Books in the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology CSE series

Representing a broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, this work examines how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis. It reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global music.

During the patron saint fiesta in the town of San Jeronimo, Peru, crowds gather at sunset awaiting the entrance of the colourful dance troupes, or comparsas. The comparsas have become a powerful way for the local people to make sense of their place in the world. This text looks at this tradition.

When we think of composers like Mozart or Beethoven, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra. For most of Japan's musical history, however, no such role existed - composition and performance were deeply intertwined. This book offers fresh insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large.

Focusing on popular huayno music and the ways it has been promoted to Peru's emerging middle class, the author 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.

In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman's voice and a drumbeat to make a man get up and dance. The author draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities.

Explores how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Berliner demonstrates that a lifetime of preparation lies behind the skilled improviser's every note.

The contributors explore the intimate relationships between music & gender, across the wide range of cultures around the Mediterranean. Essays examine musical behaviour as representation, assertion, and transgression of gender identities.

Examines art music by Haitian and African American composers who were inspired by Haiti's history as a nation created by slave revolt. This title also highlights the contributions of many Haitian and African American composers who wrote music that brought rhythms and melodies of the Vodou ceremony to local and international audiences.

A book on the critical role of music in African ritual which focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. It analyzes their practices through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country.

Presents the voices of three musicians - queer nightclub star Zeki Muren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu - who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Using these three singers as a lens, the author examines Turkey's repressive politics and civil violence as well as its public life.

Illustrating the practices and processes of musical improvisation, this text includes contributions by 17 scholars and improvisers. It offers a history of research and an overview of the different approaches to the topic that can be used, ranging from cognitive study to detailed musical analysis.

In 1978, four musicians crowded into a cramped basement theater in downtown Seoul, where they, for the first time, brought the rural percussive art of p'ungmul to a burgeoning urban audience. This title traces this reinvention through the rise of the Korean supergroup.

Offer an account of the music of Africa. This title draws on the author's extensive travels and three decades of study in many parts of the continent to compare and contrast a wealth of musical traditions from a range of cultures. It also features a selection of photographs and is accompanied by a compact disc of the author's own recordings.

Umm Kulthum was a celebrated musical performer in the Arab world, and her songs still permeate the international airwaves. This, the first English-language biography, chronicles her life and career. In particular, it examines her success in a society which discouraged women from public performance.