With extensive photographs and an audio CD, this guide to Balinese music showcases the history, culture and art of the gamelan ceremony.Bali has developed and nourished an astonishing variety of musical ensembles—called gamelan—comprising dozens of instruments mainly made of bronze or bamboo, and organized into groups with as many as 30 to 40 players. In Balinese Gamelan Music, Michael Tenzer, a noted Professor of Music at the University of Britis...

This book presents an introduction to more than a dozen different types of Balinese gamelan, each with its own established tradition, repertoire and social or religious context. The instruments and basic principles underlying the gamelan are introduced, thus providing listeners with the means to better appreciate the music. Scores of beautiful color photographs, a discography, and a brief guide to studying and hearing the music in Bali, will prove indispensible to visitors and gamelan affi...

Named one of BBC History Magazine's "Books of the Year" in 2010 In this groundbreaking study, D. R. M. Irving reconnects the Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern Hispanic world. For some two and a half centuries, the Philippine Islands were firmly interlinked to Latin America and Spain through transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and culture. The city of Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital intercultural nexus and a...

Modernity, Complex Societies, and the Alphorn provides a fascinating examination of the musical instrument the alphorn, alphorn music and its performance. Indeed, it is the first book about this extraordinary instrument to appear in English. It analyses the alphorn phenomenon as a symbol of the Swiss nation, going back to the Swiss nation building process in the nineteenth century and the “invention of tradition” which began in the second half of the nineteenth century, before arriving at ...

Immerse students in the music traditions of the Irish, one of North America's largest ethnic populations. Across the Water: Teaching Irish Music and Dance at Home and Abroad gives general music teachers the tools to introduce the music and dance of Ireland while respecting the music's cultural origins. An overview of the history of Irish traditional music provides a basic understanding of the political and cultural events that have influenced this musical style. Readers learn how ...

While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences-notably anthropol...

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media disseminationfrom phonograph cylinders to MP3seach subjected to the political and economic forces of its particular era and region. Carried by mass media, the broader culture of Arab music has been thoroughly transformed as well. Simultaneously, mass mediated music has become a powerful social force. While paral...

Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in the context of the growth and development of the art form's instrumental and stylistic innovations. Rather than perpetuating the glamorous worldwide conceptions that often only reflect the tango that left Argentina nearly 100 years ago, authors Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland trace tango's historical and stylistic musical trajectory in Argentina, beginning with the guardia nueva's crystallization of the g...

Cultural hybridity is a celebrated hallmark of U.S. American music and identity. Yet hybrid music is all too often marked -and marketed - under a single racial label. Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that counter this convention; these projects instead foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the very face of the ghettoizing culture industry. Giving voice to four contemporary projects, author Tamara Roberts traces black/Asian engagements that reach across t...

"Russian folk songs are a living history of the Russian people, rich, vivid and truthful, revealing their entire life," wrote the great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol.Russian folk songs have always played an essential part in Russian life, culture, and music. They have played an important part in the work of many great Russian composers including Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Prokoviev, and Stravinsky. In this new study, Vadim Prokhorov provides a historical survey a...

Despite its isolation on the western edge of Europe, Ireland occupies vast amounts of space on the music maps of the world. Although deeply rooted in time and place, Irish songs, dances and instrumental traditions have a history of global travel that span the centuries. Whether carried by exiles, or distributed by commercial networks, Irish traditional music is one of the most popular World Music genres, while Clare, on Ireland's Atlantic seaboard, enjoys unrivaled status as a "Home of the...

The world of Sub-Saharan African music is immensely rich and diverse, containing a plethora of repertoires and traditions. In The African Imagination in Music, renowned music scholar Kofi Agawu offers an introduction to the major dimensions of this music and the values upon which it rests. Agawu leads his readers through an exploration of the traditions, structural elements, instruments, and performative techniques that characterize the music. In sections that focus upon rhythm, m...