Browse

An invention of the Industrial Revolution, the accordion provided the less affluent with an inexpensive, loud, portable, and durable “one-man-orchestra” capable of producing melody, harmony, and bass all at once. This book considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the more exotic-sounding South American bandoneón and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, the chapters illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

This book addresses the relationship between small-scale banjo makers and the musical community within which they function, specifically groups and individuals interested in the performance and promotion of old-time music, a style deeply invested with nostalgia and a romanticized view of rural American life. Within this environment, banjo builders provide not only instruments that continuously reference a collectively imagined past, but also expand that same conception to include elements that have heretofore been overlooked or purposely ignored, such as blackface minstrelsy and the role this 19^th century phenomenon played in advancing the popularity of the banjo. By introducing instruments that reference or replicate those used in this admittedly onerous practice, builders are contributing to the growing awareness within the old-time musical world that much of the music and its associated techniques are the result of centuries of interaction between black and white musicians. In doing so, they have also advanced the discourse regarding race and music in American society by demonstrating how deeply embedded these processes are in our nation’s history.

This collection of essays is driven by the proposition that environmental and cultural sustainability are inextricably linked. The authors are unified by the influence of the pioneering work of Jeff Todd Titon in developing broadly ecological approaches to folklore, ethnomusicology, and sustainability. These approaches lead to advocacy and activism. Building on and responding to Titon's work, the authors call for profoundly integrated efforts to better understand sustainability as a challenge that encompasses all living beings and ecological systems, including human cultural systems. While many of the chapters address musicking and ecomusicology, others focus on filmmaking, folklore, digital media, philosophy, and photography. Organized into five parts, Part 1 establishes a theoretical foundation and suggests methods for approaching the daunting issues of sustainability, resilience, and adaptive management. Part 2 offers five case studies interpreting widely divergent ways that humans are grappling with ecological and environmental challenges by engaging in expressive culture. Part 3 illustrates the role of media in sustainable cultural practices. Part 4 asks how human vocal expression may be central to human self-realization and cultural survival with case studies ranging from the digital transmission of Torah chanting traditions to Russian laments. Part 5 embraces Titon's highly influential work establishing and promoting applied ethnomusicology, and speaks directly to the themes of advocacy and activism.

Bluegrass music has taken root all over the world but thrives in unique ways in the Czech Republic. Ethnomusicologist and bluegrass musician Lee Bidgood writes about what it is like to live and work playing bluegrass in the heart of Europe. The chapters trace Bidgood's engagement with Czech bluegrassers, their processes of learning, barriers to understanding, and the joys and successes that they find in making bluegrass their own. After providing a general cultural and historical background, a set of case studies convey ethnographic detail from Bidgood's participatory observational research: with a Czech band as they work abroad in Europe; with banjo makers seeking an international market; with fiddlers wrestling with technical, social, and aesthetic hurdles; with a non-Christian seeking to truthfully sing gospel songs. Bidgood's analysis of songs, sounds, places, and speech provide insights into how Czech bluegrassers negotiate the Americanness and Czechness of their musical projects. This study poses bluegrass not as a restrictive set of repertoire or techniques, but as a form of sociality, a discourse with local and global resonances—and in its Czech form it is clearly a practice of in-betweenness that defies categorization, challenging narratives that limit music to a certain time, place, or people. Includes orientation notes on language, and a glossary of Czech terms.

This book ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance; in particular, it explores this phenomenon by observing local and national music and dance festivals and international dance performances and workshops, as well as by analyzing the contemporary production of new tarantella music text. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, the book illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. The book argues that the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining southern Italian identity, especially in relation to the Italian Southern Question; in fact, they help Southern Italian groups redefine their own identities as immigrants within a larger Mediterranean and postcolonial context. They also translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as tarantella moves from local and national Italian festivals to the Italian diaspora as well as to New Age and world-music scenes, its growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.

Spanish émigré guitarist Celedonio Romero gave his American debut performance on a June evening in 1958. In the sixty years since, the Romero family—Celedonio, his wife Angelita, sons Celín, Pepe, and Angel, as well as grandsons Celino and Lito—has become preeminent in the world of Spanish flamenco and classical guitar in the United States. Walter Aaron Clark’s in-depth research and unprecedented access to his subjects have produced the consummate biography of the Romero family. Clark examines the full story of their genius for making music, from their outsider's struggle to gain respect for the Spanish guitar to the ins and outs of making a living as musicians. As he shows, their concerts and recordings, behind-the-scenes musical careers, and teaching have reshaped their instrument’s very history. At the same time, the Romeros have organized festivals and encouraged leading composers to write works for guitar as part of a tireless, lifelong effort to promote the guitar and expand its repertoire. Entertaining and intimate, Los Romeros opens up the personal world and unfettered artistry of one family and its tremendous influence on American musical culture. It features a gallery of forty photographs as well as appendices providing a chronology, genealogy, list of albums, and a summary of Romero publications, editions, and educational materials.

Although Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world and home to an estimated 44 million Indonesians, its musical arts and cultures have not been the subject of a book-length study until now. Documenting and explaining the ethnographic, cultural, and historical contexts of Sumatra's performing arts, this book also traces the changes in their style, content, and reception from the early 1970s onward. The book offers a fascinating ethnographic record of vanishing musical genres, traditions, and practices that have become deeply compromised by the pressures of urbanization, rural poverty, and government policy. It showcases the complex diversity of Indonesian music and includes field observations from six different provinces: Aceh, North Sumatra, Riau, West Sumatra, South Sumatra, and Bangka-Belitung. Featuring photographs and original drawings from Kartomi's field observations of instruments and performances, the book provides a comprehensive musical introduction to this neglected, very large island, with its hundreds of ethno-linguistic-musical groups.

The concept of folk (or lok in North Indian languages) has become an essential part of public discourse in contemporary India that is used to mark social identity and an authentic relationship to place. This musical ethnography explores the contours and consequences of the contemporary folk music boom in Uttarakhand while tracing the influences of colonial, nationalist, and post-colonial ideologies on current conceptualizations of folk music and on various approaches to “folklorizing” musical practice. Like the better-documented process of classicization, folklorization necessarily entails the silencing and purging of undesirable, polluting, low-status bodies and musical elements from particular performance traditions. Recasting Folk documents the ways in which reformers have sought to create value for folk traditions by turning to processes of codification, adaptation, and exclusion. The book also illuminates the lives of artists whose opportunities to succeed in the vernacular music industry have varied on the basis of their caste, class, and gender positions. By moving beyond the village to examine interconnected contexts of production in recording studios, state festivals, and literary texts, this text challenges long-entrenched understandings of the folk concept in South Asia.

Defined by its distinct performance style, stage practices, and regional- and dialect-based identities, Cantonese opera originated as a traditional art form performed by itinerant companies in temple courtyards and rural market fairs. In the early 1900s, however, Cantonese opera began to capture mass audiences in the commercial theaters of Hong Kong and Guangzhou—a transformation that changed it forever. This book charts Cantonese opera's confrontations with state power, nationalist discourses, and its challenge to the ascendancy of Peking opera as the country's preeminent “national theatre.” Mining vivid oral histories and heretofore untapped archival sources, the book relates how Cantonese opera evolved from a fundamentally rural tradition into urbanized entertainment distinguished by a reliance on capitalization and celebrity performers. It also expands analysis to the transnational level, showing how waves of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia and North America further re-shaped Cantonese opera into a vibrant part of the ethnic Chinese social life and cultural landscape in the many corners of a sprawling diaspora.

This book documents ways in which women’s performance practices engage with and localize world religions while creating opportunities for women’s agency. This study draws on the rich resources of three disciplines: ethnomusicology, gendered studies of religion, and religious music studies. It is a meta-ethnography formed by comparisons among different ethnographic case studies. The book analyses women’s performances at religious events in cultural settings spread across the world to demonstrate the pivotal roles women can play in localizing the practice of world religions, exploring moments in which performance allows women the agency to move, however momentarily, beyond culturally determined boundaries while revealing patterns that suggest unsuspected similarities in widely divergent religious contexts. With the rise of religious fundamentalism and with world politics embroiled in debate about women’s bodies and their comportment in public, ethnomusicologists and other scholars must address questions of religion, gender, and their intersection. By reading deeply into, but also across, the ethnographic detail of multiple studies, this book reveals patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. It invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries and suggesting that they can actively work to counter the divisive rhetoric of religious exceptionalism by revealing the many ways in which religions and cultures are similar to one another.

No other instrument has witnessed such a dramatic rise to popularity—and precipitous decline—as the accordion. This book is the first history of the piano accordion and the first book-length study of the accordion as a uniquely American musical and cultural phenomenon. The book traces the changing idea of the accordion in the United States and its cultural significance over the course of the twentieth century. It focuses on key moments of transition, from the introduction of elaborately decorated European models imported onto the American vaudeville stage and the instrument's celebration by ethnic musical communities and mainstream audiences alike, to the accordion-infused pop parodies by “Weird Al” Yankovic as well as a recent revival within contemporary cabaret acts and pop groups such as They Might Be Giants. Loaded with dozens of images of gorgeous instruments and enthusiastic performers and fans, this book represents the accordion in a wide range of popular and traditional musical styles, revealing the richness and diversity of accordion culture in America.

Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture. The book traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, the book contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. It reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.

Based on extensive research in India and Pakistan, this book examines the ways drumming and voices interconnect over vast areas of South Asia and considers what it means for musical instruments to be voice-like and carry textual messages in particular contexts. The book employs a hybrid, novelistic form of presentation in which the fictional protagonist Muharram Ali, a man obsessed with finding music he believes will dissolve religious and political barriers, interacts with the book's field consultants, to communicate ethnographic and historical realities that transcend the local details of any one person's life. The result is a daring narrative that follows Muharram Ali on a journey that explores how the themes of South Asian Muslims and their neighbors coming together, moving apart, and relating to God and spiritual intermediaries resonate across ritual and expressive forms such as drumming and dancing. The story charts the breakdown of this naiveté. A daring narrative of music, religion and politics in late twentieth century South Asia, the book delves into the social and religious principles around which Muslims, Hindus, and others bond, create distinctions, reflect upon one another, or decline to acknowledge differences.

Voices of Drought is an ethnomusicological study of relationships between popular music, the environmental and social costs of drought, and the politics of culture and climate vulnerability in the northeast region of Brazil, primarily the state of Ceará. The book traces the articulations of music and sound with drought as a discourse, a matter of politics, and a material reality. It encompasses multiple entwined issues, including ecological exile, poverty, and unequal access to vital resources such as water, along with corruption, prejudice, unbridled capitalism, and rapidly expanding neoliberalism. Each chapter is a case study: the use of carnauba wax, formed by palm trees as a protective climate adaptation, in the production of wax cylinder sound recordings in the late nineteenth century; the political significance of regionalist popular music, especially baião and forró, in the mid-twentieth century; forró music and practices of weather forecasting that involve listening to bird calls; the production and meaning of the soundscape of a small city as it involves musician Raimundo Fagner; social and musical change at the turn of the twenty-first century; and the cancellation of state-sponsored Carnival celebrations due to a costly multi-year drought in the 2010s. Demonstrating how ecological crisis affects musical culture by way of and proportionate to social difference and stratification, the book advocates a focus on environmental justice in ecomusicological scholarship.

Influences by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, this book ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas. Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, the book challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, the book notes the ways Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. The book's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, the book ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity.

Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, this book is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing voice as a central element in her life, experiencing various opportunities, tensions, and choices through her vocality. These biographical and poetic narratives demonstrate how the act of singing embodies dynamics of representation, power, agency, activism, and risk-taking. Engaging with performance practice, politics, and constructions of gender through vocality and vocal aesthetics, the book offers insights into the experiences of specific women singers in a range of sociocultural contexts. The chapters trace themes and threads that include childhood, families, motherhood, migration, fame, training, transmission, technology, and the interface of private lives and public identities. The book concentrates solely on individual women singers. The women profiled include a locally known community singer, an internationally renowned priestess, a professional wedding singer, and a national star. Chapters range across musical genres encompassing jazz, rap, traditional, folk, devotional, and classical, and the book's geographical range encompasses Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Cuba, Cyprus, Germany, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Torres Strait Islands, Turkey, and the United States.

In many places around the world, flutes and the sounds of flutes are powerful magical forces for seduction and love, protection, vegetal and human fertility, birth and death, and other aspects of human and nonhuman behavior. This book explores the cultural significance of flutes, flute playing, and flute players from around the world as interpreted from folktales, myths, and other stories—in a word, “flutelore.” A scholarly yet readable study, the book draws upon a range of sources in folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and literary analysis. Describing and interpreting many examples of flutes as they are found in mythology, poetry, lyrics, and other narrative and literary sources from around the world, the book seeks to determine what is singularly distinct or unique about flutes, flute playing, and flute players in a global context. It shows how and why flutes are important for personal, communal, religious, spiritual, and secular expression and even, perhaps, existence. This is a book for students, scholars, and any reader interested in the cultural power of flutes.