Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.
The glory days of rock from the perspective of Canada’s original music magazine. The story of Music Express is told through the unique perspective of Keith Sharp, the magazine’s founder and editor. During its seventeen-year existence, Music Express rose from a small, Calgary-based regional magazine to an international publication. The interviews, anecdotes, and stories cover the golden era of Canadian music, with the rise to global status of such icons as Bryan Adams, Loverboy, Rush, Celine Dion, and Triumph. Their stories, as well as many more, are captured together with an array of classic rock photography that provides a unique time capsule. From Sharp’s Calgary roots in 1976 to the heady heights of his publication’s growth, he details foreign adventures covering the likes of David Bowie in Australia, KISS in West Germany, and Iron Maiden in Poland, along with other high-profile interviews including U2, Paul McCartney, Iron Maiden, and Rod Stewart.
Argentineantangois a global phenomenon. Since its origin among immigrants from the slums ofBuenos Aires and Montevideo, it has crossed and re-crossed many borders.Yet, never before has tango been danced by somany people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is morethan a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginarywhich embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism.In the wake of its latest revival, tango has become both a cultural symbol ofArgentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a modest, yet growing number of dancers from differentparts of the globe meet on the dance floor. Through interviews and ethnographical research inAmsterdam and Buenos Aires, Kathy Davis shows why a dance from another era andanother place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world andwhat happens to them as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. Sheshows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies ofgender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South inwhich Argentinean tango is—and has always been—embroiled. Davisalso explores her uneasiness about her own passion for a dance which—when seen through the lens of contemporary criticalfeminist and postcolonial theories—seems, at best, odd, and, at worst,disreputable and even a bit shameful. She uses the disjuncture between theincorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource forexploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and ascultural discourse. She concludes thatdancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonialovertones than a passionate encounter across many different borders betweendancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the ‘elsewhere.’ DancingTango is a vivid, intriguing account of an important global culturalphenomenon.
<P>Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer's imagination and every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as «a place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us.» The book includes two seminal essays, the composer's journal telling the story of the day-to-day emergence of The Place, as well as musical notations, graphs and illustrations of geophysical phenomena.</P>
<P>Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane's Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream.</P><P>Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers' Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the «drunk dancing» of Fred Astaire.</P>
<P>This collection of essays provides the first in-depth examination of camp as it relates to a wide variety of twentieth and twenty-first century music and musical performances. Located at the convergence of popular and queer musicology, the book provides new research into camp's presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including: musical theatre, classical music, film music, opera, instrumental music, the Broadway musical, rock, pop, hip-hop, and Christmas carols. This significant contribution to the field of camp studies investigates why and how music has served as an expressive and political vehicle for both the aesthetic characteristics and the receptive modes that have been associated with camp throughout twentieth and twenty-first-century culture.</P><P><B>Hardcover is un-jacketed.</B></P>
<P>Positioned on a major trade route, the Toba Batak people of Sumatra have long witnessed the ebb and flow of cultural influence from India, the Middle East, and the West. Living as ethnic and religious minorities within modern Indonesia, Tobas have recast this history of difference through interpretations meant to strengthen or efface the identities it has shaped. Antiphonal Histories examines Toba musical performance as a legacy of global history, and a vital expression of local experience. This intriguingly constructed ethnography searches the palm liquor stand and the sanctuary to show how Toba performance manifests its many histories through its «local music»—Lutheran brass band hymns, gong-chime music sacred to Shiva, and Jimmie Rodgers yodeling. Combining vivid narrative, wide-ranging historical research, and personal reflections, Antiphonal Histories traces the musical trajectories of the past to show us how the global is manifest in the performative moment.</P>
<P>Music and violence have been linked since antiquity in ritual, myth, and art. Considered together they raise fundamental questions about creativity, discourse, and music's role in society. The essays in this collection investigate a wealth of issues surrounding music and violence—issues that cross political boundaries, time periods, and media—and provide cross-cultural case studies of musical practices ranging from large-scale events to regionally specific histories. Following the editors' substantive introduction, which lays the groundwork for conceptualizing new ways of thinking about music as it relates to violence, three broad themes are followed: the first set of essays examines how music participates in both overt and covert forms of violence; the second section explores violence and reconciliation; and the third addresses healing, post-memorials, and memory. Music, Politics, and Violence affords space to look at music as an active agent rather than as a passive art, and to explore how music and violence are closely—and often uncomfortably—entwined.</P><P>CONTRIBUTORS include Nicholas Attfield, Catherine Baker, Christina Baade, J. Martin Daughtry, James Deaville, David A. McDonald, Kevin C. Miller, Jonathan Ritter, Victor A. Vicente, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski.</P>
<P>In clear and elegant prose, Music of the Common Tongue, first published in 1987, argues that by any reasonable reckoning of the function of music in human life the African American tradition, that which stems from the collision between African and European ways of doing music which occurred in the Americas and the Caribbean during and after slavery, is the major western music of the twentieth century. In showing why this is so, the author presents not only an account of African American music from its origins but also a more general consideration of the nature of the music act and of its function in human life. The two streams of discussion occupy alternate chapters so that each casts light on the other. The author offers also an answer to what the Musical Times called the «seldom posed though glaringly obtrusive» question: «why is it that the music of an alienated, oppressed, often persecuted black minority should have made so powerful an impact on the entire industrialized world, whatever the color of its skin or economic status?»</P>