Carnival Music in Trinidad


Book Description

'Music in Trinidad: Carnival', appropriate for use in undergraduate, introductory courses on world music or ethnomusicology, describes the musical conventions, modes of performance, and social dynamics of Trinidadian music, placing the music of Carnival within the context of Trinidad's rich history and culture.




Trinidad Carnival


Book Description

Like many Caribbean nations, Trinidad has felt the effects of globalization on its economy, politics, and expressive culture. Even Carnival, once a clandestine folk celebration, has been transformed into a major transnational festival. In Trinidad Carnival, Garth L. Green, Philip W. Scher, and an international group of scholars explore Carnival as a reflection of the nation and culture of Trinidad and Trinidadians worldwide. The nine essays cover topics such as women in Carnival, the politics and poetics of Carnival, Carnival and cultural memory, Carnival as a tourist enterprise, the steelband music of Carnival, Calypso music on the world stage, Carnival and rap, and Carnival as a global celebration. For readers interested in the history and current expression of Carnival, this volume offers a multidimensional and transnational view of Carnival as a representation of Trinidad and Caribbean culture everywhere. Contributors are Robin Balliger, Shannon Dudley, Pamela R. Franco, Patricia A. de Freitas, Ray Funk, Garth L. Green, Donald R. Hill, Lyndon Phillip, Victoria Razak, and Philip W. Scher.




Calypso Calaloo


Book Description

Classic calypso, one of the greatest creations of Caribbean culture, is more than the frivolous music played for tourists in pink hotels overlooking tropical beaches. Much traditional calypso is also social commentary and has reflected, sometimes not so subtly, Trinidad's difficult social and political evolution.




Governing Sound


Book Description

Written in two parts, part 1 explores the development of Calypso, from it's emergence in the pre-colonial period to the post colonial period. In part 2, the focus is on the new Carnival musical practices of soca, rapso, chutney, soca and ragga soca, and the ways in which they contirbuted to the redefination of Trinidadian cultural politics in the neoliberal era. The new rationailities, contigencies, desires and musical experments that animated the new musics and enabled them to gradually displace calypso from its centrality as national expression is examined.




Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso


Book Description

Starting from the days of slavery and following through to the first decades of the twentieth century, this book traces the evolution of Carnival and secular black music in Trinidad and the links that existed with other territories and beyond. Calypso emerged as the pre-eminent Carnival song from the end of the nineteenth century and its association with the festival is investigated, as are the first commercial recordings by Trinidad performers. These featured stringband instrumentals, 'calipsos' and stickfighting 'kalendas' (a carnival style popular from the last quarter of the nineteenth century). The emphasis of the book is on history, and great use is made of contemporary newspaper reports. colonial documents, travelogues, oral history and folklore, providing an authoritative treatment of a fascinating story in popular cultural history.




What She Go Do


Book Description

In the 1990s, expressive culture in the Caribbean was becoming noticeably more feminine. At the annual Carnival of Trinidad and Tobago, thousands of female masqueraders dominated the street festival on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. Women had become significant contributors to the performance of calypso and soca, as well as the musical development of the steel pan art form. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Trinidad and Tobago, What She Go Do demonstrates how the increased access and agency of women through folk and popular musical expressions has improved intergender relations and representation of gender in this nation. This is the first study to integrate all of the popular music expressions associated with Carnival—calypso, soca, and steelband music—within a single volume. The book includes interviews with popular musicians and detailed observation of musical performances, rehearsals, and recording sessions, as well as analysis of reception and use of popular music through informal exchanges with audiences. The popular music of the Caribbean contains elaborate forms of social commentary that allows singers to address various sociopolitical problems, including those that directly affect the lives of women. In general, the cultural environment of Trinidad and Tobago has made women more visible and audible than any previous time in its history. This book examines how these circumstances came to be and what it means for the future development of music in the region.




Jump Up!


Book Description

Jump Up Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York's diasporic communities and the Caribbean.




Music from Behind the Bridge


Book Description

'Music from behind the Bridge' tells the story of the steelband a symbol of Trinidadian culture, from the point of view of musicians who overcame disadvantages of poverty and prejudice with their extraordinary ambition.




Carnival


Book Description

This beautifully illustrated volume features work by leading writers and experts on carnival from around the world, and includes two stunning photo essays by acclaimed photographers Pablo Delano and Jeffrey Chock. Editor Milla Cozart Riggio presents a body of work that takes the reader on a fascinating journey exploring the various aspects of carnival - its traditions, its history, its music, its politics - and prefaces each section with an illuminating essay. Traditional carnival theory, based mainly on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner, has long defined carnival as inversive or subversive. The essays in this groundbreaking anthology collectively reverse that trend, offering a re-definition of 'carnival' that focuses not on the hierarchy it temporarily displaces or negates, but a one that is rooted in the actual festival event. Carnival details its new theory in terms of a carnival that is at once representative and distinctive: The Carnival of Trinidad - the most copied yet least studied major carnival in the world.




Jump Up Time


Book Description

Although she is jealous of all the attention being paid to her older sister's Carnival costume, Lily helps Christine when she gets nervous before time to go on stage.