Audiotopia


Book Description

“With Audiotopia, Kun emerges as a pre-eminent analyst, interpreter, and theorist of inter-ethnic dialogue in US music, literature, and visual art. This book is a guide to how scholarship will look in the future—the first fully realized product of a new generation of scholars thrown forth by tumultuous social ferment and eager to talk about the world that they see emerging around them.”—George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture "The range and depth of Audiotopia is thrilling. It's not only that Josh Kun knows so much-it's that he knows what to make of what he knows."—Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century "The way Josh Kun writes about what he hears, the way he unravels word, sound, and power is breathtaking, provocative, and original. A bold, expansive, and lyrical book, Audiotopia is a record of crossings, textures, tangents, and ideas you will want to play again and again."—Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation




America's Folklorist


Book Description

Folklorist, writer, editor, regionalist, cultural activist—Benjamin Albert Botkin (1901–1975) was an American intellectual who made a mark on the twentieth century, even though most people may be unaware of it. This book, the first to reevaluate the legacy of Botkin in the history of American culture, celebrates his centenary through a collection of writings that assess his influence on scholarship and the American scene. Through his work with the Federal Writers' Project during the New Deal, the Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress Project, and the Archive of American Folksong, Botkin did more to collect and disseminate the nation's folk-cultural heritage than any other individual in the twentieth century. This volume focuses on Botkin's eclectic but interrelated concerns, work, and vision and offers a detailed sense of his life, milieu, influences, and long-term contributions. Just as Botkin boldly cut across the boundaries between high and low, popular and folk, this book brings together reflections that range from the historical to the philosophical to the disarmingly personal. One group of articles looks at his career and includes the first extended analysis of Botkin's poetry; another probes the fruitful relationships Botkin had with leading musicologists, composers, poets, and intellectuals of his day. This is also the first book to bring together a collection of Botkin's best-known writings, giving readers an opportunity to appreciate his wide-ranging mind and clear, often memorable prose. For Botkin, the blurring of art and science, literature and folklore was not just a philosophy but a way of life. This book reflects that life and invites fans and those new to Botkin to appraise his lasting contributions.




Gateways to Understanding Music


Book Description

Gateways to Understanding Music, Second Edition, explores music in all the categories that constitute contemporary musical experience: European classical, popular, jazz, and world music. Covering the oldest forms of human music making to the newest, this chronology presents music from a global rather than a Eurocentric perspective. Each of 60 "gateways" addresses a particular genre, style, or period of music. Every gateway opens with a guided listening example that unlocks a world of music through careful study of its structural elements. How did the piece come to be composed or performed? How did it respond to the social and cultural issues at the time, and what does that music mean today? Students learn to listen to, explain, understand, and ultimately value all the music they encounter in their world. New to this edition is a broader selection of musical examples that reflect the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion advocated by North American universities. Eight gateways have been replaced. A timeline of gateways helps students see the book’s historical narrative at a glance. Features Values orientation—Diverse, equitable, and inclusive approach to music history. All genres of music—Presents all music as worthy of study, including classical, world, popular, and jazz. Global scope within a historical narrative—Begins with small-scale forager societies up to the present, with a shifting focus from global to European to American influences. Recurring themes — Aesthetics, emotion, social life, links to culture, politics, economics, and technology. Modular framework—60 gateways—each with a listening example—allow flexibility to organize chronologically or by the seven themes. Consistent structure—With the same step-by-step format, students learn through repeated practice how to listen and how to think about music. Anthology of scores—For those courses that use the textbook in a music history sequence. Gateways to Understanding Music continues to employ a website to host the audio examples and instructor’s resources.




All Music Guide to the Blues


Book Description

Reviews and rates the best recordings of 8,900 blues artists in all styles.




Swinging the Vernacular


Book Description

This book looks at the influence of jazz on the development of African American modernist literature over the 20th century, with a particular attention to the social and aesthetic significance of stylistic changes in the music.




Black Resonance


Book Description

Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.




The Male Dancer


Book Description

This revised third edition of The Male Dancer updates and enlarges a seminal book that has established itself as the definitive study of the performance of masculinities in twentieth century modernist and contemporary choreography. In this authoritative and lively study, Ramsay Burt presents close readings of dance works from key moments of social and political change in the norms around gender and sexuality. The book’s argument that prejudices against male dancers are rooted in our ideas about the male body and behaviour has been extended to take into account recent interdisciplinary discussions about whiteness, intersectionality, disability studies, and female masculinities. As well as analysing works by canonical figures like Nijinsky, Graham, Cunningham, and Bausch, it also examines the work of lesser-known figures like Michio Ito and Eleo Pomare, as well as choreographers who have recently emerged internationally like Germaine Acogny and Trajal Harrell. The Male Dancer has proven to be essential reading for anyone interested in dance and the cultural representation of gender. By reflecting on the latest studies in theory, performance, and practice, Burt has thoroughly updated this important book to include dance works from the last ten years and has renewed its timeliness for the 2020s.




The Leadbelly Songbook


Book Description

More than 70 songs by Huddie Ledbetter, with chord names and musical transcriptions by Jerry Silverman and biographical notes by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Fred Ramsey, and Charles Smith. Includes: Midnite Special, Backwater Blues, John Henry, and House Of The Rising Sun.




Double-take


Book Description

In this important new anthology. Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey bring together a comprehensive scicction of texts from the Harlem Renalssance a key period in the literary and cultural history of the cultural life of the United States. The collection revolutionizes our way of viewing this era, as it redresses the ongoing emphasis on the male writers of this time. Double.Take offers a unique, balanced collection of writers - men and women, gay and straight, familiar and obscure. The editors have also included works from a wide variety of genres poetry, short stories, drama, essays, music, and art - allowing readers to understand the true interdisciplinary quality of this cultural movement. Biographical sketches of the authors are provided and most of the places are included in their entirely. Double.Take also includes artwork and illustrations, many of which are from periodicals and have never before been reprinted. Significantly, Double-Take is the first book to include music lyrics to illustrate the interrelation of various art forms. Arranged by author, rather than by genre, this anthology includes works from major Harlem Renaissance figures as well as often-overlooked essay




Poetry and Narrative in Performance


Book Description

This text uses machine data of poetry readings to discover features of rhythm and intonation and to clear away methodological problems that hamper the teaching of poetic melody. The discussion is linked to the theory of literary form, throwing light on the role of emotion in poetry and fiction.




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