New Music For Old Rituals

New Music For Old Rituals brings together a selection of stories that illustrate the pervasive power of the past in the present. Together they present a strange yet familiar country where cautionary tales still serve a purpose; where sacred sites of sea, forest, valley and forts hold power, where old legends live, and where new myths are born. Within the pages of New Music for Old Rituals, bog bodies sleep, contagion rages, ancient rituals are enacted, battles are fought, ghosts linger, and time stutters, fails and turns back on itself.By the author of The Unheimlich Manoeuvre (2016) and The Girl In The Fort (2017)

Divided into two parts, this volume includes contributions focused on both myth and some of its contemporary reflections (Part I) and the connection between myth, music and ritual (Part II). The fifteen contributions gathered here are authored by academics and researchers from Brazil, France, Poland, Mexico, South Africa and Romania. They focus on a variety of subjects, including folklore, literature, classical and traditional music, science-fiction, philosophy, and religion, among others. The volume operates with an awareness of the capital role the study of the imaginary, with all its implications, is playing in the contemporary world.

Examines the history and purpose of political rituals, discusses examples from Aztec cannibal rites to presidential inauguration, and argues that the use of ritual determines the success of political groups.

The current volume traces the ways in which women composers from the early 20th century onwards incorporate and reinterpret musical elements of past music in their compositions. It investigates their unique musical writings in which they fuse traditional idioms into their musical contexts. The book reveals the composers’ perspectives toward their compositional techniques and structural constructions, and the influences that lead us to better understand their music. It provides in-depth analyses, with musical examples, of the composers’ mature compositions, and several aspects of their compositional perspectives. It also discusses their personal experiences as they developed in their music careers; for example, organizations, patrons, groups and people in various countries that helped support their music are discussed. It offers an insight into the growth and development of women’s associations, organizations and musical activity that have developed since the 20th century. Valuable information is afforded to young musicians wanting to understand contemporary music, and to listener-readers seeking a wider knowledge of contemporary music by women composers.

In February 2014 an international seminar on musical dynamics and creativity in Africa was held at Tor Vergata University of Rome. The topic and the approach were strongly influenced by issues that Gerhard Kubik believed should have been addressed for a long time, such as the attention to cultural and social dynamics, with a specific emphasis on the creativity of individuals. Beside his keynote address, Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa includes the contributions presented by scholars from different countries, particularly active in the East African area and in dialogue with Italian researchers who have field experience in the same region. Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa is the first monograph of a series of volumes connected and inspired to the journal Etnografie Sonore / Sound Ethnographies (www.soundethnographies.it), which Giorgio Adamo and his colleagues recently founded. Along with the papers multimedia contents are also available online.

The rich local traditions of musical life in rural China are still little known. Music-making in village society is largely ceremonial, and shawm bands account for a major part of such music. This is the first major ethnographic study of Chinese shawm bands in their ceremonial and social context. Based in a poor county in Shanxi province in northwest China, Stephen Jones describes the painful maintenance of ceremonial and its music there under Maoism, its revival with the market reforms of the 1980s and its modification under the assault of pop music since the 1990s. The book is accompanied by a 47-minute DVD and will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists and all those interested in modern Chinese history and society.

In Toward Ritual Transformation renowned liturgist Robert W. Hovda, and other distinguished liturgists who have followed his lead, challenge the Church to continue a pilgrimage toward beauty and justice, the inseparable components of Christian liturgy and life. Father Hovda's bishop once accused him of having a messiah complex." Hovda replied: *I thought we were supposed to. - Hovda's *messiah complex - was the idea of a church *never finalized or finished, never an accomplished fact but always on pilgrimage, seeking, growing, and helping the world grow toward what Scripture calls the reign of God. This faith community comes to realize gradually, with the help of the Word of God and the signs of the times, that its ministry in the world is the liberation and unification of the human race, because the God of the Bible is a God who is living, whose creative work is ongoing, and whose call beckons us always to move beyond where we are at any given moment. - Essays and their contributors are *A Tree Planted by a Stream, - by Gabe Huck; *The Sacred: Silence and Song, - by Robert W. Hovda; *Liturgical Prayer: Twenty-five Years of Change, - by Virgil C.Funk; *Ritual Transformations: Principles, Patterns, and People, - by J. Michael Joncas; *Being Beautiful, Being Just, - by Nathan D. Mitchell; *The Transforming Power of Music: Tales of Transformation, - by James Savage; and *All at Once the Music Changed, - by John Foley, S.J.