45 Profiles In Modern Music

Contemporary Musicians provides comprehensive information on more than 4,500 musicians and groups from around the world. Entries include a detailed biographical essay, selected discographies, contact information and a list of sources.

This engaging collection of Native American profiles examines these individuals' unique life experiences within the larger context of U.S. history. Native Americans Today: A Biographical Dictionary focuses on the lives of contemporary Native Americans. Such treatments are rare, as most Native American biographies are historical (pre-1900) and cover familiar figures. Profiles collected here are written to be enjoyable as well as instructive, presented as examples of personal storytelling that should be savored not only for their factual content, but also for the humanity they evoke. The book spotlights Native American lives in the United States and Canada, mainly after 1900, though a few older figures are included because their lives evoke strikingly modern themes. The author, an expert on all things Native American, knows (or knew) several of the people in the entries, adding a special vibrancy to the writing. Among those profiled are former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, activist Eloise Cobell, and controversial political prisoner Leonard Peltier, as well as writers, artists, and musicians. The compilation also includes non-Native Americans whose lives and careers impacted Indian life.

This invaluable resource provides a comprehensive historical and demographic overview of American Indians along with more than 100 cross-referenced entries on American Indian culture, exploring everything from arts, literature, music, and dance to food, family, housing, and spirituality. American Indian Culture: From Counting Coup to Wampum is organized by cultural form (Arts; Family, Education, and Community; Food; Language and Literature; Media and Popular Culture; Music and Dance; Spirituality; and Transportation and Housing). Examples of topics covered include icons of Native culture, such as pow wows, Indian dancing, and tipi dwellings; Native art forms such as pottery, rock art, sandpainting, silverwork, tattooing, and totem poles; foods such as corn, frybread, and wild rice; and Native Americans in popular culture. The extensive introductory section, breadth of topics, accessibly written text, and range of perspectives from the many contributors make this work a must-have resource for high school and undergraduate audiences.

Provides comprehensive information on musicians and groups from around the world. Entries include a detailed biographical essay, selected discographies, contact information, and a list of sources.

Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992. Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde. Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.