Contemporary World Musicians

Music lovers, researchers, students, librarians, and teachers can trace the personal and artistic influences behind music makers from Elton John to Leontyne Price. Individual entries on over 400 of the world's most renowned and accomplished living performers, composers, conductors, and band leaders in musical genres from opera to hip-hop. Also includes an in-depth Index covering musicians of all eras, so that readers can learn which artists, alive or dead, influenced the work of today's most important figures in the music industry.

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.

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.

The purpose of this book of essays is to provide a novel sort of introduction to music. Struck by the fact that most introductions to the art are oriented toward an historical approach or, on the other hand, cover the field of music systematically by giving attention to selected parameters such as melody, rhythm, and harmony, or to genres of music such as symphony, opera, and song, the authors were impressed by the attractiveness of an approach that focuses on music in the contemporary world, and particularly on the way in which it interacts with those social, political, and cultural processes that distinguish the twentieth century. The authors have attempted to produce a group of original essays, each of which is devoted to an approach to the study of music and musical culture, and which has one repertory or culture as its main topic of discussion. The authors view the contemporary world as consisting of the industrialized nations of the West and the developing countries of the Third World; they include among contemporary musics all sorts of musical styles that have come into existence in the twentieth century, whether their background is part and parcel of the twentieth century or whether it is to be ultimately sought in the distant past. The authors feel also that the reader will be interested in musics of the educated and elite as well as those of the broad masses of urban and rural population.

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.

SamulNori is a percussion quartet which has given rise to a genre, of the same name, that is arguably Korea’s most successful ’traditional’ music of recent times. Today, there are dozens of amateur and professional samulnori groups. There is a canon of samulnori pieces, closely associated with the first founding quartet but played by all, and many creative evolutions on the basic themes, made by the rapidly growing number of virtuosic percussionists. And the genre is the focus of an abundance of workshops, festivals and contests. Samulnori is taught in primary and middle schools; it is part of Korea’s national education curriculum. It has dedicated institutes, and there are a number of workbooks devoted to helping wannabe ’samulnorians’. It is a familiar part of Korean performance culture, at home and abroad, in concerts but also in films and theatre productions. SamulNori uses four instruments: kkwaenggwari and ching small and large gongs, and changgo and puk drums. These are the instruments of local percussion bands and itinerant troupes that trace back many centuries, but samulnori is a recent development of these older traditions: it was first performed in February 1978. This volume explores this vibrant percussion genre, charting its origins and development, the formation of the canon of pieces, teaching and learning strategies, new evolutions and current questions relating to maintaining, developing, and sustaining samulnori in the future.

This volume examines music's place in the process of Jewish assimilation into the modern European bourgeoisie and the role assigned to music in forging a new Jewish Israeli national identity, in maintaining a separate Sephardic identity, and in preserving a traditional Jewish life. Contributions include "On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth Century European Musical Life," by Ezra Mendelsohn, "Musical Life in the Central European Jewish Village," by Philip V. Bohlman, "Jews and Hungarians in Modern Hungarian Musical Culture," by Judit Frigyesi, "New Directions in the Music of the Sephardic Jews," by Edwin Seroussi, "The Eretz Israeli Song and the Jewish National Fund," by Natan Shahar, "Alexander U. Boskovitch and the Quest for an Israeli Musical Style," by Jehoash Hirshberg, and "Music of Holy Argument," by Lionel Wolberger. The volume also contains essays, book reviews, and a list of recent dissertations in the field.