Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music

Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music
Author: Bruno Nettl
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 1991-03-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226574091

Non-Aboriginal; based on papers presented at Ideas, Concepts and Personalities in the History of Ethnomusicology conference, Urbana, Illinois, April 1988.

Nettl's Elephant

Nettl's Elephant
Author: Bruno Nettl
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252090233

From one of the most lauded scholars in ethnomusicology comes this enlightening and highly personal narrative on the evolution and current state of the field of ethnomusicology. Surveying the field he helped establish, Bruno Nettl investigates how concepts such as evolution, geography, and history serve as catalysts for advancing ethnomusicological methods and perspectives. This entertaining collection covers Nettl's scholarly interests ranging from Native American to Mediterranean to Middle Eastern contexts while laying out the pivotal moments of the field and conversations with the giants of its past. Nettl moves from reflections on the history of ethnomusicology to evaluations of the principal organizations in the field, interspersing those broader discussions with shorter essays focusing on neglected literature and personal experiences.

Experiencing Rhythm

Experiencing Rhythm
Author: Jenny Fuhr
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2014-07-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1443864315

How is “rhythm” experienced? What role does “rhythm” play in musicians’ search for a collective musical identity? These questions are answered in this book on the fascinating blend of musical styles and influences within contemporary Malagasy music. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, “the footprint between Africa and Asia,” with a history marked by many waves of migration. Over the centuries, a wide range of styles of music, of instruments and of dance have become a part of the island’s musical palette. Despite this and the resulting diversity of regional musical particularities, musicians claim there is one element they all share: a common rhythmical base. To explore this claim and the meaning of “rhythm” in the Malagasy context, Jenny Fuhr makes use of her dual role as musician and researcher. Self-reflexive field research combined with learning to play and perform Malagasy music enables a profound intercultural dialogue. This book shows how her intense involvement in music-making and a constant dialogue between musical experiences and discourses opens up new paths of understanding. In doing so, it challenges prevalent Western analytical perspectives on music and demonstrates the need for a more performance-based approach to ethnomusicology.

Singing a Hindu Nation

Singing a Hindu Nation
Author: Anna Schultz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199730830

Singing a Hindu Nation is a study of ranullnullriya kirtan, a western Indian performance medium that combines song, Hindu philosophical discourse, and nationalist storytelling. Beginning during the anti-colonial movement of the late nineteenth-century, performers of ranullnullriya kirtan led masses of Marathi-speaking people in temples and streets, and they have continued to preach and sing nationalism as devotion in the post-colonial era, and into the twenty-first century. In this book, author Anna Schultz demonstrates how, through this particular form of musical performance, the political becomes devotional, and explores why it motivates people to action and violence. Through both historical and ethnographic studies, Schultz shows that ranullnullriya kirtan has been especially successful in combining these two realms because kirtankars perform as representatives of the divine sage Narad, thereby infusing their nationalist messages with ritual weight. By speaking and singing in regional idioms with rich associations for Maharashtrian congregations, they use music to combine political and religious signs in ways that seem natural and desirable, promoting embodied experiences of nationalist devotion. As the first monograph on music and Hindu-nationalism, Singing a Hindu Nation presents a rare glimpse into the lives and performance worlds of nationalists on the margins of all-India political parties and cultural organizations, and is an essential resource for ethnomusicologists, as well as scholars of South Asian studies, religion, and political theory.

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
Author: Alison Arnold
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1126
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351544381

In this volume, sixty-eight of the world's leading authorities explore and describe the wide range of musics of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Nepal and Afghanistan. Important information about history, religion, dance, theater, the visual arts and philosophy as well as their relationship to music is highlighted in seventy-six in-depth articles.

Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala

Maya Achi Marimba Music in Guatemala
Author: Sergio Navarrete Pellicer
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781592132928

For the Achi, one of the several Mayan ethnic groups indigenous to Guatemala, the music of the marimba serves not only as a form of entertainment but also as a form of communication, a vehicle for memory, and an articulation of cultural identity. Sergio Navarrete Pellicer examines the marimba tradition -- the historical confluence of African musical influences, Spanish colonial power, and Indian ethnic assimilation -- as a driving force in the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in Rabinal, the heart of Achi culture and society. By examining the performance and consumption of marimba music as complementary parts of a system of social interaction, religious belief, and ethnic identification, Navarrete Pellicer reveals how the strains of the marimba resonate with the spiritual yearnings and cultural negotiations of the Achi as they try to come to terms with the political violence ...

Ilmatar's Inspirations

Ilmatar's Inspirations
Author: Tina K. Ramnarine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-02-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226704041

Ilmatar gave birth to the bard who sang the Finnish landscape into being in the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic). In Ilmatar's Inspirations, Tina K. Ramnarine explores creative processes and the critical role that music has played in Finnish nationalism by focusing on Finnish "new folk music" in the shifting spaces between the national imagination and the global marketplace. Through extensive interviews and observations of performances, Ramnarine reveals how new folk musicians think and talk about past and present folk music practices, the role of folk music in the representation of national identity, and the interactions of Finnish folk musicians with performers from around the globe. She focuses especially on two internationally successful groups—JPP, a group that plays fiddle dance music, and Värttinä, an ensemble that highlights women's vocal traditions. Analyzing the multilayered processes—musical, institutional, political, and commercial—that have shaped and are shaped by new folk music in Finland, Ramnarine gives us an entirely new understanding of the connections between music, place, and identity.

The Improvising Mind

The Improvising Mind
Author: Aaron Berkowitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199590958

The ability to improvise represents one of the highest levels of musical achievement. Yet what musical knowledge is 3equired for improvisation? How does a musician learn to improvise? What are the neural correlates of improvised performance? These are some of the questions explored in this unique and fascinating new book.

Lineage of Loss

Lineage of Loss
Author: Max Katz
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 081957760X

In the middle of the nineteenth century a new family of hereditary musicians emerged in the royal court of Lucknow and subsequently rose to the heights of renown throughout North India. Today this musical lineage, or ghar n, lives on in the music and memories of only a small handful of descendants and players of the family instrument, the sarod. Drawing on six years of ethnographic and archival research, and fifteen years of musical apprenticeship, Max Katz explores the oral history and written record of the Lucknow ghar n ,tracing its displacement, loss of prestige, and erasure from the collective memory. In doing so he illuminates a hidden history of ideological and social struggle in North Indian music culture, intervenes in ongoing debates over the anti-Muslim agenda of Hindustani music's reform movement, and reanimates a lost vision in which Muslim scholar-artists defined the music of the nation. An interdisciplinary, postmodern counter-history, Lineage of Loss offers a new and unsettling narrative of Hindustani music's encounter with modernity.