Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic


Book Description

"An ethnographic study of the emergence of a pan-ethnic style of music in Israel between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s. This two-decade period encompasses the coming of age of the Middle Eastern and North African creators of the grassroots music network in the 1970s and the sea change in the music's reception by mainstream Israeli society in the 1990s.




The Mediterranean in Music


Book Description

Politically and historically, the Mediterranean has been a space for critical dialogue for competing and often antagonistic voices, and still functions as meeting place for diverse and interdisciplinary approaches. Although other academic disciplines have attempted a unified approach to Mediterranean studies, until recently Mediterranean music as a singular concept has received relatively little scholarly development. This volume is a crucial first step and investigates several musical cultures that have traditionally demonstrated common threads, trends, and interactions. The music of Greece, Crete, Turkey, Albania, Corsica, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Palestine are all considered in this volume as the scholars represented here reveal the musical commonality among otherwise divergent traditions. Unnecessary technical jargon is avoided, and an interdisciplinary approach embracing ethnology and material culture considerations makes this volume relevant not only to musicologists and anthropologists, but likewise to the general reader interested in tourism.




The Mediterranean World


Book Description

A history of this hub of culture and commerce: “Enviable readability . . . an excellent classroom text.” —European History Quarterly Located at the intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Mediterranean has connected societies for millennia, creating a shared space of intense economic, cultural, and political interaction. Greek temples in Sicily, Roman ruins in North Africa, and Ottoman fortifications in Greece serve as reminders that the Mediterranean has no fixed national boundaries or stable ethnic and religious identities. In The Mediterranean World, Monique O’Connell and Eric R. Dursteler examine the history of this contested region from the medieval to the early modern era, beginning with the fall of Rome around 500 CE and closing with Napoleon’s attempted conquest of Egypt in 1798. Arguing convincingly that the Mediterranean should be studied as a singular unit, the authors explore the centuries when no lone power dominated the Mediterranean Sea and invaders brought their own unique languages and cultures to the region. Structured around four interlocking themes—mobility, state development, commerce, and frontiers—this book, including maps, photos, and illustrations, brings new dimensions to the concepts of Mediterranean nationality and identity.




World Music


Book Description

From folk music to worldbeat, world music holds the power to evoke the exotic and give voice to the voiceless. This new edition shows how dramatic political changes are affecting the ways in which people produce and listen to world music, and addresses how new technologies and the internet alter the way we disseminate and listen to it.




Performing al-Andalus


Book Description

Performing al-Andalus explores three musical cultures that claim a connection to the music of medieval Iberia, the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus, known for its complex mix of Arab, North African, Christian, and Jewish influences. Jonathan Holt Shannon shows that the idea of a shared Andalusian heritage animates performers and aficionados in modern-day Syria, Morocco, and Spain, but with varying and sometimes contradictory meanings in different social and political contexts. As he traces the movements of musicians, songs, histories, and memories circulating around the Mediterranean, he argues that attention to such flows offers new insights into the complexities of culture and the nuances of selfhood.




The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music


Book Description

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music is a ten-volume reference work, organized geographically by continent to represent the musics of the world in nine volumes. The tenth volume houses reference tools and descriptive information about the encyclopedia’s structure, criteria for inclusion and other information specific to the field of ethnomusicology. An award-winning reference, its contributions are from top researchers around the world who were active in fieldwork and from key institutions with programs in ethnomusicology. GEWM has become a familiar acronym, and it remains highly revered for its scholarship, uncontested in being the sole encompassing reference work with a broad survey of world music. More than 9,000 pages, with musical illustrations, photographs and drawings, it is accompanied by 300+ audio examples.




The Sea in the Middle


Book Description

The Sea in the Middle presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration. Key features: Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today.




Musicians and their Audiences


Book Description

How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.




The Black Mediterranean


Book Description

This edited volume aims to problematise and rethink the contemporary European migrant crisis in the Central Mediterranean through the lens of the Black Mediterranean. Bringing together scholars working in geography, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies, this volume takes the Black Mediterranean as a starting point for asking and answering a set of crucial questions about the racialized production of borders, bodies, and citizenship in contemporary Europe: what is the role of borders in controlling migrant flows from North Africa and the Middle East?; what is the place for black bodies in the Central Mediterranean context?; what is the relevance of the citizenship in reconsidering black subjectivities in Europe? The volume will be divided into three parts. After the introduction, which will provide an overview of the theoretical framework and the individual contributions, Part I focuses on the problem of borders, Part II features essays focused on the body, and Part III is dedicated to citizenship.




Rebetiko Worlds


Book Description

Rebetiko Worlds invites the reader to share the experience of rebetiko music-making in the city of Thessaloniki today. It aims at representing an ethnographic world made of diverse realities united by the melancholic sounds of rebetiko songs. Rather than a musicological account on rebetiko music, this ethnography is about the human encounters happening in certain rebetiko venues of the Ano Poli area in Thessaloniki. How do people perceive, practice, feel and imagine rebetiko song—a music tradition coming from the beginning of the 20th century—today? What are the worldviews embodied and inspired in the context of the ongoing rebetiko performances? And, how may the exploration of rebetiko revivalist culture convey understandings of broader music-cultural orientations defining contemporary Greek society? This ethnography is primarily interested in knowing contemporary rebetiko culture as a ‘lived experience’. It captures instances of the life-worlds of the people involved in the rebetiko revival, which unravel the ways local traditions are re-defined in the context of the nostalgic re-invention of ‘ethnic’ music in postcolonial times. On this level, the representation of the discourses and aesthetics associated with rebetiko performances today instigate further interpretations of local cultural trends, the visions of ‘our’ future triggered by the mythicized representations of ‘our’ past. Beyond a window to the rebetiko worlds of today, this book recounts the story of an ethnographer engaged in fieldwork ‘at home’. It aims at communicating the dynamics of reflexivity shaping the ethnographic self by proposing an understanding of the fieldwork experience as a ‘special ontology’. In this way, it reveals the various dilemmas, moments of enthusiasm and moments of despair lived in the process of research in an attempt to illuminate the poetics of the subjective cultural knowledge. Rebetiko Worlds incites the reader to share the poetics of ethnographic ‘fiction’ and interpretation and, through this, the gradual ‘making’ of the ethnomusicologist in the field.