Kategoria BISAC: Music >> Ethnomusicology

"The Sacred Harp," a tunebook that first appeared in 1844, has stood as a model of early American musical culture for most of this century. Tunebooks such as this, printed in shape notes for public singing and singing schools, followed the New England tradition of singing hymns and Psalms from printed music. Nineteeth-century Americans were inundated by such books, but only the popularity of "The Sacred Harp" has endured throughout the twentieth century.

With this tunebook as his focus, John Bealle surveys definitive moments in American musical history, from the lively singing schools of...

A little more than 50 years ago, in 1955, Ali AkbarKhan issued an LP called Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas, with spoken introduction by violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Until then, Indian music was terra incognita in the West. When the same album was reissued as a CD in 1995, under the title Then and Now, it was nominated for a Grammy.

In the last 50 years, there has been the explosive influence of Indian music and culture in the West. Words such as karma, yoga, raga, nirvana, all once unknown here, have entered the language. Most famously, the wonders of the Indian...

In 1941 and '42 African American scholars from Fisk University--among them the noted composer and musicologist John W. Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams, Jr.--joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mission was to explore the musical habits and history of the black community there and "to document adequately the cultural and...

Eyre creates a range of unforgettable portraits....

Eyre creates a range of unforgettable portraits....

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues.

Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa,...