Ethnicity Identity And Music

- Directly relevant to the needs of teachers and researchers in music, musicology, ethnomusicology and social anthropology. This book examines the significance of music in the construction of identities and ethnicities, and suggests ways to understand music as social practice. The authors focus on the role of music in the construction of national and regional identities; the media and 'postmodern identity'; concepts of authenticity; aesthetics; meaning; performance; 'world music'; and the use of music as a focus for discursive evocations of 'place'. The chapters tackle a wide range of subjects including 16th century etiquette, Celtic music and Chopin. The volume will be of interest to social anthropologists, and those working in the fields of cultural studies, politics, gender studies, musicology and folklore.

Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics looks at a variety of popular and folk music from around the world, with examples of British, Slovene, Chinese and American songs, poems and musicals. Charles Taylor says that “it is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time”; one can make the same claim for music. Inexorably tied to time, to the measure of the beat, but freed from time by the polysemous potential of the words, song rapidly becomes “our” song, helping to cement memory and community, to make the past comprehensible and the present bearable. The authors of the fifteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how lyrics set to music can reflect, express and construct collective identities, both traditional and contemporary.

Raymond MacDonald is Professor of Music Psychology and Improvisation and Head of The School of Music at University of Edinburgh. He runs music workshops and lectures internationally and has published over 70 peer reviewed papers and book chapters. He has co-edited four texts, Musical Identities (2002), Musical Communication (2005), Musical Imaginations (2012) and Music Health et Wellbeing (2012) and was editor of the journal Psychology of Music between 2006 and 2012. His on-going research focuses on issues relating to improvisation, musical communication, music health and wellbeing, music education and musical identities. As a saxophonist and composer he is a founding member of The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and has released over 60 CDs. Collaborating with musicians such as David Byrne, George Lewis, Evan Parker, Jim O'Rourke and Marilyn Crispell he has toured and broadcast worldwide and has written music for film, television, theatre, radio and art installations.

During the 1990s, Asian pop artists began entering the mainstream of the British music industry for the first time. Bands such as Black Star Liner, Cornershop, Fun Da Mental and Voodoo Queens, led those within and without the industry to start asking questions such as what did it mean to be Asian? How did the bands' Asian background affect their music? What did their music say about Asians in Britain? In this book, Rehan Hyder draws on in-depth interviews with musicians from these bands and with critics and record producers, to examine the pressures associated with making music as a young Asian in today's multi-ethnic Britain. As the book reveals, these musicians wish to convey an authentic sense of creativity in their music, while at the same time wanting to assert a positive ethnic identity. Hyder explores these two impulses against the backdrop of a music industry and a society at large that hold a range of confining stereotypes about what it means to be Asian. The experiences of these bands add considerably to the wider debate about the nature of identity in the contemporary world.

Merengue is a quintessential Dominican dance music. This work aims to unravel the African and Iberian roots of merengue. It examines the historical and contemporary contexts in which merengue is performed and danced, its symbolic significance, its social functions, and its musical and choreographic structures.

"A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.

Small Musical Worlds in the Mediterranean is a pioneering book-length study of the complex topics of identity, ethnicity and global processes in children’s musical lives in the Republic of Cyprus - a Mediterranean country during its post-colonial era. What is it about this country’s musical enculturation that made musical identity such a potent element in Greek Cypriot children’s worlds? How is history, tradition, modernity, ethnic fluidity, syncretism and diversification in the Mediterranean negotiated in the construction of musical ’self’ and ’other’ in children’s daily lives? This book, through a journey of ’fieldwork at home’, discusses how children select, reject, reproduce and transform meanings and create new ones at the micro-level of their lives through which individuals and groups define themselves and others. Towards this exploration, musical identity in childhood is discussed in terms of cultural production and reproduction, human expression, inter-relating and learning. Ethnographic vignettes of children’s musical practices and direct words add depth and humour to the flow of the book. This study is a synthesis of ethnomusicology, musical anthropology, education and folklore in which the author effectively weaves together theories of musical enculturation and identity, sociocultural learning and human agency. The book will be invaluable to scholars interested in musical enculturation, musical identities, children’s contextual musical practices, ethnicity, globalization studies, music education and Mediterranean studies.

Music, Popular Culture, Identities is a collection of sixteen essays that will appeal to a wide range of readers with interests in popular culture and music, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology. Organized around the central theme of music as an expression of local, ethnic, social and other identities, the essays touch upon popular traditions and contemporary forms from several different regions of the world: political engagement in Italian popular music; flamenco in Spain; the challenge of traditional music in Bulgaria; boerenrock and rap in Holland; Israeli extreme heavy metal; jazz and pop in South Africa, and musical hybridity and politics in Côte d’Ivoire. The collection includes essays about Latin America: on the Mexican corrido, the Caribbean, popular dance music in Cuba, and bossanova from Brazil. Communities of a cultural diaspora in North America are discussed in essays on Somali immigrant and refugee youth and Iranians in exile in the US. Grounded in cultural theory and a specialized knowledge of a particular popular musical practice, each author has written a critical study on the mix of music and identity in a particular social practice and context.