In 1978, four musicians crowded into a cramped basement theater in downtown Seoul, where they, for the first time, brought the rural percussive art ofp ungmulto a burgeoning urban audience. In doing so, they began a decades-long reinvention of tradition, one that would eventually create an entirely new genre of music and a national symbol for Korean culture. Nathan Hesselink sSamulNoritraces this reinvention through the rise of the Korean supergroup of the same name, analyzing the strategies the group employed to transform a museum-worthy musical form into something that was...

Exploring Peru s lively music industry and the studio producers, radio DJs, and program directors that drive it, Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars is a fascinating account of the deliberate development of artistic taste. Focusing on popular huayno music and the ways it has been promoted to Peru s emerging middle class, Joshua Tucker tells a complex story of identity making and the marketing forces entangled with it, providing crucial insights into the dynamics among art, class, and ethnicity that reach far beyond the Andes.Tucker focuses on the music of Ayacucho, Peru,...

When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japan s musical history, however, no such role existed composition and performance were deeply intertwined. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. InComposing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese...