For artists, creativity plays a powerful role in understanding, confronting, and negotiating the crises of the present. Seeding the Tradition explores conflicting creativities in traditional music in Hõ Chí Minh City, the Mekong Delta, and the Vietnamese diaspora, and how they influence contemporary southern Vietnamese culture. The book centers on the ways in which musicians of đón ca tài tù, a "music for diversion," practice creativity or sáng tạo in early 21st-century southern Vietnam. These musicians draw from long-standing theories of primarily Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused primarily - although not exclusively - on the individual genius. They play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to not only maintain their tradition but keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam. With ethnographic descriptions of zither lessons in Hõ Chi Minh City, outdoor music cafes in Cãn Thơ, and television programs in Đõng Tháp, Seeding the Tradition offers a rich description of southern Vietnamese sáng tạo and suggests revised approaches to studying creativity in contemporary ethnomusicology.

An exploration of ethical dynamism in vocal life Ways of Voice is the first ethnomusicological monograph to delve deeply into the diverse, variegated techniques of voice production in North India. It explicitly thematizes the dynamic movement between vocal dispositions—singers who consciously retrain themselves in order to acquire a different voice, focusing on the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions. The book deals extensively with the formation and contestation of particular, historically grounded ways of voice, from Bollywood film singers to modern raga vocality to pop Sufi song. Working from dozens of concrete examples, it fills an important gap both in South Asian ethnomusicology and in the emerging field of voice studies. Audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site.

An ethnography about local working musicians in Brazil's "most African" city Living from Music in Salvador examines the labor of musicians in Salvador da Bahia, widely regarded as Brazil's most African city. Drawing on fieldwork that spans over sixteen years, the book explores local musicians' lives as members of a flexible work force, emphasizing questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in relation to professional music making. From clubs and restaurants, to Carnaval parades and festival celebrations, to concert stages and recordings, the abiliy of musicians to earn a living wage is contingent on their navigating industry and societal conditions that are profoundly informed by the entrenched legacies of colonization and slavery.

Genre Publics is a cultural history showing how new notions of 'the local' were produced in context of the Indonesian 'local music boom' of the late 1990s. Drawing on industry records and interviews, media scholar Emma Baulch traces the institutional and technological conditions that enabled the boom, and their links with the expansion of consumerism in Asia, and the specific context of Indonesian democratization. Baulch shows how this music helped reshape distinct Indonesian senses of the modern, especially as 'Asia' plays an ever more influential role in defining what it means to be modern.

How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of Parameters and Peripheries of Culture, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain their communities within Paramaribo, the capital. Focusing on three collectives known locally as “cultural groups,” which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons, it marks a vital contribution to knowledge about the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Just how “Irish” is traditional Irish music? Trad Nation combines ethnography, oral history, and archival research to challenge the longstanding practice of using ethnic nationalism as a framework for understanding vernacular music traditions. Tess Slominski argues that ethnic nationalism hinders this music’s development today and in an increasingly multiethnic Ireland. She discusses early-twentieth century women whose musical lives were shaped by Ireland’s struggles to become a nation; follows the career of Julia Clifford, a fiddler who lived much of her life in England, and explores the experiences of women, LGBTQ+ musicians, and musicians of color in the early-twenty-first century.

Sublime is the word that better summarises Led Zeppelin’s philosophy and aesthetics. By highlighting the distinctive features of the band members and their management, analysing the symbolism behind the albums’ paratextual elements and exploring the epic of the band tours, the book identifies the main features of Led Zeppelin’s philosophy, or at least those that are intentionally disclosed by the entity {Page + Plant + Jones + Bonham}.

Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry’s innovative and road-tested textbook is an introduction to Rock and R&B suitable for general education courses in music and also accessible for general readers interested in a novel approach to gaining a historically rich, yet concise understanding of these genres. The book is organized around a series of timelines, tables, and figures created by the author, and provides fresh perspectives that bring readers into the heart of the social and cultural import of the music. Charry lays out key theoretical issues, covers the technical foundations of the music industry, and provides a capsule history of who did what when, with particular emphasis on the rapid emergence of distinct genres in the music industry. The book’s figures distill the history and provide new insight into understanding trends. Over 1000 artists, albums, and songs are included here, such as Muddy Water, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Madonna, Talking Heads, and Public Enemy.

The University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music celebrates its centennial in this lavishly illustrated book. The Hartt School holds unique qualities that continue to distinguish it from other performing arts institutions. Through personal and official written communications, school newsletters, speeches, and the exquisite quality of artistic expression, a belief in the value of art is continually reinforced, often with great eloquence, sometimes with humor, and always from the heart.

What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the “classical” forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.

Playing It Dangerously questions what happens when feelings attached to popular music conflict with expressions of the dominant socio-cultural order, and how this tension enters into the politics of popular culture at various levels of human interaction. Tambura is a genre-crossing performance practice centered on an eponymous stringed instrument, part of the mandolin family, that Roma, Croats, and Serbs adopted from Ottoman forces. The acclamation that one is a “dangerous player” connotes exceptional virtuosic improvisation and rapid finger technique and, as the highest praise that a musician can receive from his peers. Tambura has served as a site of both contestation and reconciliation since its propagation as Croatia’s national instrument during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. This study combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and music analysis to expound affective block: a theory of the dialectical dynamics between affective and discursive responses to differences in playing styles.

In this pioneering musicological study the Danish emeritus professor Finn Egeland Hansen proposes that the classical-romantic main current of the 19th century in fact represents two sub-currents, the one focusing on the romantic aspects, the other focusing on the classical aspects of its musical style. His thesis is discussed with excerpts from the standard musicological literature plus writings by Saint-Saëns, and Finn Egeland Hansen exemplifies his argument in readings of the music by three stylistically different composers – the French Camille Saint-Saëns and Charles Gounod and the Danish Niels W. Gade. Finn Egeland Hansen labels these harbingers’ style as retro-classicism.

Tokyo Listening examines how the sensory experience of the city informs how people listen to both music and everyday, ubiquitous sounds. Drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of sound studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology and over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, Lorraine Plourde traces the linkages between sound and urban space. She examines listening cultures via four main ethnographic sites in Tokyo—an experimental music venue, classical music cafes, office workspaces, and department stores—looking specifically at how such auditory sensibilities are cultivated. The book brings together two different types of spaces into the same frame of reference: places people go to specifically for the music, and spaces where the music comes to them. Tokyo Listening examines the sensory experience of urban listening as a planned and multifaceted dimension of everyday city life, ultimately exploring the relationship between sound, comfort, happiness, and productivity.

Pop music meets the media..

David Nelson wrote and compiled Konnakkol Manual to assist teaching an advanced course in the rhythmic compositions of Karnatak (South Indian) music. This new instructional book picks up where his previous book, Solkattu Manual, left off. It includes advanced exercises for developing control of odd pulse divisions, such as three and five notes per beat. There is a chapter on the sources of Karnatak tāas (meters), and another on the evolution of rhythmic compositions—told through the work of three generations of musicians. The main body of the book comprises full tani āvartanams (spoken percussion solos) in three tāas, together with instructions for practice, and Solkattu notation. Nelson created 150 instructional videos to accompany the text. They are accessible at wesleyan.edu/wespress/konnakkol/.