 1970s onward.

Having dedicated almost forty years of scholarship to exploring the rich and varied music of Sumatran provinces, Margaret Kartomi provides a fascinating ethnographic record of vanishing musical genres, traditions, and practices that have become deeply compromised by the pressures of urbanization, rural poverty, and government policy. This deeply informed collection showcases the complex diversity of Indonesian music and includes field observations from six different provinces: Aceh, North Sumatra, Riau, West Sumatra, South Sumatra, and Bangka-Belitung. Featuring photographs and original drawings from Kartomi's field observations of instruments and performances, Musical Journeys in Sumatra provides a comprehensive musical introduction to this neglected, very large island, with its hundreds of ethno-linguistic-musical groups.

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Musical Ritual in Mexico City

From the Aztec to NAFTA

By Mark Pedelty

University of Texas Press, 2004

On the Zócalo, 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 army marching band plays the "Himno Nacional," a vestige of the nineteenth century. And all around the square, people listen to the contemporary sounds of pop, rock, and música grupera. In all, some seven centuries of music maintain a living presence in the modern city.

This book offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and ethnography of musical rituals in the world's largest city. Mark Pedelty details the dominant musical rites of the Aztec, colonial, national, revolutionary, modern, and contemporary eras, analyzing the role that musical ritual played in governance, resistance, and social change. His approach is twofold. Historical chapters describe the rituals and their functions, while ethnographic chapters explore how these musical forms continue to resonate in contemporary Mexican society. As a whole, the book provides a living record of cultural continuity, change, and vitality.

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