Folk Music, Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology


Book Description

Folk Music, Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology: Canadian Perspectives, Past and Present features the proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music / La Société Canadienne pour les Traditions Musicales (formerly the Canadian Folk Music Society / La Société canadienne de musique folklorique) that took place in November, 2006 in Ottawa at Carleton University and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. This publication showcases the diversity of music research currently being conducted by folk and traditional music specialists, ethnomusicologists, and practicing musicians in Canada. The papers are organized in five sections according to common themes in contemporary research in ethnomusicology and folk music studies, and each section is preceded by a short introduction which highlights the section’s theme(s) as well as the individual papers. Folk Music, Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology: Canadian Perspectives, Past and Present confirms the rich history of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music, a history that comprises enormous changes in scholarly research, musical practice, emergent technologies, changes in doing fieldwork, and shifting identity boundaries over the past fifty years. This volume is intended as a contribution to published literature on ethnomusicological and folklore research in Canada, creating a new resource of historical, contemporary, and scholarly relevance that will appeal to academics and music enthusiasts alike. "Canadian ethnomusicologists' expertise in the realm of First Nations musics, and Anglo, Celtic and French folksong repertories is already well established. This volume shows us the breadth of cultural territory with which 21st-century Canadian scholars of music and scholars of Canadian musics are now engaged, as well as their theoretical and methodological sophistication. " —Kati Szego, School of Music, Memorial University




Electric Folk


Book Description

In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of British musicians rediscovered traditional folk ballads, fusing the old melodies with rock, jazz, and blues styles to create a new genre dubbed "electric folk" or "British folk rock." This revival featured groups such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle and individual performers like Shirley & Dolly Collins, and Richard Thompson. While making music in multiple styles, they had one thing in common: they were all based on traditional English song and dance material. These new arrangements of an old repertoire created a unique musical voice within the popular mainstream. After reasonable commercial success, peaking with Steeleye Span's Top 10 album All Around My Hat, Electric Folk disappeared from mainstream notice in the late 1970s, yet performers continue to create today. In Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music, Britta Sweers provides an illuminating history and fascinating analysis of the unique features of the electric folk scene, exploring its musical styles and cultural implications. Drawing on rare historical sources, contemporary music journalism, and first-hand interviews with several of electric folk's most prominent artists, Sweers argues that electric folk is both a result of the American folk revival of the early 1960s and a reaction against the dominance of American pop music abroad. Young British "folk-rockers," such as Richard Thompson and Maddy Prior, turned to traditional musical material as a means of asserting their British cultural identity. Yet, unlike many American and British folk revivalists, they were not as interested in the "purity" of folk ballads as in the music's potential for lively interaction with modern styles, instruments, and media. The book also delves into the impact of the British folk rock movement on mainstream pop, American rock music, and neighboring European countries. Ultimately, Sweers creates a richly detailed portrait of the electric folk scene--as cultural phenomenon, commercial entity, and performance style.




Ilmatar's Inspirations


Book Description

Ilmatar gave birth to the bard who sang the Finnish landscape into being in the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic). In Ilmatar's Inspirations, Tina K. Ramnarine explores creative processes and the critical role that music has played in Finnish nationalism by focusing on Finnish "new folk music" in the shifting spaces between the national imagination and the global marketplace. Through extensive interviews and observations of performances, Ramnarine reveals how new folk musicians think and talk about past and present folk music practices, the role of folk music in the representation of national identity, and the interactions of Finnish folk musicians with performers from around the globe. She focuses especially on two internationally successful groups—JPP, a group that plays fiddle dance music, and Värttinä, an ensemble that highlights women's vocal traditions. Analyzing the multilayered processes—musical, institutional, political, and commercial—that have shaped and are shaped by new folk music in Finland, Ramnarine gives us an entirely new understanding of the connections between music, place, and identity.




May It Fill Your Soul


Book Description

In this vivid musical ethnography, Timothy Rice documents and interprets the history of folk music, song, and dance in Bulgaria over a seventy-year period of dramatic change. From 1920 to 1989, Bulgaria changed from a nearly medieval village society to a Stalinist planned industrial economy to a chaotic mix of capitalist and socialist markets and cultures. In the context of this history, Rice brings Bulgarian folk music to life by focusing on the biography of the Varimezov family, including the musician Kostadin and his wife Todora, a singer. Combining interviews with his own experiences of learning how to play, sing and dance Bulgarian folk music, Rice presents one of the most detailed accounts of traditional, aural learning processes in the ethnomusicological literature. Using a combination of traditionally dichotomous musicological and ethnographic approaches, Rice tells the story of how individual musicians learned their tradition, how they lived it during the pre-Communist era of family farming, how the tradition changed with industrialization brought under Communism, and finally, how it flourished and evolved in the recent, unstable political climate. This work—complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples—contributes not only to ethnomusicological theory and method, but also to our understanding of Slavic folklore, Eastern European anthropology, and cultural processes in Socialist states.




Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Explaining that musicality is an essential touchstone of the human experience, a concise introduction to the study of the nature of music, its community and its cultural values explains the diverse work of today's ethnomusicologists and how researchers apply anthropological and other social disciplines to studies of human and cultural behaviors. Original.




A History of European Folk Music


Book Description

The aim of this study is to increase understanding of folk music within an historical, European framework, and to show the genre as a dynamic and changing art form. The book addresses a plethora of questions through its detailed examination of a wide range of music from vastly different national and cultural identities. It attempts to elucidate the connections between, and the varying development of, the music of peoples throughout Europe, firstly by examining the ways in which scholars of different ideological and artistic ambitions have collected, studied and performed folk music, then by investigating the relationship between folk and popular music. Jan Ling is Professor of Musicology at Göteborg University, Sweden.




Turning the Tune


Book Description

The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested in experiencing traditional music. He begins by tracing its historical development from the days prior to the influx of visitors, through a period called "the Revival," in which traditional Irish music was revitalized and transformed, to the modern period, which is dominated by tourism. A large number of incomers, locally known as "blow-ins," have moved to the area, and the traditional Irish music is now largely performed and passed on by them. This fine-grained ethnographic study explores the commercialization of music and culture, the touristic consolidation and consumption of "place," and offers a critique of the trope of "authenticity," all in a setting of dramatic social change in which the movement of people is constant.




How Musical is Man?


Book Description

This important study in ethnomusicology is an attempt by the author -- a musician who has become a social anthropologist -- to compare his experiences of music-making in different cultures. He is here presenting new information resulting from his research into African music, especially among the Venda. Venda music, he discovered is in its way no less complex in structure than European music. Literacy and the invention of nation may generate extended musical structures, but they express differences of degree, and not the difference in kind that is implied by the distinction between 'art' and 'folk' music. Many, if not all, of music's essential processes may be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in society. Thus all music is structurally, as well as functionally, 'folk' music in the sense that music cannot be transmitted of have meaning without associations between people. If John Blacking's guess about the biological and social origins of music is correct, or even only partly correct, it would generate new ideas about the nature of musicality, the role of music in education and its general role in societies which (like the Venda in the context of their traditional economy) will have more leisure time as automation increases.




The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival


Book Description

Why is music from the past significant today and how has it been transformed to suit new values and agendas? This volume examines the globally recurrent cultural processes of revival, resurgence, restoration, and renewal. Interdisciplinary perspectives shed new light on authenticity, recontextualization, transmission, institutionalization, globalization, and post-revival legacies.







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