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The Accordion in the Americas: Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More!

Helena Simonett (ed.)

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 ... More

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.Less

American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination

Elizabeth A Clendinning

The book seeks to answer these questions: Why are there more than 150 gamelans (Indonesian percussion ensembles) in North America, and why are more than half of them associated with American colleges ... More

The book seeks to answer these questions: Why are there more than 150 gamelans (Indonesian percussion ensembles) in North America, and why are more than half of them associated with American colleges and universities? How and why did gamelan ensembles spark the ethnomusicological imagination? What impact have these ensembles had on college music programs, their local communities, and transnational Indonesian performing arts scenes? How does a lifetime of teaching foreign college students shape the lives of non-American music teachers? First providing an overview of gamelan and its incorporation in education in North America, this book uses the story of the career and community of one performer-teacher, I Made Lasmawan of Bali and Colorado, as a case study to examine the formation and sustenance academic world music ensembles. It examines the way students develop musical and cultural competence by learning gamelan in traditional ethnomusicology ensemble courses and analyzes the merits of including gamelan ensembles in studies in percussion, composition, and music education. More broadly, the book argues that beyond the classroom, the presence of these ensembles shapes transnational arts education and touristic performing arts scenes in Bali. Finally, it advocates for world music ensemble courses as a powerful means for teaching musical and cultural diversity and sparking transnational exchanges, both in and outside the classroom.Less

Building New Banjos for an Old-Time World

Richard Jones-Bamman

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 ... More

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 19th 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. Less

Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy

Timothy J. Cooley (ed.)

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 ... More

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.Less

Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe

Lee Bidgood

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 ... More

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.Less

Dhol: Drummers, Identities, and Modern Punjab

Gibb Schreffler

In the early twenty-first century, the Punjab region’s traditional drummers, dholis, were experiencing “the toughest time ever.” Concurrently, their instrument, the iconic barrel-drum dhol, was ... More

In the early twenty-first century, the Punjab region’s traditional drummers, dholis, were experiencing “the toughest time ever.” Concurrently, their instrument, the iconic barrel-drum dhol, was experiencing unprecedented global popularity. This book uncovers why, notwithstanding the emblematic status of dhol for Punjabis, the dholis’ local communities are facing existential crisis. The pursuit of a national identity—which aids in political representation and maintaining historical consciousness during change—has led modern Punjabis to make particular economic, social, and artistic choices. A casualty of this pursuit has been the disenfranchisement of dholis, who do not find representation despite the symbolic import of dhol to that national identity. Through the example of dhol’s subtle appropriation, the book argues that the empowerment gained by bolstering Punjabi identity in the global arena works at the expense of people on Punjabi society’s margins. At its core are the hereditary-professional drummers who, while members of society’s low-status “outcaste” population, created and maintained dhol traditions over centuries. Exacerbated by a cultural nationalist discourse that downplays ethnic diversity, their subaltern ethnic identities have been rendered invisible. Recognizing their diverse ethnic affiliations, however, is only the first step towards hearing hitherto absent perspectives of individual musicians. As a work of advocacy, this book draws on two decades of ethnography of Indian, Pakistani, and diasporic Punjabi drummers to center their experiences in the story of modern Punjab.Less

Global Tarantella: Reinventing Southern Italian Folk Music and Dances

Incoronata Inserra

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 ... More

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.Less

Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States

Melvin L. Butler

For Jamaican Pentecostal Christians, music is a form of worship that opens pathways to the Spirit and brings about deliverance from sin. It is also a way of drawing and transcending boundaries, as ... More

For Jamaican Pentecostal Christians, music is a form of worship that opens pathways to the Spirit and brings about deliverance from sin. It is also a way of drawing and transcending boundaries, as practitioners sing about what they believe and identify where they stand in relation to cultural and religious outsiders. This book explores these ritual functions as they are fulfilled within Jamaican church services and concerts. It highlights the ways in which Pentecostals cultivate feelings of collective distinctiveness by rendering gospel music with an island flavor and by patrolling stylistic boundaries between a holy “home” and a profane “world.” This dichotomy is destabilized through the transnational flow and appropriation of popular culture and “American” media. What emerges are the strategies of musical worship through which Pentecostals embody their religion and seek spiritual transcendence while navigating the crossroads of local and global practice. Pentecostals describe themselves as “in the world, but not of the world,” meaning that while they live and work in the broader society, they strive to be “sanctified” from it by upholding a distinct moral code. This narrative of worldly renunciation prompts believers to abandon prior habits of conduct while embracing newer, localized identities as children of God. This book uncovers how gospel music, as a dynamic cultural practice, complicates these theological affirmations and reveals the shifting foundations of Pentecostal identity in Jamaica and its diaspora.Less

Los Romeros: Royal Family of the Spanish Guitar

Walter Aaron Clark

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, ... More

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.Less

Musical Ethics and Islam: The Art of Playing the Ney

Banu Senay

At the heart of this study is a musical practice that occupies a significant place in the contemporary public soundscape of Turkey: the art of playing the ney. Intimately connected with Sufism in ... More

At the heart of this study is a musical practice that occupies a significant place in the contemporary public soundscape of Turkey: the art of playing the ney. Intimately connected with Sufism in both the Ottoman Empire and, for better or worse, in modern secular Turkey, the ney has been a popular instrument throughout the Middle East and North Africa. After enduring a checkered social life during the Turkish Republic’s modernizing reforms, today in a more Islam-friendly socio-political environment the ney is flourishing. Based on extensive field research in Istanbul and an apprentice-style method of inquiry, the book documents the lifetime of preparation required to become an expert player of the ney (neyzen). It examines in particular the transformative power of this Islamic art pedagogy to cultivate new artistic and ethical perceptions in learners. Crafting oneself as a neyzen transcends ‘mere’ musical technique in profound ways, as it also involves developing a certain way of living. Exploring firsthand the practical process of musical teaching and learning, together with their ethical scaffolding, the book has theoretical implications for scholars studying many other forms of apprentice-style learning. It also helps redress the underdeveloped understandings and often-polemical claims made in both the media and by Islamophobic discourse concerning processes by which Muslims develop a religious and moral sense.Less

Musical Journeys in Sumatra

Margaret Kartomi

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. ... More

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.Less

Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change

John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (eds)

Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a fresh contribution to the environmental humanities, offering ten original essays anchored in the fields of folklore studies ... More

Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a fresh contribution to the environmental humanities, offering ten original essays anchored in the fields of folklore studies and ethnomusicology that engage productively with forms of traditional expressive culture at the crux of environmental debate and conflict. These essays draw on ethnographic research in several world regions to explore the ways individuals and groups express and perform their connection to the environment as they interpret changing environments, manage ecological crises, and seek to change policies, minds, and practices. Performing Environmentalisms brings together a set of essays that focus on genres and practices of expressive culture—songs, stories, handicrafts, and ritual and activist practices—as these are employed to come to grips with ecological change, and in doing so, argues for performing environmentalisms as a valuable perspective on ecological change and environmental crisis in the Anthropocene. The book consists of a substantial introduction, laying the foundation for thinking about expressive culture as an instrument of environmental discourse, followed by essays grouped into three sections: Perspectives on Diverse Environmentalisms, Performing the Sacred, and Environmental Attachments; a thoughtful afterword by Eduardo Brondizio locates Performing Environmentalisms as a welcome contribution toward a holistic approach to environmental issues.Less

Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility

Stefan Fiol

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 ... More

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. Less

A Respectable Spell: Transformations of Samba in Rio de Janeiro

This book is primarily about the social history and musical changes of samba in Rio de Janeiro from 1917 to the early 1930s, looking chiefly at the era’s commercial recordings. The year 1917 marks ... More

This book is primarily about the social history and musical changes of samba in Rio de Janeiro from 1917 to the early 1930s, looking chiefly at the era’s commercial recordings. The year 1917 marks the first time that a popular song designated as “samba” became a widespread Carnival success in the city. In the early 1930s, a new style of samba became dominant, such that it is still today the genre’s primary point of reference. The book proposes an analysis and interpretation of the differences in the musical styles, highlighting their rhythmic aspects. It also shows how these differences are linked to the way in which samba and sambistas are understood in Rio de Janeiro’s society and culture during this period. The first part of the book, “From Lundu to Samba,” deals with popular music genres created during the second half of the nineteenth century, such as lundu, Brazilian tango, and maxixe, whose musical characteristics came to be shared with old-style samba. The book’s second part, “From One Samba to Another,” deals with the emergence of samba in Rio de Janeiro as a commercial genre of popular music, and with the creation and success of the new style of samba, paying special attention to the trajectories of Ismael Silva and Noel Rosa, composers representative of this transition.Less

The Rise of Cantonese Opera

Wing Chung Ng

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 ... More

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.Less

Ritual Soundings: Women Performers and World Religions

Sarah Weiss

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 ... More

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.Less

Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life

Tony Perman

This book is an ethnography of spirit possession ceremonies and accompanying musical practices in the rural Ndau-speaking communities surrounding Chipinge, Zimbabwe. Collectively called madhlozi, ... More

This book is an ethnography of spirit possession ceremonies and accompanying musical practices in the rural Ndau-speaking communities surrounding Chipinge, Zimbabwe. Collectively called madhlozi, these spirits are the “outsider spirits” of distant social encounters that have shaped Ndau identity and history. The purpose of this book is to explain how musicking during ceremonial life in rural Ndau communities in Zimbabwe is meaningfully experienced during a single spirit possession ceremony. It investigates the immediacy of musical experience and the ways in which the ongoing present of ceremonial performance becomes emotional and socially salient. It provides a model rooted in ethnography and semiotic analysis that illuminates the tight relationship between sound, meaning, experience, and emotion, engaging with three overlapping bodies of knowledge: Ndau spiritual life, semiotics, and studies of emotion and affect. Each chapter in Part II focuses on a specific category of spirits and emphasizes an element of semiotic theory to build a model for exploring affect, emotional experience, and ceremonial efficacy: objects, signs, effects, and continuity. The purpose of the ceremonies I describe and analyze is to transform possibility into actuality, desires into reality. Music is uniquely suited to facilitate experiential transformations such as this. Situated within the historical, spiritual, musical, and political contexts of contemporary Ndau life in Zimbabwe, this book explains how important the experience of meaning is to ceremonial life.Less

Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America

Marion Jacobson

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 ... More

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.Less

Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in Indo-Caribbean Music

Peter Manuel

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. ... More

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.Less

The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia

Richard K. Wolf

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 ... More

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.Less