Music: ATS1346 2020

This book brings together a wide range of contemporary explorations of Indigenous music and dance in the Torres Strait and the tropical regions of the Northern Territory. This collection shows how traditional music and dance have responded to colonial control in the past and more recently to other external forces beyond local control. It looks at musical pasts and presents as a continuum of creativity; at contemporary cultural performance as a contested domain; and at cross-cultural issues of recording and teaching music and dance as experienced by Indigenous leaders and educators, and non-Indigenous researchers and scholars. Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors demonstrate how local music and dance genres have been subject to missionary, institutional, popular and global influences. They offer an understanding of the cultural background and history of Torres Strait music; discuss how contemporary Christian music and dance in Arnhem Land incorporate traditional ritual; unpack the complex form and structure of an Australian Aboriginal song series; and examine the transformation of a nineteenth-century American popular song into a 'traditional' anthem of the Torres Strait. The book also examines the interface between Aboriginal ritual, movement and the environment as portrayed on film, and explores the issues raised by the presence of Aboriginal performers in the non-Indigenous university classroom.

Masculinity in popular music is explored in chapters from Aaron Corn's 'To See Their Fathers' Eyes: Expressions of Ancestry through Yarrata among Yoliju Popular Bands from Arnhem Land, Australia', to chapters from Muddy Waters to Mick Jagger, Elvis to Freddie Mercury, Jeff Buckley to Justin Timberlake. Sometimes these roles shift as the singer ages, attitudes change, or new challenges on the pop scene arise; other times, the persona hardens into a shell-like mask that the performer struggles to escape. This book is the first serious study of how forms of masculinity are negotiated, constructed, represented and addressed across a range of popular music texts and practices. Written by a group of internationally recognized popular music scholars, these essays study the concept of masculinity in performance and appearance, and how both male and female artists have engaged with notions of masculinity in popular music.

Manikay are the ancestral songs of Arnhem Land, passed down over generations and shaping relationships between people and the country. Singing Bones foregrounds the voices of manikay singers from Ngukurr in southeastern Arnhem Land and charts their critically acclaimed collaboration with jazz musicians from the Australian Art Orchestra, Crossing Roper Bar. It offers an overview of Wägilak manikay narratives and style, including their social, ceremonial and linguistic aspects, and explores the Crossing Roper Bar project as an example of creative intercultural collaboration and a living continuation of the manikay tradition. “Through song, the ancestral past animates the present, moving yolŋu (people) to dance. In song, community is established. By song, the past enfolds the present. Today, the unique voices of Wägilak resound over the ancestral ground and water, carried by the songs of old.”

The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory are perhaps best-known for their walk-off of Wave Hill Station in 1966, protesting against mistreatment by the station managers. The strike would become the first major victory of the Indigenous land rights movement. Many discussions of station life are focused on the harsh treatment of Aboriginal workers. Songs from the Stations portrays another side of life on Wave Hill Station. Amongst the harsh conditions and decades of mistreatment, an eclectic ceremonial life flourished during the first half of the 20th century. This book is the first detailed documentation of wajarra, public songs performed by the Gurindji people in response to contemporary events in their community. Featuring five song sets known as Laka, Mintiwarra, Kamul, Juntara, and Freedom Day, it is an exploration of the cultural exchange between Indigenous communities that was fostered by their involvement in the pastoral industry.

This book is an edited volume of essays exploring the global dimensions of musical improvisation. The contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a method for negotiating violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism. Outlining the relation of improvisatory practices to local and global power structures, they show how in sites as varied as South Africa, Canada, Egypt, the United States, and the Canary Islands, improvisation provides the means for its participants to address the past and imagine the future. In addition to essays, the volume features a poem by saxophonist Matana Roberts, an interview with pianist Vijay Iyer about his work with U.S. veterans of color, and drawings by artist Randy DuBurke that chart Nina Simone's politicization. Throughout, the contributors illustrate how improvisation functions as a model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action that can foster the creation of alternate modes of being and knowing in the world.

In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms of jazz that have flourished since the 1960s, and they reveal the contemporary relevance of those musical practices. Many of the participants in the jazz scenes discussed are still active performers. A photographic essay captures some of them in candid moments before performances. Other pieces revise standard accounts of well-known jazz figures, such as Duke Ellington, and lesser-known musicians, including Jeanne Lee; delve into how money, class, space, and economics affect the performance of experimental music; and take up the question of how digital technology influences improvisation. People Get Ready offers a vision for the future of jazz based on an appreciation of the complexity of its past and the abundance of innovation in the present.

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Critical ImprovisationStudies gather scholarship on improvisation from an immense range of perspectives, with contributions from more than sixty scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, genderstudies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

Part 1 of a 2 part documentary. Raga Revelry is an introduction to the centuries-old tradition of North Indian Classical Music, colloquially referred to as Raga music.
Contents are as follows:
Rāga experiences -- Vijay Kichlu -- Opening song -- Connection to the soul -- Antiquity and agenda -- Influences and expansion -- Voice production -- Comparison to western music -- Mastering solpha syllables -- Alankara and Paltā -- Improvisation -- Gurukulā in modern India -- Guru and Shishya roles ; Introduction to melody -- Nuances -- Rasa -- Parampara institutionalized -- Propagating the music -- Emotional bond -- Introduction to rhythm -- Vocalization in rhythm -- Introduction to tabla -- Talā : cyclic pattern -- Tempo -- Inviting the world -- Tabla : accompanying instrument -- Tihāi -- Significance of the listener -- Mukhadā : rhythm and melody -- The essence of Hindustani music.

Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal patterns, and genres of Indian music from Vedic times to the thirteenth century, presenting not so much a history as a thematic analysis and interpretation of India's magnificent musical heritage. In Indian culture, music forms an integral part of a broad framework of ideas that includes philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. Rowell works with the known theoretical treatises and the oral tradition in an effort to place the technical details of musical practice in their full cultural context. Many quotations from the original Sanskrit appear here in English translation for the first time, and the necessary technical information is presented in terms accessible to the nonspecialist. These features, combined with Rowell's glossary of Sanskrit terms and extensive bibliography, make Music and Musical Thought in Early India an excellent introduction for the general reader and an indispensable reference for ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, and Indologists.

Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Though observers of Indian classical music have long commented on these gestures, Musicking Bodies is the first extended study of what singers actually do with their hands and voices. Matthew Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to demonstrate the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The gestures that are improvised alongside vocal improvisation embody a special kind of melodic knowledge passed down tacitly through lineages of teachers and students who not only sound similar, but who also engage with music kinesthetically according to similar aesthetic and ethical ideals. Musicking Bodies builds on the insights of phenomenology, Indian and Western music theory, and cultural studies to illuminate not only the performance of gesture, but its implications for the transmission of culture, the conception of melody, and the very nature of the musicking body.

Andrew N. Weintraub shows how a genre of Indonesian music called dangdut evolved from a denigrated form of urban popular music to a prominent role in Indonesian cultural politics and the commercial music industry. Dangdut--named onomatopoetically for the music's characteristic drum sounds "dang" and "dut"--is Indonesia's most popular music. Dangdut Stories is a social and musical history of dangdut within a range of broader narratives about class, gender, ethnicity, and nation in post-independence Indonesia (1945-present). The book is the first musicological study to examine the stylistic development of dangdut music itself, using vocal style, melody, rhythm, form, and song texts to articulate symbolic struggles over meaning. Throughout the book the voices and experiences of musicians take centre stage in shaping the book's narrative. Quoted material from interviews, detailed analysis of music and song texts, and ethnography of performance illuminate the stylistic nature of the music and its centrality in public debates about Islam, social class relations, and the role of women in postcolonial Indonesia.

What happens to 'local' sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? This book explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime.

This book discusses three major elements - MTV, the Music of Malaysia, and the Music of Indonesia - and how these three interact in the modern cultural setting. The research objective behind the book was to study the impact of globalization, in the form of the MTV onslaught on the youth musical culture and identities of Indonesia and Malaysia, and to determine what theoretical basis could explain the new cultural products which have risen in response to this process. The book goes on to examine whether the nasyid and irama Malaysia music genres in Malaysia and dangdut in Indonesia are part of this process and how it is achieved.

Sonic Modernities situates Southeast Asian popular music in specific socio-historical settings, hoping that a focus on popular culture and history may shed light on how some people in a particular part of the world have been witnessing the emergence of all things modern. In its focus on pioneering artists, their creative use of new genres and border crossing technologies it aims at a rewriting of Southeast Asia's twentieth century from the perspective of popular music makers, the entertainment industry and its ever changing audiences. Chapters include: Pop Melayu vs. pop Indonesia: marketeers, producers and new interpretations of a genre into the 2000s, Worlds of sparkling lights: popular music and youth cultures in Solo, Central Java, Notes on dangdut music, popular nationalism, and Indonesian islam, Musical aspects of popular music and pop sunda in West Java, Modernizing songs of the forest : indigenous communities negotiate tensions of change in Malaysia ...

The word motreb finds its roots in the Arabic verb taraba, meaning 'to make happy.' Originally denoting all musicians in Iran, motrebi came to be associated, pejoratively, with the cheerful vulgarity of the lowbrow entertainer. In Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment, GJ Breyley and Sasan Fatemi examine the historically overlooked motrebi milieu, with its marginalized characters, from luti to gardan koloft and mashti, as well as the tenacity of motreb who continued their careers against all odds. They then turn to losanjelesi, the most pervasive form of Iranian popular music that developed as motrebi declined, and related musical forms in Iran and its diasporic popular cultural centre, Los Angeles. For the first time in English, the book makes available musical transcriptions, analysis and lyrics that illustrate the complexities of this history. As it presents the findings of the authors' years of ethnographic work with the history's protagonists, from senior motreb to pop-rock stars, the book reveals parallels between the decline of motrebi and the rise of 'modernity.' In the twentieth century, the fate of Tehran's motrebi music was shaped by the social and urban polarization that ensued from the modern market economy, and losanjelesi would be similarly affected by transnational relations, revolution, war and migration. Through its detailed and informed examination of Iranian popular music, this study reveals much about the values and anxieties of Iranian society, and is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Iranian society and history.

Los Angeles, called Tehrangeles because it is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, is the birthplace of a distinctive form of post-revolutionary pop music. Created by professional musicians and media producers fleeing Iran's revolutionary-era ban on "immoral" popular music, Tehrangeles pop has been a part of daily life for Iranians at home and abroad for decades. Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the songs, music videos, and television made in Tehrangeles express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran. Exploring Tehrangeles pop producers' complex commercial and political positioning and the histories, sensations, and fantasies their music makes available to global Iranian audiences, Hemmasi shows how unquestionably Iranian forms of Tehrangeles popular culture exemplify the manner in which culture, media, and diaspora combine to respond to the Iranian state and its political transformations.

Questions of creativity, and particularly the processes which underlie creative performance or 'improvisation', form some of the central areas of interest in current musicology. Yet the predominant discourses on which musicological thought in this area are based have rarely been challenged. In this book Laudan Nooshin interrogates musicological discourses of creativity from the perspective of critical theory and postcolonial studies, examining their ideological underpinnings, the relationships of alterity which they sustain, and the profound implications for our understanding of creative processes in music. The repertoire which forms the book's main focus is Iranian classical music, a tradition in which the performer plays a central creative role. Addressing a number of issues regarding the nature of musical creativity, the author explores both the discourses through which ideas about creativity are constructed, exchanged and negotiated within this tradition, and the practice by which new music comes into being. For the latter she compares a number of performances by musicians playing a range of instruments and spanning a period of more than 30 years, focusing on one particular section of repertoire, dastgāh Segāh, and providing transcriptions of the performances as the basis for analytical exploration of the music's underlying compositional principles. This book is about understanding musical creativity as a meaningful social practice. It is the first to examine the ways in which ideas about tradition, authenticity, innovation and modernity in Iranian classical music form part of a wider social discourse on creativity, and in particular how they inform debates regarding national and cultural identity.

Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm offers new understandings of musical rhythm through the analysis and comparison of diverse repertoires, performance practices, and theories as formulated and transmitted in speech or writing. These chapters provide detailed case studies of art and vernacular musical traditions, historical and contemporary, in South, West, East, and Southeast Asia; West and North Africa; Europe; and North America. Together these case studies highlight the multiple dimensions of musical rhythm. Considering rhythm as a topic involves a set of terminologies, methods, assumptions, and efforts at generalising and abstracting that together point to a larger dynamic in scholarly discourse between universalising and local approaches to rhythm and music more generally.

Music has been critical to national identity in Latin America, especially since the worldwide emphasis on nations and cultural identity that followed World War I. Unlike European countries with unified ethnic populations, Latin American nations claimed blended ethnicities--indigenous, Caucasian, African, and Asian--and the process of national stereotyping that began in the 1920s drew on themes of indigenous and African cultures. Composers and performers drew on the folklore and heritage of ethnic and immigrant groups in different nations to produce what became the music representative of different countries. Mexico became the nation of mariachi bands, Argentina the land of the tango, Brazil the country of Samba, and Cuba the island of Afro-Cuban rhythms, including the rhumba. The essays collected here offer a useful introduction to the twin themes of music and national identity and melodies and ethnic identification. The contributors examine a variety of countries where powerful historical movements were shaped intentionally by music.

The foremost authorities in the field of music from around the world have contributed twenty original essays for this volume, edited by Elizabeth May. Only European musics have been omitted, except insofar as they affect other musics discussed here. North American music is represented by the musics of the Native Americans and the Alaskan Eskimos. The essays are profusely illustrated with maps, drawings, diagrams, photographs, and music examples. There are extensive glossaries, bibliographies, and annotated film lists. The book is directed to readers seriously interested in acquainting themselves with musics beyond the confines of Western musicology. Contributors include Bruno Nettl, Kuo-huang Han and Lindy Li Mark, Kang-sook Lee, William P. Malm, David Morton, Bonnie C. Wade, Margaret J. Kartomi, Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Trevor A. Jones, Atta Annan Mensah, John Blacking, Alfred Kwashie Ladzekpo and Kobla Ladzekpo, Cynthia Tse Kimberlin, Jozef M. Pacholczyk, Ella Zonis, Abraham A. Schwadron, David P. McAllester, Lorraine D. Koranda, and Dale A. Olsen.

Music in Central Java is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Music in Central Java offers a vivid introduction to the region's musical and cultural landscape, showing how three themes--flexibility, appropriateness, and interconnectedness--characterize Javanese musical practices and traditions. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork, author Benjamin Brinner takes an in-depth look at gamelan music--a traditional musical ensemble tradition that typically features metallophones, xylophones, drums, and gongs--providing readers with a sense of what it means to be a musician performing gamelan. Building from fundamental Javanese concepts of time and melody, the book covers gamelan's instruments, musical idioms, and central interactions and also surveys contrasting performance contexts. It examines both the theatrical and musical aspects of the vibrant tradition of shadow-puppet plays (Wayang kulit) and offers a broad survey of other music found in Central Java. In addition, Music in Central Java provides an engaging portrait of a leading Javenese musician, traces musical responses to radical social, political, and cultural changes over the past century, and considers Javanese music in relation to Indonesia and the rest of the world. Enhanced by eyewitness accounts of performances, interviews with key performers, vivid illustrations, and hands-on listening activities, this book is a captivating introduction to the music of Central Java. It is packaged with a 78-minute audio CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book.

Mainland Southeast Asia is a culturally diverse and musically intriguing area, yet the ethnomusicological record lacks coverage of many of its musical and cultural traditions. Placing the music of this region within a social, cultural, and historical context, Music in Mainland Southeast Asia is the first brief, stand-alone volume to profile the under-represented musical traditions of Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. It also contains the first introduction to Burmese music ever presented in a music textbook. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork, author Gavin Douglas frames this survey of Southeast Asian music within three key themes: music and diversity, music and political turmoil, and music and globalization. Each theme lends itself to a discussion of the region's classical musical traditions, folk traditions, and contemporary developments. Uniquely focusing on the people who practice these musical traditions--rather than the locales from which the traditions originate--the text also follows individuals out of their native lands and into diasporic communities throughout the world. A vibrant, thorough introduction, Music in Mainland Southeast Asia is ideal for introductory undergraduate courses in world music or ethnomusicology and for upper-level courses in Southeast Asian music or Southeast Asian culture. Packaged with a 70-minute CD containing musical examples, the text features numerous listening activities that actively engage students with the music and the themes. The companion website includes supplementary materials for instructors.

For the Indigenous people of Australia, songs and dances, have encoded their history and religion, their social organisation, and their connectedness to the land for 60,000 years. As research assistant to the eminent musicologist Alice Moyle, and later on her own behalf, Jill Stubington spent many years between 1960 and 1980 in remote regions of Australia learning to listen to this music, to understand its complexity, its central role in identity, social cohesion, celebration and the resolution of family conflict. From 1960 new sound and film equipment widened the opportunities for recording; and soon the guitar and recorded popular music began to intermingle with the traditional styles. It became a matter of urgency to use the new technology to preserve the old culture. In three sections the book details the diverse culture, its musical instruments and practice; and provides listening guides to the available CDs and notations.

In the Course of Performance is the first book in decades to illustrate and explain the practices and processes of musical improvisation. Improvisation, by its very nature, seems to resist interpretation or elucidation. This difficulty may account for the very few attempts scholars have made to provide a general guide to this elusive subject. With contributions by seventeen scholars and improvisers, In the Course of Performance offers a history of research on improvisation and an overview of the different approaches to the topic that can be used, ranging from cognitive study to detailed musical analysis. Such diverse genres as Italian lyrical singing, modal jazz, Indian classical music, Javanese gamelan, and African-American girls' singing games are examined. The most comprehensive guide to the understanding of musical improvisation available, In the Course of Performance will be indispensable to anyone attracted to this fascinating art. Contributors are Stephen Blum, Sau Y. Chan, Jody Cormack, Valerie Woodring Goertzen, Lawrence Gushee, Eve Harwood, Tullia Magrini, Peter Manuel, Ingrid Monson, Bruno Nettl, Jeff Pressing, Ali Jihad Racy, Ronald Riddle, Stephen Slawek, Chris Smith, R. Anderson Sutton, and T. Viswanathan.