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Ethnic Mobility in Ballads is the fourth volume in the new SPECHEL e-ditions series. It comprises studies about ballads that in different ways reflect the movement of ethnic groups, transcending and defying national borders in ways that range from the borrowing of ‘national’ heroes to popular interpretations (and distortions) of ethnicities not one’s own, to the transfer of humour from one ethnicity to another. The studies are the result of the 44th International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für Volksdichtung, held in 2014 in Pécs, a city in Southern Hungary (Cultural Capital of Europe, 2010) which was occupied by the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of the Hungarians at Mohács in 1526 and inhabited by them for over a century, so it is hardly surprising that several of the papers make up a distinct group about balladic Turks of one degree of reality or another, but a study about the Slovenian appropriation of a Hungarian ‘hero’ is also indicative of the spread of the papers.
In the mid-1960s, a new generation of young Turkish musicians combined Western pop music with traditional Anatolian folk to forge the home-grown phenomenon of Anadolu Pop. But that was just the beginning. Through the second half of that turbulent decade, Turkish rock warped and transformed, striking out into wilder and stranger territory _ fuelled by the psychedelic revolution and played out over a backdrop of cultural, social and political turmoil. The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion tells the story of a musical movement that was brought to an end by a right-wing coup in 1980, largely forgotten and only recently being rediscovered by Western crate-diggers. It�s a tale of larger-than-life musical pioneers with raging political passions and visionary ideas ripe for rediscovery.
Charles Dickens 200: Text and Beyond: a commemorative volume is the second volume in the new SPECHEL e-ditions series. It commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of Dickens’s birth, and for the purpose brings together, in addition to ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ Dickensians, a curious variety of experts from a miscellany of areas of expertise ranging from folksinger to linguist and even magician. The chapters approach Charles Dickens from musical aspects ranging from opera to music-hall song and street ballad, from his role as a family conjuror, to psychological analyses of various of his characters and linguistic analysis of his style. He is regarded through the prism of the Irish literary scene but also through the eye of the Hungarian translator of his work, through operatic and photographic adaptations of his subject-matter. Every new chapter produces an exciting and unexpected new facet of the author, whose birth the volume celebrates.
This edited volume examines manele (sing. 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 “alien” to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the “manea phenomenon” 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.