This text challenges the monolithic portrayals of folk music and social change under commission by making a case for people's music and shows how new folk music embodies an inherently pluralistic concept of Yugoslavia's culture. Introducing one of the most vital forms of popular culture to emerge in east-central Europe and based on extensive fieldwork, the book engages the polemical perspectives of Yugoslav commentators and draws extensively on interpretive insights by musicians, media and music industry insiders.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Song from the Land of Fire explores Azerbaijanian musical culture, a subject previously unexamined by American and European scholars. This book contains notations of mugham performance--a fusion of traditional poetry and musical improvisation--and analysis of hybrid genres, such as mugham-operas and symphonic mugham by native composers. Intimately connected to the awakening of Azerbaijanian national consciousness while ruled by the Russian Empire and the USSR, mugham is inseparable from the contexts in which it is produced and heard. Inna...

"Maracatu Atomico" is the first academic work to investigate the mangue movement, one of Brazil's most vital pop culture trends of the last thirty years, and the related "new music scene" of Northeast Brazil. Contending with the widespread poverty and social problems, mangue places a renewed value on the local environment and its myriad folk traditions while embracing modern, global pop influences and technology. The book provides historical and ethnographic accounts of the movement, analyzes salient examples of folk and pop fusion music, and enters recent debates about...

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While many Western scholars have discussed the technical aspects of Balinese music or the traditional contexts for performance, little has been written in Western languages about Balinese discourses on their music. This dissertation seeks to understand the experience of music in Bali according to Balinese voices through an analysis of oral and written dialogues on music, mainly by musicians and dalangs (shadow play puppeteers) from the village of Sukawati, and scholars, teachers, administrators and students from the Indonesian College of the Arts (STSI) in the City of Denpasar. The study...

This work provides an in-depth ethnographic investigation of the greatly underestimated and under appreciated dynamic contributions of women singers, the cantaoras, to the creation, transmission and innovation of flamenco song. Situating the study of flamenco in the context of social and political currents that have shaped 20th-century Spain and drawing on interview material with the cantaoras themselves, the author shows how flamenco is a complex of cultural practices at once musical, physical, verbal and social, and that the performance of flamenco involves the expression and negotiation of...

Originally a royal court dance, baakisimba asserted the authority of the king as the head of Baganda society. After the abolition of kingship in 1967, baakisimba dance began to be performed in other contexts, with women sometimes playing the accompanying drums-traditionally a man's role-and with men occasionally performing the dance.
Sylivia Nannyonga-Tamusuza argues that the music and dance of the Baganda people are not simply reflective of culture; baakisimba participates in the construction of social relations, and helps determine how these relations shape the performing arts....

Shaped by Japanese Music is an in-depth analysis of the musical world of an individual performer, composer, and teacher. Using an ethnographic approach, this study situates musical analysis in the context of its creation, demonstrating that traditional Japanese music is hardly an archaic song form frozen in the present, but an active sociocultural system that has been reproduced in Japan from the seventeenth century to the present day. The dynamics of this cultural system unfold in the musical experiences of Kikuoka Hiroaki, the leader of a school of nagauta music, who struggled to modernize...

A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates 'Gypsy music' as a bridge between the real Roma and the idealized Gypsies of the Western imagination. David Malvinni studies specific composers - including Liszt, Brahams, Rachmaninov, Janacek, and Bartok - whose work takes up contested and varied configurations of Gypsy music, and considers them alongside contemporary debates over popular music and film.