Music Cultures In The United States

Music Cultures in the United States is a basic textbook for an Introduction to American Music course. Taking a new, fresh approach to the study of American music, it is divided into three parts. In the first part, historical, social, and cultural issues are discussed, including how music history is studied; issues of musical and social identity; and institutions and processes affecting music in the U.S. The heart of the book is devoted to American musical cultures: American Indian; European; African American; Latin American; and Asian American. Each cultural section has a basic introductory article, followed by case studies of specific musical cultures. Finally, global musics are addressed, including Classical Musics and Popular Musics, as they have been performed in the U.S.. Each article is written by an expert in the field, offering in-depth, knowledgeable, yet accessible writing for the student. The accompanying CD offers musical examples tied to each article. Pedagogic material includes chapter overviews, questions for study, and a chronoloogy of key musical events in American music and definitions in the margins.

'Music in the United States' is a basic textbook for any introduction to American music course. Each American music culture is covered with an introductory article and case studies of the featured culture.

Rock and roll music evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, as a combination of African American blues, country, pop, and gospel music produced a new musical genre. Even as it captured the ears of the nation, rock and roll was the subject of controversy and contention. The music intertwined with the social, political, and economic changes reshaping America and contributed to the rise of the youth culture that remains a potent cultural force today. A comprehensive understanding of post-World War II U.S. history would be incomplete without a basic knowledge of this cultural phenomenon and its widespread impact. In this short book, bolstered by primary source documents, Mitchell K. Hall explores the change in musical style represented by rock and roll, changes in technology and business practices, regional and racial implications of this new music, and the global influences of the music. The Emergence of Rock and Roll explains the huge influence that one cultural moment can have in the history of a nation.

A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures. With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book's twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today--from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies, to music's capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.

Volume titles: Literature and Art; Sociology; Anthropology; History.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: All American music reflects the landscape from which it springs and as that landscape changes, chewed up by the developments and industry and environmental disasters, as the air we heave in and out of our lungs is filled with new particles, as the water we drink gets its fluoride levels regulated and mineral content tweaked, it makes perfect sense that American music becomes slicker, more machinated, less like reality. We are all subject to our environs, fashioned and chiseled and sanded into shapes We have highways for arteries and clouds for brains and sticks for bones, The sounds we make are Americana. As one of the first musical expressions of the United States, country music represents the values and ideals on which the nation was founded. Country music can be seen as the epitome of the American Dream. It has its origins in the 19th century, when cowboys were working in the fields and riding through the lonely prairie, an image that has been romanticized by numerous Hollywood movies. This thesis focuses on country music as a genre as well as the identity which it represents and by which audience and performers are linked. Country music can be regarded as the music of Southern working class Americans. Since before the Civil War, the South has always been looked down upon as being primitive, simple-minded, and extremely religious. Having its roots in the South, country music has had to face substantial criticism in terms of unsophistication and over-sentimentalization. Due to a shift in national economic power, the United States have become increasingly Southernized, both culturally and musically. Southern culture and identity have become desirable. This phenomenon allowed country music to shed its dubious reputation and gain popularity across the country. This paper will shine a light on the American South as a cultural region that has more to offer than what meets the eye. Southern working class culture and its core values are going to be described and put in context with country music as a form of cultural expression. Central themes in American country music are family, love, heartbreak, work, friends, religion, and patriotism. Characteristic for the country music genre are its narrative structures, which by telling a story, enhance its ability to form a collective identity as well as a connection between the narrator, the performer, and the audience. However, country musicians are not solely messengers of the [...]

Soul music and country music propel American popular culture. Using ethnomusicological tools, Shonekan examines their socio-cultural influences and consequences: the perception of and resistance to hegemonic structures from within their respective constituencies, the definition of national identity, and the understanding of the 'American Dream.'

Folding a River, a collection of elegies, shows a pleasing range of free-verse forms that develop themes sustained throughout: loss, exile, myth, landscape. Kawita Kandpal’s poems are explorations of East–West cultures, taking her into an emo-mythic place not to be found on any map. Kandpal’s mood in Folding a River is melancholy, articulated with intelligence and grace, and her phrasing can rise to the level of proverb: “This time next year you will have evolved into an idea.” In its personal evocations of geographical and linguistic exile from the subcontinent, centered on a lost father, her work recalls that of Li-Young Lee, yet with a feminine perspective often haunting in its own right: “tenderly / taking back the mistakes of men.”