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"What can be learned from musically encountering others beyond music? Quietude is an attempt to answer this question, an holistic ethnography of the expressive lives of Korean first and second-generation victims of the atomic bombing of Japan, focused on the everyday arts of living that they employ to make life possible and worthwhile. The book documents the practically unknown history of Korean experiences of the atomic bombs and their aftermath, focused on the large community of victims-former residents of Hiroshima and their children-living in Hapcheon, South Korea. It considers victims' uses of voice, speech, song, and movement in the struggle for national and global recognition, in the ongoing work of negotiating the traumatic past, and in the effort to consolidate and maintain selves and relationships in the present. It attempts to explain the multifaceted atmosphere of quiet that predominates in "Korea's Hiroshima" by focusing on the poetics of endurance, refusal, and self-effacement in the face of discrimination, the atomic experience, and its politicization"--
In the wake of the Asia-Pacific War, Korean survivors of the "comfort women" system-those bound into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the war-lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. Hearts of Pine brings us into the lives of three such survivors: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of eight years, author Joshua Pilzer worked with these now-elderly women, smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with them, trying to understand and document their worlds of song. During four decades of secrecy and the subsequent decades of the "comfort women" protest movement, singing served these women as a means of coping with and expressing their experiences, forging and sustaining identities and social relationships, and recording and conveying their struggles and philosophies of life. Through these intimate portraits, Hearts of Pine illustrates the personal and social power of music vis-à-vis other expressive media, models a humanistic history of modern Korean music, and presents heretofore unrecorded histories of the "comfort women" system and postwar South Korean public culture written in women's song.
The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that...
Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional and contemporary Yorùbá genres of music. From the primeval age of Ayànàgalú (the Yorùbá pioneer-drummer-turned-deity-of-drumming) to the modern era, Yorùbá musical traditions have been shaped by individual performers: drummers, dancers, singers, and chanters, wself-mediated visions of their social and cultural environment. Yorùbá Music in the Twentieth Century explores the role of the performer and the performing group in creating these traditions, contributing to the ongoing reorientation of scholarship on African music toward individual creativity within a larger socia...
Explore the relationship between music and society around the world This comprehensive introductory text creates a panoramic experience for beginner students by exposing them to the many musical cultures around the globe. Each chapter opens with a musical encounter in which the author introduces a key musical culture. Through these experiences, students are introduced to key musical styles, musical instruments, and performance practices. Students are taught how to actively listen to key musical examples through detailed listening guides. The role of music in society is emphasized through chapters that focus on key world cultural groups.
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; in pre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace.The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first...
Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes. Through two contrasting Balinese case studies—of the reyong gong chime’s melodic norot...
Now that the political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity of their music are objects of international attention, Romani Routes provides a timely and insightful view into Romani communities both in their home countries and in the diaspora. Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos, feature films, festivals, and concerts has presented the music of Balkan Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman notes, Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people. In this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures who produce this music, offering a sensitive and ...
Applied studies scholarship has triggered a not-so-quiet revolution in the discipline of ethnomusicology. The current generation of applied ethnomusicologists has moved toward participatory action research, involving themselves in musical communities and working directly on their behalf. The essays in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, edited by Svanibor Pettan and Jeff Todd Titon, theorize applied ethnomusicology, offer histories, and detail practical examples with the goal of stimulating further development in the field. The essays in the book, all newly commissioned for the volume, reflect scholarship and data gleaned from eleven countries by over twenty contributors. Themes ...
"Critical Themes in World Music is a reader of nine short essays by the authors of the successful Excursions in World Music, Eighth Edition, edited by Timothy Rommen and Bruno Nettl. The essays introduce key and contemporary themes in ethnomusicology-gender and sexuality, coloniality and race, technology and media, sound and space, and more-creating a counterpoint to the area studies approach of the textbook, a longstanding model for thinking about the musics of the world. Instructors can use this flexible resource as a primary or secondary path through the materials, on its own or in concert with Excursions in World Music, allowing for a more complete understanding that highlights the many continuities and connections that exist between musical communities, regardless of region. Critical Themes in World Music presents a critically-minded, thematic study of ethnomusicology, one that serves to counterbalance, complicate, and ultimately complement the companion textbook"--