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الاستماع والقراءة

Aida Huseynova

This book traces the development of Azerbaijani art music from its origins in the Eastern, modal, improvisational tradition known as mugham through its fusion with Western classical, jazz, and world art music. Aida Huseynova places the fascinating and little-known history of music in Azerbaijan against the vivid backdrop of cultural life under Soviet influence, which paradoxically both encouraged and repressed the evolution of national musics and post-Soviet independence. Inspired by their neighbors to the East and West, Azerbaijani musicians enjoyed a period of remarkable creativity, composing and performing the first opera and the first ballet in the Muslim East, establishing the region's first Opera and Ballet Theater and Conservatory of Music, and discovering ways to merge the modal lyricism of mugham with the rhythmic dynamics of jazz. Drawing on previously unstudied archives, letters, and documents as well as her experience as an Azerbaijani musician and educator, Huseynova shows how Azerbaijani musical development was not a product of Soviet cultural policies but rather grew from and reflected deep and complex cultural processes.

Indiana University Press

Ethnomusicology Multimedia

Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera

Adriana N. Helbig

“[A] magnificent study . . . adds to the burgeoning scholarship on global hip hop and furthers our knowledge of the African diaspora in Eastern Europe.” —Anthropology of East Europe Reviews

Featured in NPR’s “Read These 6 Books About Ukraine”

 In Hip Hop Ukraine, we enter a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence—African, Soviet, American—to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change.

“This is a unique and admirable book that traces a complex trail from hip hop created by African migrants in Ukraine through remote African-American influences to their origins in Uganda and back again.” —Slavic Review

“Portrays the music as a forceful influence on worldwide social and cultural expression.” —Slavonic and East European Review

“A well-conceived study of the role and significance of hip hop in Ukraine. It joins the ranks of other very timely chronicles on the impact of hip hop in various societies around the world.” —Allison Blakely, Boston University

Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration

Merih Erol

A study of the musical discourse among Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christians during a complicated time for them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During the late Ottoman period (1856–1922), a time of contestation about imperial policy toward minority groups, music helped the Ottoman Greeks in Istanbul define themselves as a distinct cultural group. A part of the largest non-Muslim minority within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire, the Greek Orthodox educated elite engaged in heated discussions about their cultural identity, Byzantine heritage, and prospects for the future, at the heart of which were debates about the place of traditional liturgical music in a community that was confronting modernity and westernization. Merih Erol draws on archival evidence from ecclesiastical and lay sources dealing with understandings of Byzantine music and history, forms of religious chanting, the life stories of individual cantors, and other popular and scholarly sources of the period. Audio examples keyed to the text are available online.

“Merih Erol’s careful examination of the prominent church cantors of this period, their opinions on Byzantine, Ottoman and European musics as well as their relationship with both the Patriarchate and wealthy Greeks of Istanbul presents a detailed picture of a community trying to define their national identity during a transition. . . . Her study is unique and detailed, and her call to pluralism is timely.” —Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, author of The Musician Mehters

“Overall, the book impresses me as a sophisticated work that avoids the standard nationalist views on the history of the Ottoman Greeks.” —Risto Pekka Pennanen, University of Tampere, Finland

“This book is a great contribution to the fields of historical ethnomusicology, religious studies, ethnic studies, and Ottoman and Greek studies. It offers timely research during a critical period for ethnic minorities in the Middle East in general and Christians in particular as they undergo persecution and forced migration.” —Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform

Paul Schauert

The Ghana Dance Ensemble takes Ghana's national culture and interprets it in performance using authentic dance forms adapted for local or foreign audiences. Often, says Paul Schauert, the aims of the ensemble and the aims of the individual performers work in opposition. Schauert discusses the history of the dance troupe and its role in Ghana's post-independence nation-building strategy and illustrates how the nation's culture makes its way onto the stage. He argues that as dancers negotiate the terrain of what is or is not authentic, they also find ways to express their personal aspirations, discovering, within the framework of nationalism or collective identity, that there is considerable room to reform national ideals through individual virtuosity.

Staging Ghana: Artistry and Nationalism in State Dance Ensembles

Tamar Barzel

An up-close view of the 1990s music scene that brought us neo-klezmer bands, Tzadik Records, and a new vision of Jewish identity.

Coined in 1992 by composer/saxophonist John Zorn, “Radical Jewish Culture,” or RJC, became the banner under which many artists in Zorn’s circle performed, produced, and circulated their music. New York’s downtown music scene, part of the once-grungy Lower East Side, has long been the site of cultural innovation, and it is within this environment that Zorn and his circle sought to combine, as a form of social and cultural critique, the unconventional, uncategorizable nature of downtown music with sounds that were recognizably Jewish.

Out of this movement arose bands, like Hasidic New Wave and Hanukkah Bush, whose eclectic styles encompassed neo-klezmer, hardcore and acid rock, neo-Yiddish cabaret, free verse, free jazz, and electronica. Though relatively fleeting in rock history, the “RJC moment” produced a six-year burst of conversations, writing, and music—including festivals, international concerts, and nearly two hundred new recordings. During a decade of research, Tamar Barzel became a frequent visitor at clubs, post-club hangouts, musicians’ dining rooms, coffee shops, and archives. Her book describes the way RJC forged a new vision of Jewish identity in the contemporary world, one that sought to restore the bond between past and present, to interrogate the limits of racial and gender categories, and to display the tensions between secularism and observance, traditional values and contemporary concerns.

Includes links to audiovisual content

New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene

Jean Ngoya Kidula

“The book contains an excellent mix of deep personal understanding of the culture and copious documentation.” —Eric Charry, Wesleyan University

This sensitive study is a historical, cultural, and musical exploration of Christian religious music among the Logooli of Western Kenya. It describes how new musical styles developed through contact with popular radio and other media from abroad and became markers of the Logooli identity and culture. Jean Ngoya Kidula narrates this history of a community through music and religious expression in local, national, and global settings. The book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

“The archival and ethnographic research is outstanding, the accounts of mission history, and then the musical explanations of a variety of forms of change that have accompanied mission intervention, the incursion of forms of modernity, and globalization at large are compelling and unparalleled.” —Carol Muller, University of Pennsylvania

“Explores contemporary African music through the prism of ethnographies through the people’s engagement of Christianity as a unifying ideology in the context of history, modernity, nationalisms and globalisation.” —Journal of Modern African Studies

“The meticulous and sometimes highly sophisticated musical analyses, transcriptions, and the rich historical and ethnographic perspectives illuminate not only ongoing discourses and contestations of syncretism and related analytical notions, they also represent a plausible model of a balanced approach to ethnomusicology.” ?International Journal of African Historical Studies

“An essential text for thinking about world Christianities, because it approaches a particular African Christianity from both insider and outsider perspectives.” —Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith

Music in Kenyan Christianity: Logooli Religious Song

Nanette de Jong

As contemporary Tambú music and dance evolved on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, it intertwined sacred and secular, private and public cultural practices, and many traditions from Africa and the New World. As she explores the formal contours of Tambú, Nanette de Jong discovers its variegated history and uncovers its multiple and even contradictory origins. De Jong recounts the personal stories and experiences of Afro-Curaçaoans as they perform Tambu–some who complain of its violence and low-class attraction and others who champion Tambú as a powerful tool of collective memory as well as a way to imagine the future.