My Music is a first-hand exploration of the diverse roles music plays in people's lives. "What is music about for you?" asked members of the Music in Daily Life Project of some 150 people, and the responses they received -- from the profound to the mundane, from the deeply-felt to the flippant -- reflect highly individualistic relationships to and with music. Susan Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, and Project Director Charles Keil have collected and edited nearly forty of those interviews to document the diverse ways in which people enjoy, experience, and use music.CONTRIBUTORS: Charles Keil, George Lipsitz.

The study of subcultural musics, what Mark Slobin calls "small musics in big systems," is characterized by a tremendously expanding search for cultural identity within multiethnic societies that are increasingly caught up in global cultural flow. Subcultural Sounds is the first critical attempt to explore the dynamics of this process in Europe and America, the heartland of music production and bellwether for global culture. By combining interpretation with concrete analysis, Slobin works toward a comparative approach for understanding the "micromusics" of Euro-America. Includes a new preface that was added to the second printing in 2000.

From 1826 to 1829, John Bradford, founder of Kentucky's first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette, reprinted in its pages sixty-six excerpts that he considered important documents on the settlement of the West. Now for the first time all of Bradford's Notes on Kentucky -- the primary historical source for Kentucky's early years -- are made available in a single volume, edited by the state's most distinguished historian.The Kentucky Gazette was established in 1787 to support Kentucky's separation from Virginia and the formation of a new state. Bradford's Notes deal at length with that protracted debate and the other major issues confronting Bradford and his pioneering neighbors. The early white settlers were obsessed with Indian raids, which continued for more than a decade and caused profound anxiety. A second vexing concern was overlapping land claims, as swarms of settlers flowed into the region. And as quickly as the land was settled, newly opened fields began to yield mountains of produce in need of outside markets. Spanish control of the lower Mississippi and rumors of Spain's plan to close the river for twenty-five years were far more threatening to the new economy than the continuing Indian raids.Equally disturbing was the British occupation of the northwest posts from which it was believed the northern Indianraids emanated. Not until Anthony Wayne's sweeping campaign against the Miami villages and the signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1794 was tension from that quarter relieved. Finally, the Jay Treaty with Britain and the Pinckney Treaty with Spain diplomatically cleared the Kentucky frontier for free expansion of the white populace.John Bradford's Notes on Kentucky, now published together for the first time, deal with all of these pertinent issues. No other source portrays so intimately or so graphically the travail of western settlement.

In Singing the Glory Down, William Lynwood Montell contributes to a fuller understanding of twentieth-century American culture by examining the complex relationships between gospel music and the culture of the nineteen-county study area in which this music has flourished for a hundred years. He has recorded the memories and feelings of those who were young while the movement gathered steam and who remember it at its high point, and stories about those who have passed over that river about which they loved to sing.In the early 1900s, a singing school or gospel convention was a major social event that enticed people to walk for miles to learn to sing or to hear someone who already had. The shape-note teachers of those days conducted days or even weeks of nightly practice, which culminated in a performance that confirmed the teacher's skill. Quartet music originated in these settings.Today, some area quartets still sound much like those early groups; others teach themselves to sing by imitating their favorite professional gospel ensembles.They travel every weekend in buses emblazoned with the names of their groups, with tapes and albums to sell. Through all the changes, the four-part southern harmony of Kentucky gospel music has remained the same.In the words of these performers, through letters, diaries, and interviews, Montell details the attitudes and joys of those involved most deeply in the gospel music scene. He also brings the reader into their personal relationships, their professional jealousies, and their struggles to keep alive the music they love.

Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane's Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream.Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers' Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the "drunk dancing" of Fred Astaire.

Throughout his life the major Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdós (1843-1920) took a keen interest in the visual arts. Parts I and II of this book discuss Galdós's art journalism and his artistic contributions to the illustrated edition of the historical novels. But the main focus (part III) is on references to the visual arts and pictorial landscapes, particularly in the serie contemporánea, the contemporary social novels. Such allusions often act as a guide to interpretation; they also relate to the whole philosophical question of how the eye perceives physical reality. Professor Bly offers a fascinating analysis of the various types of interrelationship between visual art and novelistic action; his study contributes greatly to the understanding of aesthetic and moral perception in Galdós's novels, and contains wider implications for nineteenth-century literary and aesthetic theory.

Although Pedro Calderón de la Barca was one of the greatest and most prolific playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, most of his nonallegorical comedias -- 118 in all -- have remained unknown. Robert ter Horst presents here the first full-length study of these works, a sustained, meditative analysis dealing with more than 80 plays, conveying a sense of the whole of Calderón's secular theater.To approach so vast a body of literature, Mr. ter Horst examines the meaning and function in Calderón of three broad subjects -- myth, honor, and history -- the warp threads across which the playwright weaves a subtle tapestry of contrasts, dualities, and conflicts: the private person versus the public person, the inner realm versus the outer, masculine against feminine, poet against prince.The Calderón who emerges is a consciously consummate artist whose lifelong study was the passions of the human mind and body. In addition, he is seen as a synthesizer of his Spanish literary heritage and especially as a brilliant adapter of Cervantes' insights to the stage. Robert ter Horst's profound and far-ranging analysis sheds light on many fine works previously neglected and finds new depths in such supreme achievements as No hay cosa como callar, El segundo Escipión, and La vida es suefio.

In 1713, soon after publication of the Spectator had come to an end, its place on breakfast tables of Queen Anne's London was taken by the Guardian. Richard Steele, continuing in the new paper the blend of learning, wit, and moral instruction that had proved so attractive in the Tatler and Spectator, was the editor and principal writer; in the 175 numbers of the Guardian he included 53 essays by Joseph Addison, as well as contributions by Alexander Pope, George Berkeley, and several others, some of whom doubtless transmitted their papers through the famous lion's head letterbox that Addison had erected in Button's coffeehouse. "These papers," as John C. Stephens writes in the introduction to his edition of the Guardian, "helped to form and to shape the morals and manners of countless generations in Britain and abroad."This first modern edition of the Guardian was prepared from the original printing of the papers, is fully annotated and indexed, and includes a comprehensive introduction discussing especially the authorship of the individual essays.

Greek vases and Peruvian bottles, Chinese bronzes and African masks, Tel Brak idols and Egyptian tomb paintings -- artifacts ancient and modern reveal man's universal fascination with the eye and his awe before its mysterious powers. In this wide-ranging and richly illustrated essay Albert M. Potts considers the special properties the human mind has ascribed to the eye over the millenia and seeks out its peculiar significance as symbol. Amulets against the Evil Eye persist today in nearly every part of the world. Almost as pervasive is the conception of the Good Eye, itself used as a protective amulet. The Eye of Horus, for example, was one of the holiest symbols of the ancient Egyptian religion, and its descendants can still be found in the Mediterranean basin. Using artifacts and texts, the folklore of our own times, and aspects of the unconscious revealed by Jungian psychology, Potts reveals the diverse forms and meanings of this powerful symbol.

An important book of essays on "dance and ideas about dance"

Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a "living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains" in terms of man's "new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essense is cinematic narration." Prats' work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors -- Fellini's Director's Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller's Seven Beauties, Antonioni's Blowup -- Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods of the past and the new narrative in which images are free to display their energies fully, to lead the eye beyond rational concepts of reality and illusion, truth and falsity, good an evil, beauty and ugliness. The autonomous visual event, Prats finds, offers one of the most direct ways of entering into adventures of ideas, particularly in the realm of human values. Movies have revolutionized art as well as thought about art, and inasmuch as art and life converge, they have revolutionized life itself.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jose Limon, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolas, Pauline Koner, Paul Taylor.