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Brazilian music has been central to Brazil's national brand in the U.S. and U.K. since the early 1960s. From bossa nova in 1960s jazz and film, through the 1970s fusion and funk scenes, the world music boom of the late 1980s and the bossa nova remix revival at the turn of the millennium, and on to Brazilian musical distribution and branding in the streaming music era, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries focuses on watershed moments of musical breakthrough, exploring what the music may have represented in a particular historical moment alongside its deeper cultural impact. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music, author K. E. Goldschmitt...
In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The chapters illustrate how literary records of often painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator; how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result; and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects ...
Digital technology has profoundly transformed almost all aspects of musical culture. This book explains how and why.
Melodious panpipes and kena flutes. The shimmering strums of a charango. Poncho-clad musicians playing "El Cóndor Pasa" at subway stops or street corners while selling their recordings. These sounds and images no doubt come to mind for many "world music" fans when they recall their early encounters with Andean music groups. Ensembles of this type -- known as "Andean conjuntos" or "pan-Andean bands" -- have long formed part of the world music circuit in the Global North. In the major cities of Latin America, too, Andean conjuntos have been present in the local music scene for decades, not only in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (i.e., in the Andean countries), but also in Argentina, Chile, Colomb...
In Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Díaz examines musicians' agency, constructions of blackness and Africanness, musical structure, performance practices, and rhetoric in Brazil, and provides a model for the study of African-derived music in other diasporic locales.
In ways both mundane and sensational, listening can be an expressive act, enabling people to stage consumption as a public practice -- what author Byrd McDaniel calls "spectacular listening." With a range of compelling ethnographic case studies, McDaniel investigates a broad shift in contemporary listening norms and the stakes for listeners with disabilities. He reveals how listening-as-performance can be an opportunity for play, as well as a critical practice that exposes ableism in music institutions, technologies, and discourse.
A dynamic multimedia introduction to the global connections among peoples and their music
Inventing the Recording focuses on the decades in which recorded sound went from a technological possibility to a commercial and cultural artefact. Through the analysis of a specific and unique national context, author Eva Moreda Rodríguez tells the stories of institutions and individuals in Spain and discusses the development of discourses and ideas in close connection with national concerns and debates, all while paying close attention to original recordings from this era. The book starts with the arrival in Spain of notices about Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, followed by the first demonstrations of the invention (1878-1882) by scientists and showmen. These demonstrations ...
In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.
Richly ethnographic and a compelling read, After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy is a study of carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti. The book explores how the self-declared president of konpa Sweet Micky (Michel Martelly) rose to the nation's highest office while methodically crafting a political product inherently entangled with his musical product. It offers deep historical perspective on the characteristics of carnivalesque verbal play-and the performative skillset of the artist (Sweet Micky) who dominated carnival for more than a decade-including vulgarities and polemics. Yet there has been profound resistance to...