In the Central Himalayan region of Garhwal, the gods (devtas) enjoy dancing. Musicians - whether ritual specialists or musical specialists - are therefore an indispensable part of most entertainment and religious events. In shamanistic ceremonies, their incantations, songs and drumming 'make' the gods possess their mediums. In other contexts, such as dramatic theatrical renditions of stories of specific deities, actors 'dance' the role of their character having become possessed by the spir...

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship betwee...

Noise Uprising brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the gl...

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining comp...

Celtic music scholar and musician Liz Doherty is no stranger to Cape Breton music – in fact, she has made a study of it. Doherty’s exposure to, and research of, the island’s music traditions was the germination for this compendium on the Cape Breton fiddle: its history, its people, the tunes, the recordings. The fiddle music of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, has its own sound, artistic standards, performance practices and etiquette. The Cape Breton fiddler of the 21st century is performi...

This book traces the development of Azerbaijani art music from its origins in the Eastern, modal, improvisational tradition known as mugham through its fusion with Western classical, jazz, and world art music. Aida Huseynova places the fascinating and little-known history of music in Azerbaijan against the vivid backdrop of cultural life under Soviet influence, which paradoxically both encouraged and repressed the evolution of national musics and post-Soviet independence. Inspired by their...

The Kaprálová Companion, edited by Karla Hartl and Erik Entwistle, is a collection of biographical and analytical essays on Czech composer Vítezslava Kaprálová [1915–1940]. Accompanied by an annotated catalog of works, annotated chronology of life events, bibliography, discography, and a list of published works, The Kaprálová Companion is an essential, comprehensive guide to the composer's life and music. It is also the first book published on Kaprálová in English.

While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos.Heavy metal scholarship has until ...

Since the 1980s, musicians and audiences in Athens have been rediscovering musical traditions associated with the Ottoman period of Greek history. The result of this revivalist movement has been the urban musical style of 'paradosiaká' ('traditional'). Drawing from a varied repertoire that includes Turkish art music and folk and popular musics of Greece and Turkey, and identified by the use of instruments which previously had little or no performing tradition in Greece, paradosiaká has had...

This book considers the activities and writings of early song collectors and proto-ethnomusicologists, memoirists, and other "musical travelers" in 19th-century France. Each of the book’s discrete but interrelated chapters is devoted to a different geographic and discursive site of empire, examining French representations of musical encounters in North America, the Middle East, as well as in contested areas within the borders of metropolitan France. Rosenberg highlights intersections betwe...

In the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, Korean survivors of the "comfort women" system-those bound into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the war-lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. Hearts of Pine brings us into the lives of three such survivors: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of eight years, author Joshua Pilzer worked with these now-elderly women, smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with ...

This ground-breaking case study examines record production as ethnographic work. Since its founding in 2003, Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies has produced world music recordings that have been received as radical, sometimes problematic critiques of the practices of sound ethnography. Founded by punk rocker brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, the label's releases encompass collagist sound travelogues; individual artist compilations; national, r...