Eastman/Rochester Studies Ethnomusicology – serie

Preeminant gamelan performer and scholar Sumarsam explores the concept of hybridity in performance traditions that have developed in the context of Javanese encounters with the West.Javanese Gamelan and the West studies the meaning, forms, and traditions of the Javanese performing arts as they developed and changed through their contact with Western culture. Authored by a gamelan performer, teacher, and scholar, the book traces the adaptations in gamelan art as a result of Western colonialism in nineteenth-century Java, showing how Western musical and dramatic practices were domesticated by Javanese performers creating hybrid Javanese-Western art forms, such as with the introduction of brass bands in gendhing mares court music and West Javanese tanjidor, and Western theatrical idioms in contemporary wayang puppet plays. The book also examines the presentation of Javanese gamelan to the West, detailing performances in World's Fairs and American academia and considering its influence on Western performing arts and musical and performance studies. The end result is a comprehensive treatment of the formation of modern Javanese gamelan and a fascinating look at how an art form dramatizes changes and developments in a culture.Sumarsam is a University Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and numerous articles in English and Indonesian. As a gamelan musician and a keenamateur dhalang (puppeteer) of Javanese wayang puppet play, he performs, conducts workshops, and lectures throughout the US, Australia, Europe, and Asia.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, explores the contemporary pop music scene in this little understood Southeast Asian country.Burma's Pop Music Industry is the first book to explore the contemporary pop music industry in a country that is little known or understood in the West. Based on years of fieldwork in Burma/Myanmar, Heather MacLachlan's work explores the ways in which aspiring musical artists are forging a place within the highly repressive social and political context that is Burma today. It deals sensitively with issues such as negotiating local and global styles,performance contexts and practices, and, more importantly, with ethical issues such as the anonymity of informants and the place of Western ethnomusicologists in countries outside the West. Drawn from interviews conducted from 2007 through 2009 with Burmese composers, performers, producers, concert promoters, journalists, recording engineers, radio station employees, music teachers, and censors in Yangon -- Burma's largest city and the locus of all pop music production -- Burma's Pop Music Industry represents a significant contribution both to popular music studies and to Southeast Asian studies.Heather MacLachlan is Assistant Professor of Music, University of Dayton.

Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional and contemporary Yorùbá genres of music.From the primeval age of Ayànàgalú (the Yorùbá pioneer-drummer-turned-deity-of-drumming) to the modern era, Yorùbá musical traditions have been shaped by individual performers: drummers, dancers, singers, and chanters, wself-mediated visions of their social and cultural environment. Yorùbá Music in the Twentieth Century explores the role of the performer and the performing group in creating these traditions, contributing to the ongoing reorientation of scholarship on African music toward individual creativity within a larger social network.Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional Yorùbá genres such as bàtá and dùndún drumming as well as more contemporary genres such as Yorùbá popular music. The book also addresses a spectrum of social issues, ranging from gender inequality to the impactianity and Islam on Yorùbá musical practice. Throughout, Omojola emphasizes the interrelatedness of the different components of the Yorùbá musical landscape, as well as the role of specific individuals and groups of musicians, whohave continued to draw from indigenous Yorùbá musical resources to create new musical forms in the process of engaging the social dynamics of a rapidly changing environment.Awarded honorable mention in the 2014 Kwabena Nketia Book Competition of the African Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology.Bode Omojola is a Five College Associate Professor of Music at Mt. Holyoke College.

Preeminant gamelan performer and scholar Sumarsam explores the concept of hybridity in performance traditions that have developed in the context of Javanese encounters with the West.Javanese Gamelan and the West studies the meaning, forms, and traditions of the Javanese performing arts as they developed and changed through their contact with Western culture. Authored by a gamelan performer, teacher, and scholar, the book traces the adaptations in gamelan art as a result of Western colonialism in nineteenth-century Java, showing how Western musical and dramatic practices were domesticated by Javanese performers creating hybrid Javanese-Western art forms, such as with the introduction of brass bands in gendhing mares court music and West Javanese tanjidor, and Western theatrical idioms in contemporary wayang puppet plays. The book also examines the presentation of Javanese gamelan to the West, detailing performances in World's Fairs and American academia and considering its influence on Western performing arts and musical and performance studies. The end result is a comprehensive treatment of the formation of modern Javanese gamelan and a fascinating look at how an art form dramatizes changes and developments in a culture.Sumarsam is a University Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and numerous articles in English and Indonesian. As a gamelan musician and a keenamateur dhalang (puppeteer) of Javanese wayang puppet play, he performs, conducts workshops, and lectures throughout the US, Australia, Europe, and Asia.

Presenting a range of ethnographic case studies from around the globe, this edited collection offers new ways of thinking about the interconnectivity of gender, place, and emotion in musical performance.While ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have long recognized the theoretical connections between gender, place, and emotion in musical performance, these concepts are seldom analyzed together. Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music is the first book-length study to examine the interweaving of these three concepts from a cross-cultural perspective. Contributors show how a theoretical focus one dimension implicates the others, creating an exus of performative engagement. This process is examined across different regions around the globe, through two key questions: How are aesthetic, emotional, and imagined relations between performers and places embodied musically? And in what ways is this performance of emotion gendered across quotidian, ritual, and staged events?Through ethnographic case studies, the volume explores issues of emplacement, embodiment, and emotion in three parts: landscape and emotion; memory and attachment; and nationalism and indigeneity. Part I focuses on emplaced sentiments in Australasia through Vietnamese spirit possession, Balinese dance, and land rights in Aboriginal performance. Part II addresses memories of Aboriginal choral singing, belonging in Bavarian music-making, and gender-performativity in Polish song. Part III evaluates emotion and fandom around a Korean singer in Japan, and Sámi interconnectivities in traditional and modern musical practices. Beverley Diamond provides a thought-provoking commentary in the afterword.

Gender in Chinese Music draws together contributions from ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to explore how music is implicated in changing notions of masculinity, femininity, and genders "in between" in Chinese culture.Village ritualists, international classical pianists, pop idols, and professional mourners -- whether they perform in temples, on concert stages, or in TV shows, Chinese musicians continually express and negotiate their gendered identities. Gender in Chinese Music brings together contributions from ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to explore how gender is not only manifested in the diverse musical traditions of Chinese culture but also constructed through performing and observing these traditions.Individual chapters examine unique music cultures ranging from those of courting couples in China's heartlands to ethnic minority singers in the borderlands, and from Ming-period courtesans to contemporary karaoke hostesses. The book also features interviews with musicians, music industry workers, and fans talking about gender. With its wide-ranging subject matter and interdisciplinary approach, this volume will be an important resource for researchers and students interested in how music is implicated in the changing notions of masculinity, femininity, and genders "in between." Contributors: RuardAbsaroka, Rachel Harris, Stephen Jones, Frank Kouwenhoven, Olivia Kraef, Joseph Lam, Rowan Pease, Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Hwee-San Tan, Shzr Ee Tan, Xiao Mei, Judith Zeitlin, Tiantian Zheng.Rachel Harris is Reader in the Music of China and Central Asia at SOAS, University of London. Rowan Pease is Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London. Shzr Ee Tan is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Investigates the significance of a range of digital technologies in contemporary Indigenous musical performance, exploring interdisciplinary issues of music production, representation, and transmission.The essays in this volume offer rich and diverse perspectives on the encounter between Indigenous music and digital technologies. They explore how digital media -- whether on CD, VCD, the Internet, mobile technology, or in the studio -- have transformed and become part of the fabric of Indigenous cultural expression across the globe. Communication technologies have long been tools for nation building and imperial expansion, but these studies reveal how over recent decades digital media have become a creative and political resource for Indigenous peoples, often nurturing cultural revival, assisting activism, and complicating earlier hegemonic power structures. Bringing together thework of scholars and musicians across five continents, the volume addresses timely issues of transnationalism and sovereignty, production and consumption, archives and transmission, subjectivity and ownership, and virtuality and the posthuman.Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media is essential reading for scholars working on topics in ethnomusicology, Indigeneity, and media studies while also offering useful resources for Indigenous musicians and activists. The volume provides new perspectives on Indigenous music, refreshes and extends debates about digital culture, and points to how digital media shape what it means to be Indigenous in the twenty-first century.Contributors: Linda Barwick, Beverley Diamond, Thomas R. Hilder, Fiorella Montero-Diaz, John-Carlos Perea, Henry Stobart, Shzr Ee Tan, Russell WallaceThomas R. Hilder is postdoctoral fellow in musicology at the University of Bergen. Henry Stobart is reader in music at Royal Holloway, University of London. Shzr Ee Tan is senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The music of clarinetists Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras is iconic of American klezmer music. Their legacy has had an enduring impact on the development of the popular world music genre.Since the 1970s, klezmer music has become one of the most popular world music genres, at the same time influencing musical styles as diverse as indie rock, avant-garde jazz, and contemporary art music. Klezmer is the celebratory instrumental music that developed in the Jewish communities of eastern Europe over the course of centuries and was performed especially at weddings. Brought to North America in the immigration wave in the late nineteenth century, klezmer thrived and developed in the Yiddish-speaking communities of New York and other cities during the period 1880-1950.No two musicians represent New York klezmer more than clarinetists Naftule Brandwein (1884-1963)and Dave Tarras (1897-1989). Born in eastern Europe to respected klezmer families, both musicians had successful careers as performers and recording artists in New York. Their legacy has had an enduring impact and helped to spurthe revival of klezmer since the 1970s.Using their iconic recordings as a case study, New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century looks at the inner workings of klezmer dance music, from its compositional aspects to the minutiae of style. Making use of historical and ethnographic sources, the book places the music within a larger social and cultural context stretching from eastern Europe of the nineteenth century to the United Statesof the present.JOEL E. RUBIN is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia and an acclaimed performer of traditional klezmer music.

Examines how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble uses musical performance and storytelling to manage, structure, model, and legitimize power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda.Tuning the Kingdom draws on oral and written accounts, archival research, and musical analysis to examine how the Kawuugulu Clan-Royal Musical Ensemble of the Kingdom of Buganda (arguably the kingdom's oldest and longest-surviving performance ensemble) has historically managed, structured, modeled, and legitimized power relations among the Baganda people of south-central Uganda. Damascus Kafumbe argues that the ensemble sustains a complex sociopolitical hierarchy, interweaving and maintaining a delicate balance between kin and clan ties and royal prerogatives through musical performance and storytelling that integrates human and nonhuman stories. He describes this phenomenonas "tuning the kingdom," and he compares it to the process of tensioning or stretching Kiganda drums, which are always moving in and out of tune. Even as Kawuugulu continues to adapt to the rapidly changing world around it, Tuning the Kingdom documents how Kawuugulu has historically articulated and embodied principles of the three inextricably related domains that serve as the backbone of Kiganda politics: kinship, clanship, and kingship.Winner of the 2020 Kwabena Nketia Book Prize of the African and African Diasporic Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology and Honorable Mention for the 2019 Ogot Book Prize of the African Studies AssociationDamascus Kafumbe is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College.

A "contemplative" ethnographic study of a Benedictine monastery in Vermont known for its folk-inspired music.Far from being a long-silent echo of medieval religion, modern monastery music is instead a resounding, living illustration of the role of music in religious life. Benedictine monks gather for communal prayer upwards of five timesper day, every day. Their prayers, called the Divine Office, are almost entirely sung.Benedictines are famous for Gregorian Chant, but the original folk-inspired music of the monks of Weston Priory in Vermont is amongthe most familiar in post-Vatican II American Catholicism. Using the ethnomusicological methods of fieldwork and taking inspiration from the monks' own way of encountering the world, this book offers a contemplative engagement with music, prayer, and everyday life. The rich narrative evokes the rhythms of learning among Benedictines to show how monastic ways of being, knowing, and musicking resonate with humanistic inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge andunderstanding.Maria S. Guarino received her PhD in critical and comparative studies in music from the University of Virginia. She specializes in ethnography, religious life, Benedictine monasticism, and contemplativepractices.Support for this publication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

A "contemplative" ethnographic study of a Benedictine monastery in Vermont known for its folk-inspired music.Far from being a long-silent echo of medieval religion, modern monastery music is instead a resounding, living illustration of the role of music in religious life. Benedictine monks gather for communal prayer upwards of five times per day, every day. Their prayers, called the Divine Office, are almost entirely sung.Benedictines are famous for Gregorian Chant, but the original folk-inspired music of the monks of Weston Priory in Vermont is among the most familiar in post-Vatican II American Catholicism. Using the ethnomusicological methods of fieldwork and taking inspiration from the monks' own way of encountering the world, this book offers a contemplative engagement with music, prayer, and everyday life. The rich narrative evokes the rhythms of learning among Benedictines to show how monastic ways of being, knowing, and musicking resonate with humanistic inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding.Support for this publication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Chronicles the work of Norberto Tavares, a Cabo Verdean musician and humanitarian who served as the conscience of his island nation during the transition from Portuguese colony to democratic republic.Based on twenty years of collaborative fieldwork, Songs for Cabo Verde: Norberto Tavares's Musical Visions for a New Republic focuses on the musician Norberto Tavares but also tells a larger story about postcolonial nation building, musical activism, and diaspora life within the Lusophone sphere. It follows the parallel trajectories of Cabo Verdean independence and Tavares's musical career over four decades (1975-2010). Tavares lived and worked in Cabo Verde, Portugal, and the United States, where he died in New Bedford, Massachusetts at age fifty-four. Tavares's music serves as a lens through which we can view Cabo Verde's transition from a Portuguese colony to an independent, democratic nation, one that was shaped in part through the musician's persistent humanitarian messages.

Examines the history of one of the best known dramatic dance performance practices on Bali and its connection with cultural tourism.The kecak is one of the best-known dramatic dance performance practices on Bali. Based on the ancient Indian Ramayana epic, it is performed by an ensemble of male and female solo dancers and accompanied by a hundred men who function as both musicians and living scenery. Since its creation in the 1930s, the kecak has been primarily a tourist performance. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and meticulous archival study, Kendra Stepputat provides here a comprehensive study of the history, form, and cultural significance of the kecak. The first part of the book focuses on the kecak in its present form, including musical, choreographic, and dramatic elements. The connection between cultural tourism on Bali and kecak performance practice is analyzed in detail, including the dependency between tourism professionals and artists and ways of promoting the kecak. Tourists' perspectives on the kecak are addressed separately. The second part deals with the genesis and development of the kecak from the 1930s onward, exploring how it became and stayed a tourist genre for more than eighty years.

Focusing on runyege, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda.Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender.Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.

WINNER: Society for Ethnomusicology - 2024 Nketia Book PrizeThe first full-length study of the musical pasts of Asafo warrior associations based on the author's "ways of walking" with local scholars along the Ghanaian littoral.What is Asafo ndwom (music)? How and when is it performed? What is the state of this warrrior tradition that once served as the bedrock of the Akan, Ewe, and Ga societies in Ghana? How does Asafo enact the past and serve as an archive for the people? In an attempt to answer these questions, Walking with Asafo in Ghana investigates the musical pasts of Asafo. The book is an ethnography of walking, organized into eight chapters. Each chapter ends with a piece of creative writing in the author's "ethnographic voice," in which she sums up the main ideas. It is Aduonum's attempt at an anticolonial and decolonialist African musicology, one that subverts and decenters white racial framing of research, analysis, and presentation, disrupting how Euro-American concepts frame our ways of telling and experiencing ndwom. Aduonum's goal on this trajectory is to tell her story, create something new, and chart a new path. Through this fluid and complex book, she repositions African Elders' knowledge as "epistemologies of decolonization and de-coloniality" and centers the stories shared by local Fante scholars. The text is polyvocal, multimodal, multiperspective, performative, reflexive, and dialogic, informed by the structure of Asafo ndwom, appellations, proverbs, her mentors' tellings, and "embodied" calling and responding. It is a performative scholarly discourse, ndwom-based: a performance. As a celebration of Asafo, those warriors who insisted their lives matter, the text is meant to be read and performed.This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

A critical interpretation of essential Kiganda royal court songs that examines how the meanings of their lyrics enter into dynamic dialogue with contemporary national politics in Uganda. Lyric interpretation, which Damascus Kafumbe defines as a process of creative renewal that infuses vitality into songs, enables interpreters and analysts to derive a multiplicity of meanings from songs instead of being limited to a single literal narrative. As he and his research collaborators demonstrate, the process extends the life of a song by allowing it to generate new versions, meanings, and relevance. Kafumbe examines how lyric interpretation serves to renew the lives of twenty-one songs from the repertoires of royal court musicians of the Kingdom of Buganda, arguing that the meanings of these songs are not singular, static, and monolithic but rather dynamic and multivalent.Through extensive research within past and present contexts, Kafumbe presents a series of unique perspectives on the ways Kiganda court songs reflect varied kinds of power relations. These meanings, which surface via lyric interpretation, come from daily interactions among citizens and between leaders and subjects. This interpretive process helps illuminate truths and clarify myths about the power dynamics that shape political life in present-day Uganda, highlighting the relevance of court song lyrics to contemporary national contexts. By engaging with the book's wide range of voices, readers will learn to appreciate these songs, their historical and contemporary contexts, and their composer-performers' stories and interpretations more fully.This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Honourable Mention for Society for Ethnomusicology - Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume PrizeOffers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings.Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

Honourable Mention for Society for Ethnomusicology - Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume PrizeOffers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings.Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

Focusing on runyege, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda.Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender.Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.

Illuminates how voice, faith, and hearing become intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and mobility amid the rapidly transforming religious landscape of China's ethnic borderland.The twentieth-century expansion of Protestantism among the upland peoples in the China-Southeast Asia borderlands has catalyzed a profound sociocultural change in the region. In Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland, Ying Diao finds important sonic evidence for this religious revolution in the rapidly transforming region of northwest Yunnan, presenting a compelling account of the region's Christian minority and highlighting the importance of aurality in this group's response to Christianity and other modernizing projects. Diao documents a range of sounded religious practices by the Lisu, an indigenous yet historically migratory people, to examine how participatory music production, circulation, and consumption become integral to indigenous perception and experience of faith.Weaving together evidence from multisite fieldwork, archival records, and audiovisual media, Diao demonstrates a nuanced understanding of people of faith at the margins, one centered on the sensual and material dimensions of religion and on the intertwining of local agency and external hegemonic forces. The resulting book provides historical and contextual information that enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global Christianity while showing how sound can be an ambivalent but fruitful avenue through which ways of faith are constructed in a context where religion remains voiceless.