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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.

Conceived as an introduction to a vast, immensely rich and diverse set of repertories, this book explores the sounding forms of Sub-Saharan African music. Aimed at a general musical readership, it describes the major dimensions of African music and the values upon which they are built. An opening chapter invites readers to sample the basic qualities of African music and reflect on the challenges of writing about African music. In subsequent chapters, the book discusses the place of music in society, musical instruments, the relationship between language and music, rhythm, melody, form, and harmony. A final chapter traces various appropriations of African music. In conveying the dynamics within each of the core dimensions, a broad orientation is typically supplemented by close readings of selected repertory items. These include an Ewe dirge, an Nkundo lullaby, an Aka Pygmy children’s song, an item of Central African entertainment music, an art song, and a piano etude. Although the focus throughout is on Africa’s “traditional” heritage, here regarded as the backbone of Africa’s musical thinking, a few items of popular and art music are included to demonstrate the range of African musical imagining. Frequent reference is made to the vast recorded legacy of African music, and readers are encouraged to explore them to gain a deeper appreciation of the music. The book illuminates both the structural and the expressive dimensions of black African music and is designed to engender dialogue between scholars of music and ethnographers, music analysts and composers.

This collection of essays analyzes diverse musical creations with reference to the contexts in which the music is created and performed. The authors explain the music as sound in process, through prose, diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures—court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book’s companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world-music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today’s interconnected world.

“In Naples, there are more singers than there are unemployed people.” These words echo through the neomelodica music scene, a vast undocumented economy animated by wedding singers, pirate TV, and tens of thousands of fans throughout southern Italy and beyond. In a city with chronic unemployment, this setting has attracted hundreds of aspiring singers trying to make a living—or even a fortune. In the process, they brush up against affiliates of the region’s violent organized crime networks, the camorra. This book explores the murky neomelodica music scene and finds itself on uncertain ground. The “art of making do” refers to the informal and sometimes illicit entrepreneurial tactics of some Neapolitans who are pursuing a better life for themselves and their families. In the neomelodica music scene, the art of making do involves operating do-it-yourself recording studios and performing at the private parties of crime bosses. It can also require associating with crime boss-impresarios who guarantee their success by underwriting it with extortion, drug trafficking, and territorial influence. This book offers a riveting ethnography of the lives of men who seek personal sovereignty in a shadow economy dominated, in incalculable ways, by the camorra. The text navigates situations suffused with secrecy, moral ambiguity, and fears of ruin that undermine the anthropologist’s sense of autonomy.

An iconic symbol and sound of the Lucumí/Santería religion, Afro-Cuban batá are talking drums that express the epic mythological narratives of the West African Yoruba deities known as orisha. By imitating aspects of speech and song, and by metaphorically referencing salient attributes of the deities, batá drummers facilitate the communal praising of orisha in a music ritual known as a toque de santo. This book blends musical transcription, musical analysis, interviews, ethnographic descriptions, and observations from his own experience as a ritual drummer to highlight the complex variables at work during a live Lucumí performance. Integral in enabling trance possessions by the orisha, by far the most dramatic expressions of Lucumí faith, batá drummers are also entrusted with controlling the overall ebb and flow of the four- to six-hour toque de santo. During these events, batá drummers combine their knowledge of ritual with an extensive repertoire of rhythms and songs. Musicians focus on the many thematic acts that unfold both concurrently and in quick succession. In addition to creating an emotionally charged environment, playing salute rhythms for the orisha, and supporting the playful song competitions that erupt between singers, batá drummers are equally dedicated to nurturing their own drumming community by creating a variety of opportunities for the musicians to grow artistically and creatively.

Audible States examines how elites have governed politically and aesthetically meaningful spaces of silence and sound in Albania since 1945. Interweaving archival research with ethnographic interviews, author Nicholas Tochka argues that modern political orders do not simply render social life visible, but also audible. And in rendering social life audible, states make reality governable in significant, albeit unpredictable, ways. The book’s chronological narrative presents an aural history of government through the close examination of a state-subsidized popular genre, light music, as broadcast at an annual song competition, Radio-Television Albania’s Festival of Song. Drawing on a wide range of archival resources and over forty interviews with composers, lyricists, singers, and bureaucrats, it describes how popular music became integral to governmental projects to improve society—and a major concern for both state-socialist and postsocialist regimes. Incorporating insights from governmentality studies, Audible States presents a new perspective on music and government that reveals the fluid, pervasive but ultimately limited nature of state power in the modern world. In doing this, it addresses ongoing conversations in ethnomusicology, area studies, and cultural studies of the Cold War.

Bamako Sounds tells the story of an African city, its people, their values, and their music. Centered on the music and musicians of Bamako, Mali’s booming capital city, this book reveals a community of artists whose lives and works evince a complex world shaped by urban culture, postcolonialism, musical expression, religious identity, and intellectual property. Drawing on years of ethnographic research with classically trained players of the kora (a twenty-one-string West African harp) as well as more contemporary, hip-hop influenced musicians and producers, Ryan Thomas Skinner analyzes how Bamako artists balance social imperatives with personal interests and global imaginations. Whether performed live on stage, broadcast on the radio, or shared over the Internet, music is a privileged mode of expression that suffuses Bamako’s urban soundscape. It animates professional projects, communicates cultural values, pronounces public piety, resounds in the marketplace, and quite literally performs the nation. Music, the artists who make it, and the audiences who interpret it thus represent a crucial means of articulating and disseminating the ethics and aesthetics of a varied and vital Afropolitanism, in Bamako and beyond.

Bangkok Is Ringing is an on-the-ground sound studies analysis of the political protests that transformed Thailand in 2010–11. Bringing the reader through sixteen distinct “sonic niches” where dissidents used media to broadcast to both local and diffuse audiences, the book catalogues these mass protests in a way that few movements have ever been catalogued. The Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt protests that shook Thailand took place just before other international political movements, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Bangkok Is Ringing analyzes the Thai protests in comparison with these, seeking to understand the logic not only of political change in Thailand, but across the globe. The book is attuned to sound in a great variety of forms. The author traces the history and use in protest of specific media forms, including community radio, megaphones, CDs, and live concerts. The research took place over the course of sixteen months, and the author worked closely with musicians, concert promoters, activists, and rank-and-file protesters. The result is a detailed and sensitive ethnography that argues for an understanding of sound and political movements in tandem. In particular, it emphasizes the necessity of thinking through constraint as a fundamental condition of both political movements and the sound that these movements produce. In order to produce political transformations, the book argues, dissidents must be sensitive to the ways that their sounding is constrained and channeled.

How are an individual’s ability and motivation to be creative shaped by the world around her? Why does creativity seem to flourish in some environments, while in others it is stifled? Many societies value creativity as an abstract concept and many, perhaps even most, individuals feel an internal drive to be creative; however, tremendous social pressures restrict development of creative skill sets, engagement in creative activities, and willingness to take creative risks. Becoming Creative explores how social and cultural factors enable or inhibit creativity in music. The book integrates perspectives from ethnomusicology, education, sociology, psychology, and performance studies, prioritizing the voices of practicing musicians and music educators. Insights are drawn from ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with classical, jazz, and traditional musicians in South Africa, Finland, and the United States. By comparing and analyzing these musicians’ personal experiences, Becoming Creative deepens our understanding of the development and practice of musical creativity, the external factors that influence it, and strategies for enhancing it. The book reveals the common components of how musical creativity is experienced across these cultures and explains why creativity might not always be considered socially desirable. It identifies ideal creativity-enabling criteria—specific skill sets, certain psychological traits and states, and access to opportunities and authority—and illustrates how these enablers of creativity are fostered or thwarted by a variety of beliefs, learning methods, social relationships, institutions, and social inequalities. Becoming Creative further demonstrates formal and informal strategies for overcoming inhibitors of creativity.

Beginning in the 1930s, men, and a handful of women, came from India's many communities — Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and many others — to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in the words of some, “the original fusion music”. They worked as composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular name “Bollywood,” but the musicians themselves remain, in their own words, “behind the curtain” — the anonymous and unseen performers of one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres. This book offers an account of the Bollywood film-music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In an insider's look at the process of musical production from the late 1940s to the mid 1990s, before the advent of digital recording technologies, the author explains who these unknown musicians were and how they came to join the film-music industry. On the basis of a set of first-hand accounts from the musicians themselves, he reveals how the day-to-day circumstances of technology and finance shaped both the songs and the careers of their creators and performers. The author also unfolds the technological, cultural, and industrial developments that led to the enormous studio orchestras of the 1960s–90s, as well as the factors which ultimately led to their demise in contemporary India.

The Brazilian berimbau, a musical bow, is most commonly associated with the energetic martial art/dance/game of capoeira. This study explores its stature from the 1950s to the present in diverse musical genres including bossa nova, samba-reggae, MPB (Popular Brazilian Music), electronic dance music, Brazilian art music, and more. Berimbau music spans oral and recorded historical traditions, connects Latin America to Africa, juxtaposes the sacred and profane, and unites nationally constructed notions of Brazilian identity across seemingly impenetrable barriers. This book considers the berimbau beyond the context of capoeira, and explores the bow’s emergence as a national symbol. Throughout, it engages and analyzes intersections of musical traditions in the Black Atlantic, North American popular music, and the rise of global jazz. The book is an introduction to Brazilian music for musicians, Latin American scholars, capoeira practitioners, and other people who are interested in Brazil’s music and culture.

Western medicine has conventionally separated music, science, and religion into distinct entities, yet traditional cultures throughout the world have always viewed music as a bridge that connects and balances the physical with the spiritual to promote health and healing. As people in even the most technologically advanced nations across the globe struggle with obtaining affordable and reliable healthcare, more and more people are now turning to these ancient cultural practices of holistic and ICAM healing (integrative, complementary, and alternative medicine). This book convincingly demonstrates the relevance of medical ethnomusicology in light of the globally spreading ICAM approaches to health and healing. Revealing the Western separation of healing from spiritual and musical practices as a culturally determined phenomenon, the book confirms their underlying unity. In a place poetically known as the Roof of the World, the culture found within the towering Pamir Mountains of Badakhshan Tajikistan serves as the paradigm of ICAM healing practices. The book’s research and immersion into the Badakhshani culture provides a well-balanced “insider” perspective while maintaining an “observer’s” view, as it effectively bridges the widespread gaps between ethnomusicology, health science, and music therapy.

This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (i.e. Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large. Songs are a vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, are distributed via soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the hegemonic popular music genre in India (even for people who rarely watch the films for which the songs were written). The book illustrates how film songs are produced through the collaboration of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in order to enhance the film narrative, but also to have commercial success outside of the film. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark songs, along with biographical and musical descriptions of the people who have crafted and performed these songs, this book illustrates how the creators of Hindi film songs have always mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices from Indian and international sources in order to produce a distinctive Indian music genre. This genre has always had cosmopolitan orientations, yet has consistently retained discrete sound and production practices over its long history.

This book explores the life and performance practices of the Irish sean-nós singer Joe Heaney (1919–1984). Born in Connemara, Ireland, as an autonomous state was about to be created, Heaney grew up speaking the Irish language on a windswept coastal landscape, where he absorbed a rich oral heritage in Irish and in his second language, English. Circumstances took him abroad, and eventually to the United States; he performed and sang his way through life, seeking to accomplish his quest of recognition for an art that was understood as such by only a few. His ability to enthrall and mesmerize his audiences in North America became legendary. That the songs and stories he presented in performance were rooted in a Gaelic culture strange to most of his audiences made his capacity all the more remarkable. This book traces the trajectory that led Heaney to present certain songs and stories to his audiences while excluding others. It offers song texts, translations, and musical transcriptions, together with a detailed discussion of their function and significance for the song man. The authors highlight issues of masculinity, language, religion, history, authenticity, and identity as part of their work in uncovering one Irishman's presentation of self, region, and nation. Many of the works can be heard on a web site constructed as an accompaniment to this book. The book makes for a rich feast of material, exposing the often-thorny decisions made by a stellar performer to forge a professional repertoire from material he had absorbed in his youth.

Broken Voices is the first English-language book on Korea’s rich folksong traditions, and the first study of the effects of Japanese colonialism on the intangible heritage of its former colony. Maliangkay demonstrates that South Korea’s cultural preservation system, one of the world’s most elaborate, is deeply rooted in the period of Japanese colonial rule. He describes how the three largest folksong traditions, which have all been passed on in and around Seoul, have developed prior to and after becoming recognized as national cultural properties. Although continued government funding for Korea’s national heritage has won over many skeptics, close analysis of the traditions reveals that they have changed significantly since their official designation as Important Intangible Cultural Property. Those changes are, however, not caused by the prevailing image of Japan only, or the system per se, but by a combination of socio-political and economic factors. Since traditions that fail to attract practitioners and audiences are unsustainable, compromises may be unwelcome, but imperative.

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.

Queen Ida. Danny Poullard. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. These are names that are familiar to many fans of Cajun music and zydeco, and they have one other thing in common: longtime residence in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are all part of a vibrant scene of dancing and live Louisiana-French music that has evolved over several decades. This book traces how this region of California has been able to develop and sustain dances several times a week with more than a dozen bands. Description of this active regional scene opens into a discussion of several historical trends that have affected life and music in Louisiana and the nation. The book portrays the diversity of people who have come together to adopt Cajun and Creole dance music as a way to cope with a globalized, media-saturated world. The author weaves together interviews with musicians and dancers (some from Louisiana, some not), analysis of popular media, participant observation as a musician and dancer, and historical perspectives from wartime black migration patterns, the civil rights movement, American folk and blues revivals, California counterculture, and the rise of cultural tourism in “Cajun Country.” In so doing, he reveals the multifaceted appeal of celebrating life on the dance floor, Louisiana-French style.

Carmen and the Staging of Spain explores the Belle Époque fascination with Spanish entertainment that refashioned Bizet’s opera and gave rise to an international “Carmen industry.” Authors Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz challenge the notion of Carmen as an unchanging exotic construct, tracing the ways in which performers and productions responded to evolving fashions for Spanish style from its 1875 premiere to 1915. Focusing on selected realizations of the opera in Paris, London, and New York, Christoforidis and Kertesz explore the cycles of influence between the opera and its parodies; adaptations in spoken drama, ballet and film; and the panorama of flamenco, Spanish dance, and musical entertainments. Their findings also uncover Carmen's dynamic interaction with issues of Hispanic identity against the backdrop of Spain's changing international fortunes. The Spanish response to this now most-Spanish of operas is illuminated by its early reception in Madrid and Barcelona, adaptations to local theatrical genres, and impact on Spanish composers of the time. A series of Spanish Carmens, from opera singers Elena Sanz and Maria Gay to the infamous music-hall star La Belle Otero, had a crucial influence on the interpretation of the title role. Their stories provide a fresh context for the book's reappraisal of leading Carmens of the era, including Emma Calvé and Geraldine Farrar.

Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory and History is a (w)holistic historiography of the circum-Caribbean region. The book highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. The book moves through different sites and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework: Calypso during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism; the Cuban rumba/son complex of the postwar era of American empire; jazz in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization; and, lastly, Nuyorican Salsa coinciding with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. The book thinks about the circum-Caribbean region as integrated culturally and conceptually while paying close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region. At the same time, the book engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world. The project interrogates the interrelation between music, movement, memory, and history, a ‘contrapuntal’ analysis that treats the music of the African diaspora as both epistemological anchor and as a mode of expression and representation of both black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways to re-theorize the politics of race, nationalism and musical practice, geopolitical conjunctures, as well as re-assess the historical development of the modern world system, through the examination of local, popular responses to the global age. In short, the book utilizes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working-class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read from classical music’s practices. Finally, its aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long-term investment that is more possible, and makes more sense, for middle- and upper-class families. Through these arguments, the book reframes existing debates on gender and classical music participation in light of the classed gender identities that the study revealed. Overall, the book suggests that inequalities in cultural production can be understood through examining the practices that are used to create a particular aesthetic. It argues that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. It describes how the aesthetic of classical music is a mechanism through which the middle classes carry out boundary-drawing around their protected spaces, and within these spaces, young people’s participation in classical music education cultivates a socially valued form of self-hood.