Books in the Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities series

The traditions of the Mediterranean island of Corsica have been well preserved and revitalized, yet little has been written about it in scholarly circles. This work represents the first treatise on Corsican music in the English language. Transported by Song: Corsican Voices from Oral Tradition to World Stage chronicles the evolution of Corsican music from the early 20th century to the present, charting its progression from the world of oral tradition to a vibrant new performance culture maintained by an expanding cohort of cosmopolitan players. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, comprehensive interviewing, and close observation of Corsican affairs, author Caroline Bithell maps out the social, cultural, economic, and political climate of Corsica in the 20th and early 21st centuries, offering insights into the way French cultural policy, decentralization legislation, and EU funding structures have impacted musical activity on the island. Key issues are explored through case studies of Corsican performing groups, allowing the reader to appreciate the musicians' inspirations and intentions, their ability to balance local and cosmopolitan frames of reference, and the relation of their new output to 'traditional' idioms and procedures. The book also offers new perspectives on debates about music and ethnicity and gender dynamics, and explores the use of modern technology in an oral idiom, and the psycho-physiological and transcendental experiences associated with polyphonic singing. Well researched and comprehensively written, Transported by Song also includes musical transcriptions, a glossary, discography, filmography, and bibliography.

Becoming an Ethnomusicologist centers on the life and education of the author, Bruno Nettl, a well-known ethnomusicologist. Focusing on eleven individuals who influenced him significantly, it follows their roles through his career from his childhood in Czechoslovakia and his familys forced departure in 1939 to his education in the United States and career as a scholar. These essays contribute to an understanding of the life of Jewish and German minorities in Bohemia through the first half of the 20th century, of pre-World War II Prague, of the experience of intellectual and academic refugees in the United States during and after World War II, and of the early development of ethnomusicology as a field of study. This work opens with the authors exploration of the careers of his father, the well-known music historian Paul Nettl, and his mother, Gertrud Nettl, a pianist and piano teacher. From his boyhood in Prague, Nettl provides insights into his own evolution as a musicologist.He discusses the rise of the discipline of ethnomusicology, from the studies of Native American music by his mentor George Herzog to the work of linguist C. F. Voegelin and folklorist Stith Thompson.He also looks back on the contribution and input of his principal consultants in his fieldwork on Native American, Iranian, and Indian music. These essays contribute significantly to the history of musicology, containing the longest--to date--treatments of the contributions of the distinguished scholars Paul Nettl and George Herzog. This work will interest students and scholars of immigration history, Native American culture, and the history of ethnomusicology itself.

We seldom consider how much we mistakenly presume in hewing to definitions of music that differ dramatically from the standpoint of other cultures. In What Makes Music European, Marcello Sorce Keller examines the limitations of accepted wisdom about the concept of music in Euro-Western culture. His investigations of the conclusions reached by music researchers of the past several decades considerably upsets the concepts relied upon by the concert-going public. Sorce Keller insightfully asks: Who makes the music? Should music be original, and how much can it be? Why do people identify with songs, pieces, styles, and repertoire? Why is music so ideological? Why do we misunderstand the music of different times and places, and why do we enjoy doing so? He also explores the juxtaposition of economy, society, and music making, as well as the concept of illegal harmonies.In What Makes Music European, Sorce Keller addresses the little-discussed matters that are essential to an understanding of how music intersects with the life of so many people. Readers are offered an approach for thinking about music that depends as much on its history as on the concepts and attitudes of the social sciences. What Makes Music European concisely demonstrates, to those familiar with Western music, how peculiar Euro-Western concepts of music appear from a cross-cultural perspective. At the same time, it encourages ethnomusicologists to apply their knowledge to Western music and explain to its public how much of what listeners take for granted is, at the very least, highly debatable.

Sacred music has long contributed fundamentally to the making of Europe. The passage from origin myths to history, the sacred journeys that have mobilized pilgrims, crusaders, and colonizers, the politics and power sounded by the vox populiall have joined in counterpoint to shape Europe's historical longue duree. Drawing upon three decades of research in European sacred music, Philip V. Bohlman calls for a re-examination of European modernity in the twenty first century, a modernity shaped no less by canonic religious and musical practices than by the proliferation of belief systems that today more than ever respond to the diverse belief systems that engender the New Europe. In contrast to most studies of sacred musical practice in European history, with their emphasis on the musical repertories and ecclesiastical practices at the center of society, Bohlman turns our attention to individual and marginalized communities and to the collectives of believers to whose lives meaning accrues upon sounding the sacred together.In the historical chapters that open Revival and Reconciliation, Bohlman examines the genesis of modern history in the convergence and conflict the lie at the heart of the Abrahamic faithsJudaism, Christianity, and Islam. Critical to the meaning of these religions to Europe, Bohlman argues, has been their capacity to mobilize both sacred journey and social action, which enter the everyday lives of Europeans through folk religion, pilgrimage, and politics, the subjects of the second half of his study. The closing sections then cross the threshold from history into modernity, above all that of the New Europe, with its return to religion through revival and reconciliation. Based on an extensive ethnographic engagement with the sacred landscapes and sites of conflict in twenty-first-century Europe, Bohlman calls in his final chapters for new ways of hearing the silenced voices and the full chorus of sacred music in our contemporary world.Ethnomusicologists from different traditions as well as scholars of religious studies and the history of modern Europe will find Revival and Reconciliation a fascinating exploration of the connections between sacred music and the role it plays in the formations of the modern self.

In The Past Is Always Present, Tore Tvarn Lind examines the musical revival of Greek Orthodox chant at the monastery of Vatopaidi within the monastic society of Mount Athos, Greece. In particular, Lind focuses on the musical activities at the monastery and the meaning of the past in the monks efforts at improving their musical performance practice through an emphasis on tradition.Based on a decade of intense fieldwork and extensive interviews with members of Athos monastic community, Lind covers a vast array of topics. From musical notation and the Greek oral tradition to CD covers and music production, the tension between tradition and modernity in the musical activity of the Athonite community raises a clear challenge to the quest to bring together Orthodox spirituality and quietude with musical production. The Past Is Always Present addresses all of these matters by focusing on the significance and meaning of the local chanting style. As Lind argues, Byzantine chant cannot be fully grasped in musicological terms alone, outside the context of prayer. Yet because chant is fundamentally a way of communicating with God, the sound generated must be exactly right, pushing issues of music notation, theory, and performance practice to the forefront.Byzantine chant, Lind ultimately argues, is a modern phenomenon as the monastic communities of Mount Athos negotiate with the realities of modern Orthodox identity in Greece. By reporting on the musical revival activities of this remarkable community through the topics of notation, musical theory, drone-singing, and spiritual silence, Lind looks at the ways in which Athonite heritage is shaped, touching upon the Byzantine chants contemporary relationship with practice of pilgrimage and the phenomenon of religious tourism.Offering unique insights into the monastic culture at Mount Athos, The Past Is Always Present is for those especially interested in sacred music, past and present Greek culture, monastic life, religious tourism, and the fields of ethnomusicology and anthropology.

This edited volume examines manele (sg. manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. But manele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even ΓÇ£alienΓÇ¥ to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the ΓÇ£manea phenomenonΓÇ¥ as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.

The essays in Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas extend beyond the music of medieval Iberia and its Mediterranean Jewish diasporas to wider aspects of Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations. The authors offer new perspectives on theories of musical interaction, hybridization, and the cultural meaning of musical expression in diasporic and minority communities. The essays address how music is implicated in constructions of ethnicity and nationhood and of myth and history, while also examining the resurgence of Al-Andalus as a symbol in musical projects that claim to promote cross-cultural understanding and peace. The diverse scholarship in Musical Exodus makes a vital contribution to scholars of music and European and Jewish history.

In This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl, editors Victoria Lindsay Levine and Philip V. Bohlman salute not only a great scholar and beloved teacher, but also a thinker whose search for the meaning and ontology of music has exerted a global influence.

While the refrain is a frequent and important feature of folk singing, little has been written on it and what it can achieve. Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song attempts to establish what refrain actually is and how it can be defined in folk and scholarly practice based on musical examples from Serbia, Montenegro, and the Republic of Srpska, with the aim of finding general rules applicable to refrains in the songs of other nations. The refrain is observed from musical and linguistic perspectives, as well as its religious, social, and economical uses. As refrain is so important in songs, special attention is devoted to its role in the development of singing.Dimitrije O. Golemovic examines various forms of refrains and their constructive role in singing, and he establishes a terminology based on several characteristics of refrains, such as their role in the song and its place within the melopoetic unit. Golemovic also takes the view that refrain can be a specific "code" in the song that marks its melody, and he supports this with a number of examples, both ancient and more recent. Also discussed is the relationship between refrain and movement in songs accompanying dance and the role of refrain in commercializing newly-composed folk music. The book includes notes, a bibliography, 190 musical examples, and an audio CD of traditional folk songs as well as some examples of newly composed folk songs.

This resource offers an opportunity to reflect critically on some of the insistent 'othering' that has accompanied much cultural production in and on the Celtic World, and that have prohibited serious critical engagement with what are sometimes described as the 'traditional' and 'folk' music of Europe.

This resource offers an opportunity to reflect critically on some of the insistent 'othering' that has accompanied much cultural production in and on the Celtic World, and that have prohibited serious critical engagement with what are sometimes described as the 'traditional' and 'folk' music of Europe.

The book is the first scholarly work that considers specifically the complexity of the international Neapolitan song scene through case studies from Greece, Argentina, the Middle East, and the United States, employing analyses of iconographical sources and international films devoted to the canzone napoletana.

Attempts to answer the question of why people sing, by focusing on the transmission and performance of songs on a small, Gaelic-speaking island community. In an exposition of the links between music, text, and performance, the vicissitudes of island life are revealed, while these tensions are shown to be leavened by the singing of humorous items.

In Sami Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hilder offers the first book-length study of this diverse and dynamic music scene and its intersection with the politics of indigeneity.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is more than a musical event that ostensibly ΓÇ£unites European peopleΓÇ¥ through music. It is a spectacle: a performative event that allegorically represents the idea of ΓÇ£Europe.ΓÇ¥ Since its beginning in the Cold War era, the contest has functioned as a symbolic realm for the performance of European selves and the negotiation of European identities. Through the ESC, Europe is experienced, felt, and imagined in singing and dancing as the interplay of tropes of being local and/or European is enacted.In Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, contributors interpret the ESC as a musical ΓÇ£mediascapeΓÇ¥ and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, contributors discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of ΓÇ£assimilationΓÇ¥ or ΓÇ£integration,ΓÇ¥ and defining the celebrated notion of the ΓÇ£European citizenΓÇ¥ in a global context. Scholars in the volume also explore the ways otherness and difference are produced, spectacularized, challenged, or even neglected in the televised musical realities of the ESC. For the contributing authors, song serves as a site for constituting Europe and the nation, on- and offstage. History and politics, as well as the constant production of European subjectivities, are sounded in song. The Eurovision song is a shifting realm where old and new states imagine their pasts, question their presents, and envision ideal futures in the New Europe.Essays in Empire of Song adopt theoretical and epistemological orientations in their exploration of ΓÇ£popular musicΓÇ¥ within ethnomusicology and critical musicology, questioning the idea of ΓÇ£EuropeΓÇ¥ and the ΓÇ£nationΓÇ¥ through and in music, at a time when the European self appears more fragmented, if not entirely shattered. Bringing together ethnomusicology, music studies, history, social anthropology, feminist theory, linguistics, media ethnography, postcolonial theory, comparative literature, and philosophy, Empire of Song will interest students and scholars in a vast array of disciplines.

This collection of essays addresses and critically examines key issues in contemporary ethnomusicology. Set in two parts, the volume explores ethnomusicology's shifting disciplinary relationships and plots a range of potential developments for its future.

The most recent scholarship available in the field of Ethnomusicolgy is presented in this collection of essays which seeks to reveal the commonality of traditional music in the Mediterranean region. An interdisciplinary approach to the study embraces not only musicology and ethnology, but also material culture considerations.