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The musical genre of taarab is played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast in East Africa. Taarab contains all the features of a typical 'Indian Ocean' music, combining influences from Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, India and the West with local musical practices. In Taarab, Music in Zanzibar, Janet Topp Fargion traces the development of the genre in Zanzibar, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Of special interest is the role of women. Although men play the main role in the composition and performance of the genre, Topp Fargion argues that the modernization of the genre owes a debt to the participation of women - as audiences and primary consumers, but also as poets and innovators of musical concepts. The book weaves together the historical, social, economic, religious and political dynamics involved in the development of the genre, and investigates how these are played out in the performance of taarab music on Zanzibar.
This bold, challenging, and celebratory new book accompanies a major exhibition at the British Library the first in the UK to explore in such detail the vibrant cultural history of this complex and compelling region.The authors explain how West Africans have profoundly shaped their own histories, focusing in particular on their profound and engaging literary culture, exploring the region's centuries-old written heritage alongside its even older oral traditions. The book ranges across a millennium of history, from the great empires of the middle ages through colonialism, resistance, and independence to contemporary life and culture. Writers, scholars, and artists have harnessed the power of words to build societies, to make political statements, to communicate faith, to fight injustice and enslavement, and to respond to the experience of Diaspora. Today, West Africa is experiencing an outpouring of creativity in a variety of media. In this richly illustrated book, leading international scholars of music, literature, history, and anthropology offer a unique insight into the stories of West African societies past and present."
Investigates the significance of a range of digital technologies in contemporary Indigenous musical performance, exploring interdisciplinary issues of music production, representation, and transmission.
Ethnomusicology: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography of books, recordings, videos, and websites in the field of ethnomusicology. The book is divided into two parts; Part One is organised by resource type in catagories of greatest concern to students and scholars. This includes handbooks and guides; encyclopedias and dictionaries; indexes and bibliographies; journals; media sources; and archives. It also offers annotated entries on the basic literature of ethnomusicological history and research. Part Two provides a list of current publications in the field that are widely used by ethnomusicologists. Multiply indexed, this book serves as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars in sorting through the massive amount of new material that has appeared in the field over the past decades.
A close look at how wylers, a popular musical style from the island of St. Kitts and Nevis, expresses a unique mode of relation in the postcolonial Caribbean. In Island Time, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. Baker argues that this speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations and the promises of economic modernity; women’s bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy; and the material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. Sh...
Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and creative participants. Eric Charry and an international group of contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of hip hop in Africa, the embrace of other contemporary genres, including reggae, ragga, and gospel music, and the continued vitality of drumming. Covering Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa, this volume offers unique perspectives on the presence and development of hip hop and other music in Africa and their place in global music culture.
Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a framework to fully contextualize and understand this process of music curation.
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has been on the cutting edge of digital archiving, building a significant historical collection and community of practice engaged in the preservation and accessibility of research materials. Over the ten years of PARADISEC's operation, the repository has grown to represent over 860 languages from across the world, including cultural materials from the Pacific region and South-East Asia, North America, Africa and Europe. With over 5000 hours of audio, the extent of the archival material, as well as the inclusion of a variety of styles such as songs, narratives and elicitation, has resulted in an invaluable...
Ethnomusicology deals with the study of the music of the world. The field is interdisciplinary, and ethnomusicologists draw on theory and method from folklore, cultural anthropology, historical musicology, literature, cultural studies and media studies, among other disciplines. So when ethnomusicologists met at Makerere University's symposium on ethnomusicology in October 2011, the issues dealt with spanned a wide spectrum of concerns which can be grouped under three major categories: Institutions, culture and identity. African Musics in Context discusses the place of performing arts in Ugandan society, archiving music and music sources, performing archival music, performing health and relig...