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Adolescents on Music foregrounds the voices of 30 American adolescent musicians, ages 12–18. Adolescent singer-songwriters, studio and solo musicians, rappers, composers and arrangers, and band, choir, and orchestra members tell about their musical development and what it is like to make music by themselves and others. Situated in these 30 adolescents’ experiences is a theory of adolescent musical development—a theory that will help music educators support adolescents in their lives. The book is structured in three parts: Part I focuses on “who I am” with an in-depth look at musical identities; Part II explores “the social self” by investigating adolescent experiences of belonging, community, and social identity; Part III looks toward “a future vision” focusing on adolescent perspectives on their future and their advice for music educators. In the last chapter, Parker proposes one philosophy of adolescent music-making. Throughout the book, research from the arts, social and natural sciences, humanities, and education dimensionalize adolescent perspectives. Special features of this book include “Step Back” locations, reflective spaces for the reader to draw connections with adolescents’ experience and their own experiences. At the end of each chapter, the “Wrap Up” allows additional spaces for topics, questions, and possibilities for effective teaching interactions. Between each chapter are “Interludes” written by one or more of the 30 adolescent contributors.

Conceived as an introduction to a vast, immensely rich and diverse set of repertories, this book explores the sounding forms of Sub-Saharan African music. Aimed at a general musical readership, it describes the major dimensions of African music and the values upon which they are built. An opening chapter invites readers to sample the basic qualities of African music and reflect on the challenges of writing about African music. In subsequent chapters, the book discusses the place of music in society, musical instruments, the relationship between language and music, rhythm, melody, form, and harmony. A final chapter traces various appropriations of African music. In conveying the dynamics within each of the core dimensions, a broad orientation is typically supplemented by close readings of selected repertory items. These include an Ewe dirge, an Nkundo lullaby, an Aka Pygmy children’s song, an item of Central African entertainment music, an art song, and a piano etude. Although the focus throughout is on Africa’s “traditional” heritage, here regarded as the backbone of Africa’s musical thinking, a few items of popular and art music are included to demonstrate the range of African musical imagining. Frequent reference is made to the vast recorded legacy of African music, and readers are encouraged to explore them to gain a deeper appreciation of the music. The book illuminates both the structural and the expressive dimensions of black African music and is designed to engender dialogue between scholars of music and ethnographers, music analysts and composers.

This book discusses how musicians from Bahia, an emblematic African diasporic location in northeastern Brazil, think about, discuss, compose, rehearse, perform, and stage music inspired by what they perceive to be their own African ancestry. It argues that these musicians assert Afro-Brazilian identities and connect to the African continent and other diasporic places by creatively engaging essentialized notions about African music and culture: instead of mechanically reproducing these tropes, they emphasize them or downplay them. The book theorizes these preconceived notions about African music, culture, and performance as tropes of Africanness, emphasizing that they exist in two interrelated realms: as essentialist ideas in discourse and as concrete practices and sounds. Six commonly encountered tropes of African music are analyzed: the notions that its most important parameter is rhythm and that it is dominated by percussion; that it is meant to be danced to or deeply embodied rather than intellectualized; that it always touches on the sacred; that it is spontaneous and improvisatory; and that it reflects communalism rather than individualism. Through four case studies from Bahia (a jazz big band called Orkestra Rumpilezz, a symphony orchestra called the Orquestra Afrosinfônica, and two berimbau orchestras led by capoeira practitioners), the book demonstrates the nuances of musical creation in the African diaspora, acknowledging the genuine impact that essentialisms have on Bahian music while showing that they may not be an essential part of the musicians’ African roots.

Haitian carnival offers a lens into popular power and politics. Political demonstrations in Haiti often manifest as musical performances. Studying carnival and political protest side by side brings insight to the musical engagement that ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians often cultivate and revere in contemporary Haiti. This book explores how the self-declared president of konpa Sweet Micky (Michel Martelly) rose to the nation’s highest office while methodically crafting a political product inherently entangled with his musical product. It provides deep historical perspective on the characteristics of carnivalesque verbal play—and the performative skill set of the artist (Sweet Micky) who dominated carnival for more than a decade—including vulgarities and polemics. It moreover demonstrates that the practice of leveraging the carnivalesque for expedient political function has precedence in Haiti’s history. Yet there has been profound resistance to this brand of politics led by many other high-profile artists, including Matyas and Jòj, Brothers Posse, Boukman Eksperyans, and RAM. These groups have each released popular carnival songs that have contributed to the public’s discussions of what civic participation and citizenship in Haiti can and should be. Author Rebecca Dirksen presents an in-depth consideration of politically and socially engaged music and what these expressions mean for the Haitian population in the face of challenging political and economic circumstances. After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy centers the voices of Haitian musicians and regular citizens by extensively sharing interviews and detailed analyses of musical performance in the context of contemporary events well beyond the musical realm.

This collection of essays analyzes diverse musical creations with reference to the contexts in which the music is created and performed. The authors explain the music as sound in process, through prose, diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures—court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book’s companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world-music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today’s interconnected world.

Across Africa, artists increasingly turn to NGO sponsorship in pursuit of greater influence and funding, while simultaneously NGOs—both international and local—commission arts projects to buttress their interventions and achieve greater reach and marketability. As a result, the key values of artistic expression become “healing” and “sensitization” measured in turn by “impact” and “effectiveness.” Such rubrics obscure the aesthetic complexities of the artworks and the power dynamics that inform their production. Clashes arise as foreign NGOs import foreign aesthetic models and preconceptions about their efficacy, alongside foreign interpretations of politics, medicine, psychology, trauma, memorialization, and so on. Meanwhile, each community embraces its own aesthetic precedents, often at odds with the intentions of humanitarian agencies. The arts are a sphere in which different worldviews enter into conflict and conversation. To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, the volume assembles ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet underanalyzed objectives for arts in emergency—demonstration, distribution, and remediation—each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. The Art of Emergency shifts the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations. In doing so, this volume brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often fraught interactions between the two.

Audible States examines how elites have governed politically and aesthetically meaningful spaces of silence and sound in Albania since 1945. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic interviews, author Nicholas Tochka argues that modern political orders do not simply render social life visible, but also audible. And in rendering social life audible, states make reality governable in significant, albeit unpredictable, ways. The book’s chronological narrative presents an aural history of government through the close examination of a state-subsidized popular genre, light music, as broadcast at an annual song competition, Radio-Television Albania’s Festival of Song. Drawing on a wide range of archival resources and over forty interviews with composers, lyricists, singers, and bureaucrats, it describes how popular music became integral to governmental projects to improve society—and a major concern for both state-socialist and postsocialist regimes. Incorporating insights from governmentality studies, Audible States presents a new perspective on music and government that reveals the fluid, pervasive but ultimately limited nature of state power in the modern world. In doing this, it addresses ongoing conversations in ethnomusicology, area studies, and cultural studies of the Cold War.

Bangkok Is Ringing is an on-the-ground sound studies analysis of the political protests that transformed Thailand in 2010–11. Bringing the reader through sixteen distinct “sonic niches” where dissidents used media to broadcast to both local and diffuse audiences, the book catalogues these mass protests in a way that few movements have ever been catalogued. The Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt protests that shook Thailand took place just before other international political movements, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Bangkok Is Ringing analyzes the Thai protests in comparison with these, seeking to understand the logic not only of political change in Thailand, but across the globe. The book is attuned to sound in a great variety of forms. The author traces the history and use in protest of specific media forms, including community radio, megaphones, CDs, and live concerts. The research took place over the course of sixteen months, and the author worked closely with musicians, concert promoters, activists, and rank-and-file protesters. The result is a detailed and sensitive ethnography that argues for an understanding of sound and political movements in tandem. In particular, it emphasizes the necessity of thinking through constraint as a fundamental condition of both political movements and the sound that these movements produce. In order to produce political transformations, the book argues, dissidents must be sensitive to the ways that their sounding is constrained and channeled.

How are an individual’s ability and motivation to be creative shaped by the world around her? Why does creativity seem to flourish in some environments, while in others it is stifled? Many societies value creativity as an abstract concept and many, perhaps even most, individuals feel an internal drive to be creative; however, tremendous social pressures restrict development of creative skill sets, engagement in creative activities, and willingness to take creative risks. Becoming Creative explores how social and cultural factors enable or inhibit creativity in music. The book integrates perspectives from ethnomusicology, education, sociology, psychology, and performance studies, prioritizing the voices of practicing musicians and music educators. Insights are drawn from ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with classical, jazz, and traditional musicians in South Africa, Finland, and the United States. By comparing and analyzing these musicians’ personal experiences, Becoming Creative deepens our understanding of the development and practice of musical creativity, the external factors that influence it, and strategies for enhancing it. The book reveals the common components of how musical creativity is experienced across these cultures and explains why creativity might not always be considered socially desirable. It identifies ideal creativity-enabling criteria—specific skill sets, certain psychological traits and states, and access to opportunities and authority—and illustrates how these enablers of creativity are fostered or thwarted by a variety of beliefs, learning methods, social relationships, institutions, and social inequalities. Becoming Creative further demonstrates formal and informal strategies for overcoming inhibitors of creativity.

Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, “the original fusion music”. They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name “Bollywood,” but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, “behind the curtain” — the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. This book offers an account of the Bollywood film-music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In an insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, the author explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film-music industry. On the basis of a set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creators and performers. The author also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s–90s, as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.

Western medicine has conventionally separated music, science, and religion into distinct entities, yet traditional cultures throughout the world have always viewed music as a bridge that connects and balances the physical with the spiritual to promote health and healing. As people in even the most technologically advanced nations across the globe struggle with obtaining affordable and reliable healthcare, more and more people are now turning to these ancient cultural practices of holistic and ICAM healing (integrative, complementary, and alternative medicine). This book convincingly demonstrates the relevance of medical ethnomusicology in light of the globally spreading ICAM approaches to health and healing. Revealing the Western separation of healing from spiritual and musical practices as a culturally determined phenomenon, the book confirms their underlying unity. In a place poetically known as the Roof of the World, the culture found within the towering Pamir Mountains of Badakhshan Tajikistan serves as the paradigm of ICAM healing practices. The book’s research and immersion into the Badakhshani culture provides a well-balanced “insider” perspective while maintaining an “observer’s” view, as it effectively bridges the widespread gaps between ethnomusicology, health science, and music therapy.

This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (i.e. Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large. Songs are a vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, are distributed via soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the hegemonic popular music genre in India (even for people who rarely watch the films for which the songs were written). The book illustrates how film songs are produced through the collaboration of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in order to enhance the film narrative, but also to have commercial success outside of the film. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark songs, along with biographical and musical descriptions of the people who have crafted and performed these songs, this book illustrates how the creators of Hindi film songs have always mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices from Indian and international sources in order to produce a distinctive Indian music genre. This genre has always had cosmopolitan orientations, yet has consistently retained discrete sound and production practices over its long history.

Bossa Mundo chronicles how Brazilian music has been central to Brazil’s national brand in the United States and the United Kingdom since the late 1950s. Scholarly texts on Brazilian popular music generally focus on questions of music and national identity, and when they discuss the music’s international popularity, they keep the artists, recordings, and live performances as the focus, ignoring the process of transnational mediation. This book fills a major gap in Brazilian music studies by analyzing the consequences of moments when Brazilian music was popular in Anglophone markets, with a focus on the media industries. With subject matter as varied as jazz, film music, dance fads, DJ/remix culture, and new models of musical distribution, the book demonstrates how the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has had lasting consequences for the creative output celebrated by Brazil as part of its national brand. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music in chronologically organized chapters, the book shifts the scholarly focus on the music’s transnational popularity from the scholarly framework of representing Otherness to broader considerations of a media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have differing priorities. The book provides a new model for studying music from culturally rich countries in the Global South where local governments often leverage stereotypes in their national branding project.

This book explores the life and performance practices of the Irish sean-nós singer Joe Heaney (1919–1984). Born in Connemara, Ireland, as an autonomous state was about to be created, Heaney grew up speaking the Irish language on a windswept coastal landscape, where he absorbed a rich oral heritage in Irish and in his second language, English. Circumstances took him abroad, and eventually to the United States; he performed and sang his way through life, seeking to accomplish his quest of recognition for an art that was understood as such by only a few. His ability to enthrall and mesmerize his audiences in North America became legendary. That the songs and stories he presented in performance were rooted in a Gaelic culture strange to most of his audiences made his capacity all the more remarkable. This book traces the trajectory that led Heaney to present certain songs and stories to his audiences while excluding others. It offers song texts, translations, and musical transcriptions, together with a detailed discussion of their function and significance for the song man. The authors highlight issues of masculinity, language, religion, history, authenticity, and identity as part of their work in uncovering one Irishman's presentation of self, region, and nation. Many of the works can be heard on a web site constructed as an accompaniment to this book. The book makes for a rich feast of material, exposing the often-thorny decisions made by a stellar performer to forge a professional repertoire from material he had absorbed in his youth.

Carmen and the Staging of Spain explores the Belle Époque fascination with Spanish entertainment that refashioned Bizet’s opera and gave rise to an international “Carmen industry.” Authors Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz challenge the notion of Carmen as an unchanging exotic construct, tracing the ways in which performers and productions responded to evolving fashions for Spanish style from its 1875 premiere to 1915. Focusing on selected realizations of the opera in Paris, London, and New York, Christoforidis and Kertesz explore the cycles of influence between the opera and its parodies; adaptations in spoken drama, ballet and film; and the panorama of flamenco, Spanish dance, and musical entertainments. Their findings also uncover Carmen's dynamic interaction with issues of Hispanic identity against the backdrop of Spain's changing international fortunes. The Spanish response to this now most-Spanish of operas is illuminated by its early reception in Madrid and Barcelona, adaptations to local theatrical genres, and impact on Spanish composers of the time. A series of Spanish Carmens, from opera singers Elena Sanz and Maria Gay to the infamous music-hall star La Belle Otero, had a crucial influence on the interpretation of the title role. Their stories provide a fresh context for the book's reappraisal of leading Carmens of the era, including Emma Calvé and Geraldine Farrar.

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo asserts the importance in shifting attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and US imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, and natural dancers, and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and hip-hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of hip-hop’s regulation, the “euphemism,” as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism—the zombie, hero, robot, and judge—constitute a way of seeing Filipino hip-hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and US global power.

Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity During Mexico’s Época de Oro is the first book-length study concerning the function of music in the prominent genres structured by the Mexican film industry. Integrating primary source material with film music studies, sound studies, and Mexican film and cultural history, this project closely examines examples from five significant film genres that developed during the 1930s through 1950s. These genres include the prostitute melodrama, the fictional indigenista film (films on indigenous themes or topics), the cine de añoranza porfiriana (films of Porfirian nostalgia), the revolutionary melodrama, and the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy). The musics in these films helped create and accentuate the tropes and archetypes considered central to Mexican cultural nationalism. Distinct in narrative and structure, each genre exploits specific, at times contradictory, aspects of Mexicanidad—the cultural identity of the Mexican people—and, as such, employs different musics to concretize those constructions. Throughout this turbulent period, these tropes and archetypes mirrored changing perceptions of Mexicanidad manufactured by the state and popular and transnational culture. Several social and political agencies were heavily invested in creating a unified national identity to merge the previously fragmented populace owing to the Mexican Revolution (1910–ca.1920). The commercial medium of film became an important tool in acquainting a diverse urban audience with the nuances of national identity, and music played an essential and persuasive role in the process. In this heterogeneous environment, cinema and its music continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity.

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working-class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read from classical music’s practices. Finally, its aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long-term investment that is more possible, and makes more sense, for middle- and upper-class families. Through these arguments, the book reframes existing debates on gender and classical music participation in light of the classed gender identities that the study revealed. Overall, the book suggests that inequalities in cultural production can be understood through examining the practices that are used to create a particular aesthetic. It argues that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. It describes how the aesthetic of classical music is a mechanism through which the middle classes carry out boundary-drawing around their protected spaces, and within these spaces, young people’s participation in classical music education cultivates a socially valued form of self-hood.

Despite the continuing interest in historically informed vocal and instrumental performance practice, the relationship between a composer's notation and the sounds it was intended to elicit remains problematic. Early recordings reveal a strikingly different sound and style from modern practice, and written sources indicate that earlier practice was even more radically different. This book looks beyond modern responses to the notation in an attempt to understand how Classical and Romantic composers may have expected to hear their music realized in performance. Theories of accentuation and their relationship to practice are discussed in relation to the notation of accents and dynamics. Similarly, articulation and phrasing are examined in theory and practice as well as in relation to composers' articulation markings and slurs. String bowing is treated as a special case, since detailed bowing instructions provide particularly important evidence of the difference between historical and current practice. Aspects of tempo are covered in detail in four chapters: evolving tempo conventions, the impact of the metronome, the range of meanings of tempo terms, the practices of particular composers, and various types of tempo modification are examined. Changing attitudes to embellishment, ornamentation, and improvization during the period are discussed in general; and individual chapters examine particular issues relating to appoggiaturas, trills, turns and other ornaments, vibrato, and portamento. A final section deals with the fermata, recitative, arpeggiation in keyboard playing; the variable dot of prolongation and other aspects of rhythmic flexibility; and the conventions of ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ performance.

This book reconnects the Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern Hispanic world. For two and a half centuries, the Philippine Islands were linked to Latin America and Spain through transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and culture. Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital locus of intercultural exchange and a significant conduit for the regional diffusion of Western music. Within Manila's ethnically diverse society, imported and local musics played a crucial role in the establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Philippines, and the advancement of Roman Catholic evangelization in surrounding territories. The metaphors of European counterpoint and enharmony are used to critique musical practices within the colonial milieu, where multiple styles and genres coexisted according to strict regulations enforced by state and ecclesiastical authorities. This study argues that the introduction and institutionalization of counterpoint acted as a powerful agent of colonialism throughout the Philippine Archipelago, and that contrapuntal structures were reflected in the social and cultural reorganization of Filipino communities under Spanish rule. Active indigenous appropriation of Spanish music and dance constituted a significant contribution to the process of hispanization. Sustained “enharmonic engagement” between Filipinos and Spaniards led to the synthesis of hybrid, syncretic genres and the emergence of performance styles that could contest and subvert hegemony. Manila's religious institutions resounded with sumptuous vocal and instrumental performances, while an annual calendar of festivities brought together many musical traditions of the native and immigrant populations in complex forms of artistic interaction and opposition.