Enriched by the insights of key contributors to the living tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, accompanying this abundantly illustrated volume is an online Spotify playlist featuring over 20 songs by musicians profiled in the book, including Dolly Parton, Dougie MacLean, Cara Dillon, John Doyle, Pete Seeger, Sheila Kay Adams, Jean Ritchie, Doc Watson, David Holt, Anais Mitchell, Al Petteway, and more.
American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music.
The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and new downloadable resources bring the music to life.
Beautifully written... a riveting account of how melodies and rhythms connect us, and help us deal with alienation and anxiety.--Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score
In this captivating blend of science and memoir, a health journalist and former cellist explores music as a source of health, resilience, connection, and joy.
Music isn't just background noise or a series of torturous exercises we remember from piano lessons. In the right doses, it can double as a mild antidepressant, painkiller, sleeping pill, memory aid--and enhance athletic performance while supporting healthy aging. Though music has been used as a healing strategy since ancient times, neuroscientists have only recently discovered how melody and rhythm stimulate core memory, motor, and emotion centers in the brain. But here's the catch: We can tune into music every day and still miss out on some of its potent effects.
Adriana Barton learned the hard way. Starting at age five, she studied the cello for nearly two decades, a pursuit that left her with physical injuries and emotional scars. In Wired for Music, she sets out to discover what music is really for, combing through medical studies, discoveries by pioneering neuroscientists, and research from biology and anthropology. Traveling from state-of-the-art science labs to a remote village in Zimbabwe, her investigation gets to the heart of music's profound effects on the human body and brain. Blending science and story, Wired for Music shows how our species' age-old connection to melody and rhythm is wired inside us.
Discover the vibrant journey of music from New York's melting pot to the mystical shores of the Bosphorus
From the Bronx to the Bosphorus explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, musical culture of New York, tracing its origins to a period when the city served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Walter Zev Feldman chronicles his journey through the musical landscapes of post-WWII New York--from the declining world of East European immigrant klezmorim to the dynamic environments of Greek, Armenian, and Caucasian musicians. These experiences culminate in the klezmer revitalization movement of the late 1970s. Feldman, whose father emigrated from Bessarabia--a region known for its rich interactions among Jewish, Roma, and Greek musicians--connects various musical worlds. From the local Turkish Sephardi synagogue and the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Washington Heights to the lively Armenian and Greek nightclubs of Manhattan, his interactions with a diverse group of musicians, including an Armenian virtuoso who once performed for Stalin and the Shah of Iran, enhance his understanding and appreciation of these interconnected cultures. Finally, at age twenty-five, in a sense he returned to his father's shtetl and studied with Dave Tarras, the greatest living klezmer in America, who had learned his key musical lessons in that very same Bessarabian town following World War I. From the Bronx to the Bosphorus is not just a chronicle of music but a poignant examination of the power of music to connect cultures, transcend borders, and preserve the echoes of a nearly vanished world.Homesick Blues explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that author Scott Aalgaard calls musical storytelling. At its core, musical storytelling is a political practice, presenting world-producing potentials as social actors generate and share stories of themselves and others in ways that intersect with and inform social and political life. Sometimes, musical storytelling is used by powerful entities to reinforce dominant geopolitical, cultural, or economic visions. More often, it is deployed as a means of interfering in or redirecting those visions. In all cases, attending to musical storytelling helps reveal the complex and unexpected ways that everyday life has been imagined and critiqued across disparate moments in modern Japanese history. Aalgaard pushes beyond the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, challenging well-established characterizations of these years as fleeting moments when critical politics in Japan reached an apex, and an end. Instead, he asserts that musical storytelling is robust and ongoing, and proposes more nuanced and comprehensive understandings of critical political and cultural engagement in modern Japan.
Homesick Blues is comprised of five chapters, each of which addresses specific instances of musical storytelling in the contexts of their own political, economic, and social histories. From postwar jazz to contemporary rock, from 1960s anti-war folk to Japanese pops (enka) and the girls' rock of the 1980s, the book explores the political uses of music, reassesses protest music, and grapples with the complex political-ness of artists, many of whom have continued to interrogate conditions of everyday life well into the contemporary moment. Homesick Blues assembles a diverse ensemble of voices, some of whom appear in English-language scholarship for the first time, including industry stakeholders, rock stars, fans, newscasters, Kyoto-based folk singers, jazz singers, karaoke enthusiasts, and even US military personnel. An equally diverse selection of scholarship and methodology, from ethnomusicology to literary studies, from philosophy to history, creates a richly interdisciplinary and accessible analysis of musical modes of politics.Updated Content On February 4, 2018, + Extra Bonus Added
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Why do Japanese people love tango? Starting with this question, which the author frequently received while working as a tango violinist in Argentina, Tango in Japan reveals histories and ethnographies of tango in Japan dating back to its first introduction in the 1910s to the present day. While initially brought to Yokohama by North American tango dancers in 1914, tango's immediate popularity in Japan quickly compelled many Japanese performers and writers to travel to Argentina in search of tango's origin beginning in the 1920s. Many Japanese musicians, dancers, aficionados, and the wider public have, since then, approached tango as a new vehicle of expression, entertainment, and academic pursuit. The sounds of tango provided comfort and a sense of hope to many during the most turbulent years of the twentieth century, carving out distinctive characteristics of contemporary Japanese tango culture. Bypassing the West-East axis of understanding cultural transmission, Tango in Japan uncovers the processes of attraction, rejection, and self-transformation, illuminating the tension of cosmopolitan endeavors away from the Euro-American West.
Based on Yuiko Asaba's field and archival work undertaken in both Japanese and Spanish languages in Japan and Argentina across two decades, and drawing on her own background as a tango violinist who performed as a member of tango orchestras in both countries, the discussions move between historical and ethnographic narratives, offering a comprehensive account of tango culture as it emerged in the history of a Japan-Argentina connection. Serving as the first in-depth work on the Japan-Argentina musical relationship, Tango in Japan tells a story that reflects the modern transformations of Japan and Argentina, and the global historical backdrops surrounding both countries.The universe began with a movement of sound, as the Divine Creative Command Kun (Be!) reverberated with tarab (musical ecstasy) through all the levels of existence, beginning with the Divine Throne all the way to the heart of humanity. In this book, we explore the history of sound and music as a sacred journey to God in Islamic spirituality, starting with the initial revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad, which emerged through sound, until the present day and tumultuous response of various Muslims to the onslaught of religious extremism. In the second chapter, Metaphysics, we explore the height of cosmic soundscape in the writings of the Andalusian Muslim mystic Muhyiddin Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240) and other saints. Then, in the third chapter, Reflections, the author shares his own meditations on the sacrality of sound based on his decades-long work as a musician and educator in the Muslim community.