Results by title

316 books match the query 'Ethnomusicology' and 40 start with s

cover of Salsa Consciente: Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio

Salsa Consciente

Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio

Andrés Espinoza Agurto

Michigan State University Press, 2021

This volume explores the significations and developments of the Salsa consciente movement, a Latino musico-poetic and political discourse that exploded in the 1970s but then dwindled in momentum into the early 1990s. This movement is largely linked to the development of Nuyolatino popular music brought about in part by the mass Latino migration to New York City beginning in the 1950s and the subsequent social movements that were tied to the shifting political landscapes. Defined by its lyrical content alongside specific sonic markers and political and social issues facing U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans, Salsa consciente evokes the overarching cultural-nationalist idea of Latinidad (Latin-ness). Through the analysis of over 120 different Salsa songs from lyrical and musical perspectives that span a period of over sixty years, the author makes the argument that the urban Latino identity expressed in Salsa consciente was constructed largely from diasporic, deterritorialized, and at times imagined cultural memory, and furthermore proposes that the Latino/Latin American identity is in part based on African and Indigenous experience, especially as it relates to Spanish colonialism. A unique study on the intersection of Salsa and Latino and Latin American identity, this volume will be especially interesting to scholars of ethnic studies and musicology alike.
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cover of SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture

SamulNori

Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture

Nathan Hesselink

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 1978, four musicians crowded into a cramped basement theater in downtown Seoul, where they, for the first time, brought the rural percussive art of p’ungmul to a burgeoning urban audience. In doing so, they began a decades-long reinvention of tradition, one that would eventually create an entirely new genre of music and a national symbol for Korean culture.
                Nathan Hesselink’s SamulNori traces this reinvention through the rise of the Korean supergroup of the same name, analyzing the strategies the group employed to transform a museum-worthy musical form into something that was both contemporary and historically authentic, unveiling an intersection of traditional and modern cultures and the inevitable challenges such a mix entails. Providing everything from musical notation to a history of urban culture in South Korea to an analysis of SamulNori’s teaching materials and collaborations with Euro-American jazz quartet Red Sun, Hesselink offers a deeply researched study that highlights the need for traditions—if they are to survive—to embrace both preservation and innovation. 
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cover of Sardinian Chronicles

Sardinian Chronicles

Bernard Lortat-Jacob

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In Sardinian Chronicles Bernard Lortat-Jacob poetically evokes Sardinian music through a series of encounters with individual musicians and their families. Refusing to separate the music from the world in which it arises, Lortat-Jacob offers twelve vignettes focused on individuals such as Cocco, a chicken farmer who deciphers the shapes of his fowl and the layout of his henhouses in the constellations of a summer sky, and Pietro, a sleep-walking postman who divides his time between mail deliveries and impromptu serenades. These vignettes bring to life an art still very much alive: the music of villages with an oral tradition, sung or played in the company of others.

Through his sensitive portraits of music makers and their families, Lortat-Jacob overcomes some of the epistemological and methodological dilemmas facing his field today, while also giving the general reader a sense of the multiple and idiosyncratic ways that music is involved in everyday life. With a foreword by Michel Leiris and a compact disc containing samples of the music being discussed, this book constitutes a breakthrough in ethnomusicology that will also interest many in Mediterranean studies and European anthropology.
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cover of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction

Saying Something

Jazz Improvisation and Interaction

Ingrid Monson

University of Chicago Press, 1997

A close-up exploration of the role of the rhythm section in jazz ensemblers

This fresh look at the neglected rhythm section in jazz ensembles shows that the improvisational interplay among drums, bass, and piano is just as innovative, complex, and spontaneous as the solo. Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race. Through interviews with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Sir Roland Hanna, Billy Higgins, Cecil McBee, and others, she develops a perspective on jazz improvisation that has "interactiveness" at its core, in the creation of music through improvisational interaction, in the shaping of social communities and networks through music, and in the development of cultural meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in twentieth-century American cultural life.

Replete with original musical transcriptions, this broad view of jazz improvisation and its emotional and cultural power will have a wide audience among jazz fans, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists.


 
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cover of Sensing Precarity: Viral Listening in Medicalized Worlds

Sensing Precarity

Viral Listening in Medicalized Worlds

Ailsa Lipscombe

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Sensing Precarity tunes into the sonic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic to reveal how moments of crisis are commonly framed as moments of rupture. Combining traditional ethnography with media analysis, creative writing, and poetry, Sensing Precarity reveals how what Ailsa Lipscombe calls “the medicalization of the everyday” is a long-standing phenomenon, one acutely experienced by disabled and chronically ill communities. Lipscombe asks: how do the sights, sounds, behaviors, expectations, and interpretive lenses of medical environments (and activities) inflect or infect everyday spaces and activities? The study argues that during crises, encounters with precarity—real, potential, and imagined—instigate widespread engagement with notions of embodiment and relationality, and that in this context, bodies are understood as both being at risk and posing risks for others.

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cover of Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes

Shaping Society through Dance

Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes

Zoila S. Mendoza

University of Chicago Press, 2000

During the patron saint fiesta in the Andean town of San Jerónimo, Peru, crowds gather at sunset in the town square, eagerly awaiting the entrance of the colorful dance troupes, or comparsas. With their masks, music, and surprising interpretations of contemporary events, the comparsas of the Cusco region are the focus of this multifaceted work. At the crossroads of folklore and ritual, mass media and local preferences, and regional and national identity, the comparsas—recorded here on VHS, DVD, and compact disc—have become a powerful way for the local people to make sense of their place in Peru and in the world. As Zoila Mendoza shows, they do more than reflect societal changes, they actively transform society.

In this fluid world, she argues, racial and ethnic identities are shaped more by notions of what is decent, elegant, and modern rather than by skin color or status. As the different troupes vie for the townspeople's recognition as the most "authentic" group, these notions are challenged and reworked. A fascinating look at a rich tradition, this innovative work is also a compelling example of the critical anthropology of performance.
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cover of Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life

Signs of the Spirit

Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life

Tony Perman

University of Illinois Press, 2020

In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity.

Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community.

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cover of Sikh Kirtan and Its Journeys: Instruments, Theories, Technologies

Sikh Kirtan and Its Journeys

Instruments, Theories, Technologies

Gurminder Kaur Bhogal

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An unprecedented portrait of Sikh devotional music demonstrating how musical traditions shift to meet changing needs.
 
Kirtan—the sung expression of sacred verses—spans the Indian subcontinent, but it plays a unique role in the Sikh faith. In Sikh Kirtan and ItsJourneys, musicologist Gurminder Kaur Bhogal introduces the devotional tradition of kirtan, examining it alongside the writings of holy figures, the Sikh Gurus and Bhagats, and its practice among musicians. The long-established tradition of kirtan originated in a canon of instruments and songs, each of which produces a singular spiritual and worldly effect when kirtan is sung. However, the realities of colonization and migration have necessitated changes to these canonical practices. Bhogal offers a deep exploration of the traditions that gave rise to kirtan and a robust portrait of the many transformations kirtan has undergone, particularly in the wide-ranging Sikh diaspora, dedicating special attention to marginal kirtan players such as women and innovators developing digital techniques and styles. A practicing kirtaniya, Bhogal has spent her life studying and performing this music, steeped in the histories and controversies her book describes.

Through a rigorous explanation of the traditions and evolutions of kirtan, Bhogal ultimately shows that kirtan is fluid, multi-faceted, and ever-changing because it reflects the shifting spiritual needs and musical tastes of devotees and practitioners across the world. Moreover, wherever kirtan is offered and received, it heightens corporeal vibrations between practitioners and devotees to motivate a sense of social purpose, social responsibility, and selfless service.
 
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cover of Sing and Sing On: Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora

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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cover of Singers Die Twice: A Journey to the Land of Dhrupad

Singers Die Twice

A Journey to the Land of Dhrupad

Peter Pannke

Seagull Books, 2013

Singers Die Twice: A Journey to the Land of Dhrupad tells the story of Peter Pannke’s life in music, his travels from Cologne to Varanasi, from Delhi to the forests of Vrindavan, from Darbhanga back to Berlin, of how he studied in the gharana of the famous Mallik family and became Germany’s best-known exponent of Indian classical music. His richly woven tale takes readers from the beginning of the gharana in the 1700s, through the last splendid days of the maharaja of Darbhanga and other proud patrons who inspired Satyajit Ray’s 1957 classic film The Music Room, to the Maha Kumbh Mela that opened the twenty-first century. Along the way, we meet colourful characters whose names are still known to every devotee of dhrupad: the grand old Pandit Ram Chatur Mallik, the pious and inspiring Pandit Vidur Mallik, Pannke himself, a master of the sarangi, and the humbler musicians and travelling players who bring music of all kinds to the fields of Bihar, across India and beyond. Singers Die Twice is the inspiring story of a master musician in the world that he loves.
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cover of Singing Paths: The Nomadic Sensibility of Mongolian Urtyn duu

Singing Paths

The Nomadic Sensibility of Mongolian Urtyn duu

Sunmin Yoon

University of Illinois Press, 2027

Mongolian urtyn duu, or long-song, is a living tradition shaped by nomadic life, ecology, and embodied experience. Sunmin Yoon draws from over fifteen years of fieldwork to reveal urtyn duu as music but also a way of knowing the world through the body, senses, and environment. As Yoon shows, rural and urban singers alike learn their craft through daily experiences of listening to landscapes, animals, and community voices. These practices forge deep links between sound, memory, and place. The singers’ use of breath, movement, and feeling produces powerful emotional and sensory experiences that connect both musicians and listeners with wider ecological and spiritual worlds. Though reflecting social change and modern Mongolia’s history, the tradition at the music’s heart continues to call upon and convey the core values of a nomadic people.

Enlightening and evocative, Singing Paths offers an eyewitness look at a rarely explored musical tradition.
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cover of Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico

Singing for the Dead

The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico

Paja Faudree

Duke University Press, 2013

Singing for the Dead chronicles ethnic revival in Oaxaca, Mexico, where new forms of singing and writing in the local Mazatec indigenous language are producing powerful, transformative political effects. Paja Faudree argues for the inclusion of singing as a necessary component in the polarized debates about indigenous orality and literacy, and she considers how the coupling of literacy and song has allowed people from the region to create texts of enduring social resonance. She examines how local young people are learning to read and write in Mazatec as a result of the region's new Day of the Dead song contest. Faudree also studies how tourist interest in local psychedelic mushrooms has led to their commodification, producing both opportunities and challenges for songwriters and others who represent Mazatec culture. She situates these revival movements within the contexts of Mexico and Latin America, as well as the broad, hemisphere-wide movement to create indigenous literatures. Singing for the Dead provides a new way to think about the politics of ethnicity, the success of social movements, and the limits of national belonging.
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cover of Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America

Singing the Land

Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America

Eli Sperling

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. This music—one part in a greater process of instilling diasporic Zionism in American Jewish communities—represents an early and underexplored means of fostering mainstream American Jewish engagement with the Jewish state and Hebrew national culture as they emerged after Israel declared its independence in 1948. This evolutionary process brought Zionism from being an often-polemical notion in American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century to a mainstream component of American Jewish life by 1948. Hebrew music ultimately emerged as an important means through which many American Jews physically participated in or ‘performed’ aspects of Zionism and Hebrew national culture from afar.   

Exploring the history, events, contexts, and tensions that comprised what may be termed the ‘Zionization’ of American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century, Eli Sperling analyzes primary sources within the historical contexts of Zionist national development and American Jewish life. Singing the Land offers insights into how and why musical frameworks were central to catalyzing American Jewry’s support of the Zionist cause by the 1940s, parallel to firm commitments to their American locale and national identities. The proliferation of this widespread American Jewish-Zionist embrace was achieved through a variety of educational, religious, economic, and political efforts, and Hebrew music was a thread consistent among them all.   
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cover of Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers around the Globe

Social Voices

The Cultural Politics of Singers around the Globe

Edited by Levi S. Gibbs

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Singers generating cultural identity from K-Pop to Beverly Sills

Around the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics include gendered performances and the negotiation of race and class identities; the class-related contradictions exposed by the divide between highbrow and pop culture; links between narratives of overcoming struggle and the distinction between privileged and marginalized identities; singers’ ability to adapt to shifting notions of history, borders, gender, and memory in order to connect with listeners; how the meanings we read into a singer’s life and art build on one another; and technology’s ability to challenge our ideas about what constitutes music.

Cutting-edge and original, Social Voices reveals how singers and their songs equip us to process social change and divergent opinions.

Contributors: Christina D. Abreu, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Kwame Dawes, Nancy Guy, Ruth Hellier, John Lie, Treva B. Lindsey, Eric Lott, Katherine Meizel, Carol A. Muller, Natalie Sarrazin, Anthony Seeger, Carol Silverman, Andrew Simon, Jeff Todd Titon, and Elijah Wald

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cover of Song Walking: Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland

Song Walking

Women, Music, and Environmental Justice in an African Borderland

Angela Impey

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women’s walking songs (amaculo manihamba)—once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)—she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place.

This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.
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cover of Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women

Songprints

The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women

Judith Vander

University of Illinois Press, 1988

Perspectives on the twentieth-century lives of Shoshone women musicians

The musical lives of Native American women have experienced a century of cultural change and constancy. Judith Vander takes readers to the Shoshone of Wyoming's Wind River Reservation to meet five generations of Shoshone women. Vander’s conversations with Emily, Angelina, Alberta, Helene, and Lenore capture their distinct personalities as they share their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward their music.

Vander transcribes and analyzes seventy-five songs that the women sing. Each woman possesses a unique songprint—a repertoire distinctive to her culture, age, and personality. As Vander shows, the context of Shoshone social and religious ceremonies offers insights into the rise of the Native American Church, the emergence and popularity of the contemporary powwow, and the changing, enlarging role of women. In addition, two eyewitnesses accounts of Ghost Dance songs and performances elaborate on the function and meaning of the Ghost Dance among the Wind River Shoshones.

2nd Place from the Pauline Alderman Prize for New Scholarship on Women in Music from the International Congress on Women in Music. Winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, 1989.

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cover of Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam

Songs for the Spirits

Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam

Barley Norton

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage. By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.
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cover of Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer

Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau

The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer

Chad S. Hamill

Oregon State University Press, 2012

Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau explores the role of song as a transformative force in the twentieth century, tracing a cultural, spiritual, and musical encounter that upended notions of indigeneity and the rules of engagement for Indians and priests in the Columbia Plateau.

In Chad Hamill’s narrative, a Jesuit and his two Indian “grandfathers”—one a medicine man, the other a hymn singer—engage in a collective search for the sacred. The priest becomes a student of the medicine man. The medicine man becomes a Catholic. The Indian hymn singer brings indigenous songs to the Catholic mass. Using song as a thread, these men weave together two worlds previously at odds, realizing a promise born two centuries earlier within the prophecies of Circling Raven and Shining Shirt.

Songs of Power and Prayer reveals how song can bridge worlds: between the individual and Spirit, the Jesuits and the Indians. Whether sung in an indigenous ceremony or adapted for Catholic Indian services, song abides as a force that strengthens Native identity and acts as a conduit for power and prayer.

A First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies book

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cover of Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China

Sonic Mobilities

Producing Worlds in Southern China

Adam Kielman

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A fascinating look at how the popular musical culture of Guangzhou expresses the city’s unique cosmopolitanism.
 
Guangzhou is a large Chinese city like many others. With a booming economy and abundant job opportunities, it has become a magnet for rural citizens seeking better job prospects as well as global corporations hoping to gain a foothold in one of the world’s largest economies. This openness and energy have led to a thriving popular music scene that is every bit the equal of Beijing’s. But the musical culture of Guangzhou expresses the city’s unique cosmopolitanism. A port city that once played a key role in China’s maritime Silk Road, Guangzhou has long been an international hub. Now, new migrants to the city are incorporating diverse Chinese folk traditions into the musical tapestry.
 
In Sonic Mobilities, ethnomusicologist Adam Kielman takes a deep dive into Guangzhou's music scene through two bands, Wanju Chuanzhang (Toy Captain) and Mabang (Caravan), that express ties to their rural homelands and small-town roots while forging new cosmopolitan musical connections. These bands make music that captures the intersection of the global and local that has come to define Guangzhou, for example by writing songs with a popular Jamaican reggae beat and lyrics in their distinct regional dialects mostly incomprehensible to their audiences. These bands create a sound both instantly recognizable and totally foreign, international and hyper-local. This juxtaposition, Kielman argues, is an apt expression of the demographic, geographic, and political shifts underway in Guangzhou and across the country. Bridging ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural geography, and media studies, Kielman examines the cultural dimensions of shifts in conceptualizations of self, space, publics, and state in a rapidly transforming the People’s Republic of China.
 
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cover of Sonic Spaces of the Karoo: The Sacred Music of a South African Coloured Community

Sonic Spaces of the Karoo

The Sacred Music of a South African Coloured Community

Marie Jorritsma

Temple University Press, 2011

Sonic Spaces of the Karoo is a pioneering study of the sacred music of three coloured (the apartheid designation for people "not white or native") people's church congregations in the rural town of Graaff-Reinet, South Africa. Jorritsma's fieldwork involves an investigation of the choruses, choir music, and hymns of the Karoo region to present a history of the people's traditional, religious, and cultural identity in song. This music is examined as part of a living archive preserved by the community in the face of a legacy of slavery and colonial as well as apartheid oppression.

Jorritsma's findings counteract a lingering stereotype that coloured music is inferior to European or African music and that coloured people should not or do not have a cultural identity. Sonic Spaces of the Karoo seeks to eradicate that bias and articulate a more legitimate place for these people in the contemporary landscape of South Africa.

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cover of Sonorous Passages: Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary

Sonorous Passages

Black Maternal Soundings and the Liberation Imaginary

Meina Yates-Richard

Duke University Press, 2026

In Sonorous Passages, Meina Yates-Richard demonstrates how, within Black Atlantic literary and cultural productions, the sounds of Black maternal figures function as mediators of liberatory thought. Under the press of chattel slavery, Black mothers were discursively rendered as points of passage between freedom and unfreedom in the political imaginary, creating a paradigm wherein Black male subjects came to be imagined as the appropriate heirs and subjects of freedom. Sonorous Passages offers the methodology of “double-listening” as a Black feminist interpretive heuristic through which we are to hear and assess the Black maternal sonority within Black Atlantic textual and sonic objects. Through works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s nineteenth-century writings to twenty-first-century literary and sonic art, Sonorous Passages traces how Black maternal figures are conceptually excised from the imaginative realms of Black political freedom, even as the soundings of Black mothers provide protective and generative sites for developing liberatory thought. As Yates-Richard shows, by listening closely to Black maternal sonority, we can access, resound, and reproduce resonant maternal inheritances of freedom.
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cover of Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela

Sonorous Worlds

Musical Enchantment in Venezuela

Yana Stainova

University of Michigan Press, 2021

El Sistema is a nationwide, state-funded music education program in Venezuela. Founded in 1975 by economist and musician José Antonio Abreu, the institution has weathered seven jolting changes in government. Hugo Chávez and, after his death, president Nicolás Maduro enthusiastically included the institution into the political agenda of the socialist project and captured the affective power of music for their own aims. Fueled by the oil boom in the 2000s, El Sistema grew over the years to encompass 1,210 orchestras for children and young people in Venezuela, reached almost 1 million people out of the 30 million in the country, and served as a model in more than 35 countries around the world.

Sonorous Worlds is an ethnography of the young Venezuelan musicians who participate in El Sistema, many of whom live in urban barrios and face everyday gang violence, state repression, social exclusion, and forced migration in response to sociopolitical crisis. This book looks at how these young people engage with what the author calls “enchantment,” that is, how through musical practices they create worlds that escape, rupture, and critique dominant structures of power.  Stainova’s focus on artistic practice and enchantment allows her to theorize the successes and failures of political projects through the lens of everyday transformations in people’s lives.
 
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cover of Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia's Cold Wars

Sound Alignments

Popular Music in Asia's Cold Wars

Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, and Kaley Mason, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

In Sound Alignments, a transnational group of scholars explores the myriad forms of popular music that circulated across Asia during the Cold War. Challenging the conventional alignments and periodizations of Western cultural histories of the Cold War, they trace the routes of popular music, examining how it took on new meanings and significance as it traveled across Asia, from India to Indonesia, Hong Kong to South Korea, China to Japan. From studies of how popular musical styles from the Americas and Europe were adapted to meet local exigencies to how socialist-bloc and nonaligned Cold War organizations facilitated the circulation of popular music throughout the region, the contributors outline how music forged and challenged alliances, revolutions, and countercultures. They also show how the Cold War's legacy shapes contemporary culture, particularly in the ways 1990s and 2000s J-pop and K-pop are rooted in American attempts to foster economic exchange in East Asia in the 1960s.Throughout, Sound Alignments demonstrates that the experiences of the Cold War in Asia were as diverse and dynamic as the music heard and performed in it.

Contributors. Marié Abe, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, Nisha Kommattam, Jennifer Lindsay, Kaley Mason, Anna Schultz, Hyunjoon Shin, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Hon-Lun (Helan) Yang, Christine R. Yano, Qian Zhang
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cover of Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy

Sound Figures of Modernity

German Music and Philosophy

Edited by Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

The rich conceptual and experiential relays between music and philosophy—echoes of what Theodor W. Adorno once called Klangfiguren, or "sound figures"—resonate with heightened intensity during the period of modernity that extends from early German Idealism to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This volume traces the political, historical, and philosophical trajectories of a specifically German tradition in which thinkers take recourse to music, both as an aesthetic practice and as the object of their speculative work. 

The contributors examine the texts of such highly influential writers and thinkers as Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bloch, Mann, Adorno, and Lukács in relation to individual composers including Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg, and Eisler. Their explorations of the complexities that arise in conceptualizing music as a mode of representation and philosophy as a mode of aesthetic practice thematize the ways in which the fields of music and philosophy are altered when either attempts to express itself in terms defined by the other.

Contributors: Albrecht Betz, Lydia Goehr, Beatrice Hanssen, Jost Hermand, David Farrell Krell, Ludger Lütkehaus, Margaret Moore, Rebekah Pryor Paré, Gerhard Richter, Hans Rudolf Vaget, Samuel Weber

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cover of Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 3rd edition with a new introduction by the author

Sound and Sentiment

Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 3rd edition with a new introduction by the author

Steven Feld

Duke University Press, 2012

This thirtieth anniversary edition of Sound and Sentiment makes Steven Feld's landmark, field-defining book available to a new generation of scholars and students. A sensory ethnography set in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, among the Kaluli people of Bosavi, Sound and Sentiment introduced the anthropology of sound, or the cultural study of sound. After it was first published in 1982, a second edition, incorporating additional field research and a new postscript, was released in 1990. The third edition includes all of the material from the first two editions, along with a substantial new introduction in which Feld discusses Bosavi's recent history and reflects on the challenges it poses for contemporary theory and representation.
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cover of Sounding Dissent: Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism

Sounding Dissent

Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism

Stephen R. Millar

University of Michigan Press, 2020

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. As the public overwhelmingly rejected a return to the violence of the Troubles, loyalist and republican groups sought other outlets to continue their struggle. Music, which has long been used to celebrate cultural identity in the North of Ireland, became a key means of facilitating the continuation of pre-Agreement identity narratives in a “post-conflict” era.

Sounding Dissent draws on three years of sustained fieldwork within Belfast's rebel music scene, in-depth interviews with republican musicians, contemporary audiences, and former paramilitaries, as well as diverse historical and archival material, including songbooks, prison records, and newspaper articles, to understand the history of political violence in Ireland.The book examines the potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of republican martyrs, and demonstrates how musical performance and political song not only articulate experiences and memories of oppression and violence, but also play a central role in the reproduction of conflict and exclusion in times of peace.
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cover of Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas

Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas

Jairo Moreno

University of Chicago Press, 2023

How is Latin American music heard, by whom, and why?

Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity.
 
This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.
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cover of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era

Sounding Like a No-No

Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era

Francesca T. Royster

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

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cover of Sounding Off: Rhythm, Music, and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels

Sounding Off

Rhythm, Music, and Identity in West African and Caribbean Francophone Novels

Julie Huntington

Temple University Press, 2009

Intrigued by "texted" sonorities—the rhythms, musics, ordinary noises, and sounds of language in narratives—Julie Huntington examines the soundscapes in contemporary Francophone novels such as Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood (Senegal), and Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent (Martinique). Through an ethnomusicological perspective, Huntington argues in Sounding Off that the range of sounds —footsteps, heartbeats, drumbeats—represented in West African and Caribbean works provides a rhythmic polyphony that creates spaces for configuring social and cultural identities.

Huntington’s analysis shows how these writers and others challenge the aesthetic and political conventions that privilege written texts over orality and invite readers-listeners to participate in critical dialogues—to sound off, as it were, in local and global communities.
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cover of Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City

Sounding Salsa

Performing Latin Music in New York City

Christopher Washburne

Temple University Press, 2008

Written from the perspective of salsa musicians,this ethnographic journey into New York salsa of the 1990s, this pioneering study examines how musicians navigated their everyday lives, grappling with the intercultural tensions and commercial pressures that were so pronounced on the salsa scene. Author Chris Washburne examines the organizational structures, recording processes, rehearsing, and gigging of salsa bands, paying particular attention to how bands created a sense of community, privileged "the people" over artistic and commercial concerns, and incited cultural pride during performance events.  He considers how violence, the illicit drug trade, and issues of gender informed sound structure, salsa aesthetics, and performance practice.   He concludes the book with a discussion of salsa style in the 1990s, emphasizing how certain structural principles involved in music making (e.g., clave) and the intercultural dynamics of Puerto Rico and New York informed performance practice.
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cover of Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Performance

Sounding the Center

History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Performance

Deborah Wong

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Sounding the Center is an in-depth look at the power behind classical music and dance in Bangkok, the capital and sacred center of Buddhist Thailand. Focusing on the ritual honoring teachers of music and dance, Deborah Wong reveals a complex network of connections among kings, teachers, knowledge, and performance that underlies the classical court arts.

Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, Wong lays out the ritual in detail: the way it is enacted, the foods and objects involved, and the people who perform it, emphasizing the way the performers themselves discuss and construct aspects of the ceremony.
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cover of Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño

Sounds of Crossing

Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño

Alex E. Chávez

Duke University Press, 2017

In Sounds of Crossing Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means, Chávez adds fresh and compelling insights into the ways transnational music-making is at the center of everyday Mexican migrant life.
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cover of Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism

Sounds of Vacation

Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism

Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

The contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encounters of musical production. In so doing, they prompt a rethinking of how to account for music and sound's resonances in postcolonial spaces.

Contributors. Jerome Camal, Steven Feld, Francio Guadeloupe, Jocelyne Guilbault, Jordi Halfman, Susan Harewood, Percy C. Hintzen, Timothy Rommen
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cover of Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music

Sounds of the Underground

A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music

Stephen Graham

University of Michigan Press, 2016

In basements, dingy backrooms, warehouses, and other neglected places around the world music is being made that doesn't fit neatly into popular or classical categories and genres, whose often extreme sounds and tiny concerts hover on the fringes of these commercial and cultural mainstreams.

The term “underground music” as it’s being used here connects various forms of music-making that exist outside or on the fringes of mainstream institutions and culture, such as noise, free improvisation, and extreme metal. This is music that makes little money, that’s noisy and exploratory in sound and that’s largely independent from both the market and from traditional high art institutions. It sometimes exists at the fringes of these commercial and cultural institutions, as for example with experimental metal or improv, but for the most part it’s removed from the mainstream, “underground,” as we see with noise artists such as Werewolf Jerusalem or Ramleh, obscure black metal artists such as Lord Foul, and improvisers such as Maggie Nicols. In response to a lack of previous scholarly discussion, Graham provides a cultural, political, and aesthetic mapping of this broad territory. By outlining the historical background but focusing on the digital age, the underground and its fringes can be seen as based in radical anti-capitalist politics or radical aesthetics while also being tied to the political contexts and structures of late capitalism. The book explores these various ideas of separation and captures, through interviews and analysis, a critical account of both the music and the political and cultural economy of the scene.

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cover of Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health: Zulu Tradition, HIV Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South Africa

Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health

Zulu Tradition, HIV Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South Africa

Steven P. Black

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health tells the story of a unique Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa, and how they maintained healthy, productive lives amid globalized inequality, international aid, and the stigma that often comes with having HIV. By singing, joking, and narrating about HIV in Zulu, the performers in the choir were able to engage with international audiences, connect with global health professionals, and also maintain traditional familial respect through the prism of performance. The focus on gospel singing in the narrative provides a holistic viewpoint on life with HIV in the later years of the pandemic, and the author’s musical engagement led to fieldwork in participants’ homes and communities, including the larger stigmatized community of infected individuals. This viewpoint suggests overlooked ways that aid recipients contribute to global health in support, counseling, and activism, as the performers set up instruments, waited around in hotel lobbies, and struck up conversations with passersby and audience members. The story of the choir reveals the complexity and inequities of global health interventions, but also the positive impact of those interventions in the crafting of community.
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cover of Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia

Stambeli

Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia

Richard C. Jankowsky

University of Chicago Press, 2010

In Stambeli, Richard C. Jankowsky presents a vivid ethnographic account of the healing trance music created by the descendants of sub-Saharan slaves brought to Tunisia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stambeli music calls upon an elaborate pantheon of sub-Saharan spirits and North African Muslim saints to heal humans through ritualized trance. Based on nearly two years of participation in the musical, ritual, and social worlds of stambeli musicians, Jankowsky’s study explores the way the music evokes the cross-cultural, migratory past of its originators and their encounters with the Arab-Islamic world in which they found themselves. Stambeli, Jankowsky avers, is thoroughly marked by a sense of otherness—the healing spirits, the founding musicians, and the instruments mostly come from outside Tunisia—which creates a unique space for profoundly meaningful interactions between sub-Saharan and North African people, beliefs, histories, and aesthetics.

Part ethnography, part history of the complex relationship between Tunisia’s Arab and sub-Saharan populations, Stambeli will be welcomed by scholars and students of ethnomusicology, anthropology, African studies, and religion.
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cover of Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World

Storytelling in Siberia

The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World

Robin P. Harris

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Olonkho, the epic narrative and song tradition of Siberia’s Sakha people, declined to the brink of extinction during the Soviet era. In 2005, UNESCO’s Masterpiece Proclamation sparked a resurgence of interest in olonkho by recognizing its important role in humanity’s oral and intangible heritage.

Drawing on her ten years of living in the Russian North, Robin P. Harris documents how the Sakha have used the Masterpiece program to revive olonkho and strengthen their cultural identity. Harris’s personal relationships with and primary research among Sakha people provide vivid insights into understanding olonkho and the attenuation, revitalization, transformation, and sustainability of the Sakha’s cultural reemergence. Interdisciplinary in scope, Storytelling in Siberia considers the nature of folklore alongside ethnomusicology, anthropology, comparative literature, and cultural studies to shed light on how marginalized peoples are revitalizing their own intangible cultural heritage.

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cover of Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940 - 1945

Strains of Dissent

Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940 - 1945

Kelly Jakes

Michigan State University Press, 2019

During the German Occupation from 1940 to 1944, Resistance fighters, Parisian youth, and French prisoners of war mined a vast repertoire from a long national musical tradition and a burgeoning international entertainment industry, embracing music as a rhetorical resource with which to destabilize Nazi ideology and contest collaborationist Vichy propaganda. After the Liberation of 1944, popular music continued to mediate French political life, helping citizens to challenge American hegemony and recuperate their nation’s lost international standing. Ultimately, through song, French dissidents rejected Nazi subordination, the politics of collaboration, and American intervention and insisted upon a return to that trinity of traditional French values, liberté, egalité, fraternité. Strains of Dissent recovers the significance of music as a rhetorical means of survival, subversion, and national identity construction and illuminates the creative and cunning ways that individual citizens defied the Occupation outside of formal resistance networks and movements. 
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cover of Stunning Males and Powerful Females: Gender and Tradition in East Javanese Dance

Stunning Males and Powerful Females

Gender and Tradition in East Javanese Dance

Christina Sunardi

University of Illinois Press, 2015

In east Javanese dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo, musicians and dancers negotiate gender through performances where males embody femininity and females embody masculinity.

Christina Sunardi ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, Sunardi learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex--sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But Sunardi's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (males who dress and live as female) access the magnetic power of femaleness.

A journey into understudied regions and ideas, Stunning Males and Powerful Females reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.

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cover of Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Subversive Sounds

Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Charles B. Hersch

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born.

This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture.

“More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

 

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