Focus Popular Music In Contemporary India

Focus: Popular Music in Contemporary India examines India’s musical soundscape beyond the classical and folk traditions of old to consider the culturally, socially, and politically rich contemporary music that is defining and energizing an Indian youth culture on the precipice of a major identity shift. From Bollywood film songs and Indo-jazz to bhangra hip-hop and Indian death metal, the book situates Indian popular music within critical and historical frameworks, highlighting the unprecedented changes the region’s music has undergone in recent decades. This critical approach provides readers with a foundation for understanding an Indian musical culture that is as diverse and complex as the region itself. Included are case studies featuring song notations, first-person narratives, and interviews of well-known artists and emerging musicians alike. Illuminated are issues of great import in India today—as reflected through its music—addressing questions of a "national" aesthetic, the effects of Western music, and identity politics as they relate to class, caste, LGBTQ perspectives, and other marginalized voices. Presented through a global lens, Focus: Popular Music in Contemporary India contextualizes the dynamic popular music of India and its vast cultural impact.

This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs of Bollywood to contemporary remixes, summarized by a reflective afterword by popular music scholar Timothy Taylor. The chapters in this volume address the impact of media and technology on contemporary music, the variety of industrial developments and contexts for Indian popular music, and historical trends in popular music development both before and after the Indian Independence in 1947. The book identifies new ways of engaging popular music in India beyond the Bollywood musical canon, and offers several case studies of local and regional styles of music. The contributors address the subcontinent's historical relationships with colonialism, the transnational market economies, local governmental factors, international conventions, and a host of other circumstances to shed light on the development of popular music throughout India. To illustrate each chapter author's points, and to make available music not easily accessible in North America, the book features an Oxford web music companion website of audio and video tracks.

Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity provides a rich and detailed look into the unique dimensions of music in Indian film. Music is at the center of Indian cinema, and India’s film music industry has a far-reaching impact on popular, folk, and classical music across the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora. In twelve essays written by an international array of scholars, this book explores the social, cultural, and musical aspects of the industry, including both the traditional center of "Bollywood" and regional film-making. Concentrating on films and songs created in contemporary, post-liberalization India, this book will appeal to classes in film studies, media studies, and world music, as well as all fans of Indian films.

Focus: Irish Traditional Music, Second Edition introduces the instrumental and vocal musics of Ireland, its diaspora in North America, and its Celtic neighbors while exploring the essential values underlying these rich musical cultures and placing them in broader historical and social context. With both the undergraduate and graduate student in mind, the text weaves together past and present, bringing together important ideas about Irish music from a variety of sources and presenting them, in three parts, within interdisciplinary lenses of history, film, politics, poetry, and art: I. Irish Music in Place and Time provides an overview of the island’s musical history and its relationship to current performance practice. II. Music Traditions Abroad and at Home contrasts the instrumental and vocal musics of the "Celtic Nations" (Scotland, Wales, Brittany, etc.) and the United States with those of Ireland. III. Focusing In: Vocal Music in Irish-Gaelic and English identifies the great songs of Ireland’s two main languages and explores the globalization of Irish music. New to this edition are discussions of those contemporary issues reflective of Ireland’s dramatic political and cultural shifts in the decade since first publication, issues concerning equity and inclusion, white nationalism, the Irish Traveller community, hip hop and punk, and more. Pedagogical features—such as discussion questions, a glossary, a timeline of key dates, and expanded references, as well as an online soundtrack—ensure that readers of Focus: Irish Traditional Music, Second Edition will be able to grasp Ireland's important social and cultural contexts and apply that understanding to traditional and contemporary vocal and instrumental music today.

Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion explores human initiations and responses to music as a process and product intrinsically part of our culture, history, place, time and ecological musical worlds. The contributors challenge scholarly approaches wherein music is detached from the social relationships in which it is produced, transmitted, used and judged. ‘Guerrilla’ is a trope long applied to socio-political machinations, human conflict and confrontation. Guerrilla Music provocatively explores research involving music practices, stories, communities and musickers worldwide that resist, defy and subvert by silence and non-compliance, reluctant subordination, subversive depowering, resistive counterpoint, or destructive, violent dismantling. Contexts spanning the subcultural local, glocal and universal highlight the potency, passions, actions and life worlds of music, musicians and those that become engulfed in musical maelstroms that incite change. Guerrilla Music both invigorates and advances scholarly debates about social power, colonisation and difference by exploring the social semiotics of music making and communities, identifying powerful new ways of understanding human communication, and what musicking means in the twenty-first century.

Focus: Music of the Caribbean presents the most important issues of Caribbean musical history and current practice, discussing thought-provoking questions in a student-friendly fashion. It uses current ethnomusicological research on Caribbean music to tell the stories of Caribbean history—those of colonialism and neocolonialism, race and nationalism, marginalization and globalization—and to explore that history’s continuing impact on the lives, cultures, musics, and dance of modern-day people in the Caribbean and beyond. In three parts, the text presents an embodied understanding of the sounds, rhythms, and movements that exemplify the history, culture, and politics of Caribbean music: I. Caribbean Music and Caribbean History establishes a framework for thinking about Caribbean musical history and the roles race and migration play II. Music and Dance in Caribbean Societies considers how contrasting forms of dance music reconcile competing ideas about Caribbean identities past and present III. Focusing In: The Social Lives of Musical Instruments in Merengue Típico explores the music of the Dominican Cibao region through a focus of the genre’s dominant musical instruments Accessible to all students regardless of musical background, Focus: Music of the Caribbean is bolstered by web resources, including more than sixty detailed listening guides and accompanying playlists, vocabulary lists, and student quizzes. Discussion questions and activities for each chapter are featured in the text.

Investigating more than 70 key concepts relating to the performing arts in more than six non-European languages, this volume provides a groundbreaking research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for theatre, performance and dance studies worldwide. The Companion features in-depth explorations of and expert introductions to a select number of performance-related key concepts in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Yorùbá as well as the Indian languages Sanskrit, Hindi and Tamil. Key concepts—such as Furǧa فرجة in Arabic, for example, or Jiadingxing 假定性 in Chinese, Gei 芸 in Japanese, Ìparadà in Yorùbá and Imyeon 이면 in Korean—that defy easy translation from one language to another (and especially into English as the world’s lingua franca) and that reflect culturally specific ways of thinking and talking about the performing arts are thoroughly examined in in-depth articles. Written by more than 60 distinguished scholars from around the globe, the articles describe in detail each concept’s dynamic history, its flexible scope of meaning and current range of usage. The Companion also includes extensive introductions to each language section, in which internationally renowned experts explain how the presented key concepts are situated within, and are constitutive of, distinct and dynamic epistemic systems that have different yet always interlinked histories and orientations. Offers a fascinating insight into the unique histories, characteristics, and orientations of linguistically and culturally distinct epistemic systems related to the performative arts Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for scholars and students worldwide and across the humanities, especially in the fields of theatre, performance, dance, translation, area and cultural studies An accessible handbook for everybody interested in performance cultures and performance-related knowledge systems existing in the world today. This volume provides an invaluable research tool and one-of-a-kind reference source for scholars and students worldwide and across the humanities, especially in the fields of theatre, performance, dance, translation and area studies, history (of science and the humanities) and cultural studies.

Singers generating cultural identity from K-Pop to Beverly Sills Around the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics include gendered performances and the negotiation of race and class identities; the class-related contradictions exposed by the divide between highbrow and pop culture; links between narratives of overcoming struggle and the distinction between privileged and marginalized identities; singers’ ability to adapt to shifting notions of history, borders, gender, and memory in order to connect with listeners; how the meanings we read into a singer’s life and art build on one another; and technology’s ability to challenge our ideas about what constitutes music. Cutting-edge and original, Social Voices reveals how singers and their songs equip us to process social change and divergent opinions. Contributors: Christina D. Abreu, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Kwame Dawes, Nancy Guy, Ruth Hellier, John Lie, Treva B. Lindsey, Eric Lott, Katherine Meizel, Carol A. Muller, Natalie Sarrazin, Anthony Seeger, Carol Silverman, Andrew Simon, Jeff Todd Titon, and Elijah Wald