Burma's Pop Music Industry is the first book to explore the contemporary pop music industry in a country that is little known or understood in the West. Based on years of fieldwork in Burma/Myanmar, Heather MacLachlan's work explores the ways in which aspiring musical artists are forging a place within the highly repressive social and political context that is Burma today. It deals sensitively with issues such as negotiating local and global styles,performance contexts and practic...

Can you change the world through song? This appealing idea has long been the professed aim of singers who are part of choruses affiliated with the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA). Theses choruses first emerged in the 1970s, and grew out of a very American tradition of (often gender-segregated) choral singing that explicitly presents itself as a community-based activity. By taking a close look at these choruses and their mission, Heather MacLachlan unpacks the fascinating his...

Teachers the world over are discovering the importance and benefits of incorporating popular culture into the music classroom. The cultural prevalence and the students' familiarity with recorded music, videos, games, and other increasingly accessible multimedia materials help enliven course content and foster interactive learning and participation. Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube provides ideas and techniques for teaching music clas...

This anthology to accompany Gateways to Understanding Music is comprised of musical "texts." These broadly defined texts—primarily musical scores—facilitate the integration of score study and music theory into the ethno/musicology curriculum, a necessary focus in the training of the professional musician. As posed by the textbook, the last question in each modular "gateway" is "Where do I go from here?" This resource provides one more opportunity to go beyond the textbook to exami...

Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories, and classical music performance competitions. In the first book on the subject, Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at the age of three. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households, established Yamaha as the world's l...

A FRESH, FUNNY, UP-CLOSE LOOK AT HOW SOUTH KOREA REMADE ITSELF AS THE WORLD'S POP CULTURE POWERHOUSE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYBy now, everyone in the world knows the song "Gangnam Style" and Psy, an instantly recognizable star. But the song's international popularity is no passing fad. "Gangnam Style" is only one tool in South Korea's extraordinarily elaborate and effective strategy to become a major world superpower by first becoming the world's number one pop c...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The world teems with different kinds of music - traditional, folk, classical, jazz, rock, pop - and each type of music tends to come with its own way of thinking. Drawing on a wealth of accessible examples ranging from Beethoven to Chinese zither music, this Very Short Introduction considers the history of music and thinking about music, focussing on its social and cultural dimensions. Nicholas Cook balances the Wester...

****Named one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist**Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors.**North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every perso...

There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in file-shari...

Ayn Rand, author of the best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, is beloved by millions of readers, and equally despised by a significant number of detractors. Her novels and her revolutionary philosophy of Objectivism have acquired a world-wide following. They have also created legions of readers who are hungry for a deeper understanding of her writings.Despite her undeniably significant contributions to the literary canon and the progression of ...

Ayn Rand is one of the most polarizing authors of the 20th century. Best known for novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” which used characters intent on exercising their individualism over conformity, Rand became a pop philosopher in the 1950s. Her work upholds the virtues of a philosophy that she and Nathaniel Branden called Objectivism.This book examines both her life and her work; it follows her humble origins and shows exactly how her books have influenced everyone fr...

Explore the creative ways music educators across the country are approaching emerging practices in music teaching and learning. Outlined in twenty-five unique case studies, each program offers a new perspective on music teaching and learning, often falling outside the standard music education curriculum. Find innovative ideas and models of successful practice to incorporate into your teaching, whether in school, university, or community settings. Close the gap between music inside and outs...