Tag Archive for Music

Announcing “Genre Publics” by Emma Baulch

by sbazarian • December 8, 2020

“A fine-grained analysis of the prominent role of Indonesian Rock and Pop in the social and political transformations that have defined the nation’s post-authoritarian trajectory. Baulch’s wonderful book has much to teach us about the political life of popular music in the age of the consumer citizen.” —Charles Hirschkind, associate professor of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

In the late 1990s sales of Indonesian pop artists’ recordings overtook sales of those issuing from the US and Europe. Media scholar Emma Baulch traces the institutional and technological conditions that enabled this local music boom, providing an historical account of media changes from 1965 to the present and arguing for its formative role in social and political change. Drawing on industry data and interviews, Genre Publics: Popular Music, Technologies, and Class in Indonesia delineates a cultural history showing how new notions of ‘the local’ were produced in context of the boom and enquires into their links with the expansion of consumerism in Asia, as well as with a more specific context of Indonesian democratization. Baulch focuses on the evolution of popular music genres in the boom to explore how this music helped reshape distinct Indonesian senses of the modern, especially as ‘Asia’ plays an ever more influential role in defining what it means to be modern.

The book also explores the unfolding of consumer capitalism in Indonesia, and of the particular kinds of class politics it engenders. It chronicles the important role popular music genres play in contests along class lines over preferred meanings of ‘the local’ at moments of political transition and rapid social change. The genre publics theory links class formation to popular music in a way that provides a fresh perspective on the role popular music plays in social and political change. It is the only book to consider the role consumerist ideologies are playing in the formation of political subjectivity in Indonesia.

EMMA BAULCH is associate professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University in Malaysia. She is the author of Making Scenes: Reggae, Death Metal and Punk in 1990s’ and co-author of Poverty and Digital Inclusion.

Wesleyan University Press’ Antiracist Reading Lists!

by mkolson • August 18, 2020

To celebrate the continuous struggle for freedom and equality in America, Wesleyan University Press has compiled a few antiracist reading lists in order to amplify BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices, experiences, and histories. Below are just a few of the fantastic titles Wesleyan University Press has published by BIPOC authors or about the Black historical legacy. Poetry, music and dance, autobiography, science fiction, historical novels, and more show the breadth of these lyrical, literary, and scholarly contributions. We are dedicated to supporting Black authors and stories, to listening and learning through publishing and reading. This moment is highlighting just how much work there is to be done in order to dismantle systemic racism in our country; these books help show us why that work is so important and how we can begin to integrate it into our daily lives and reading practices. Black lives matter!

To order books and view our full list of titles, please visit https://www.hfsbooks.com/publishers/wesleyan-university-press/ or click on the below cover images to visit a book page directly. And don’t forget to look out for Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times edited by Christina Baade and Kristin McGee– forthcoming in Spring 2021!

The following list includes poetry, science fiction, historical novels, and non-fiction.

A Hubert Harrison Reader

Five Black Lives

African American Connecticut Explored

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof

The Little Edges by Fred Moten	The Book of Landings by Mark McMorris	Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
Un-American by Hafizah Geter	The Lazarus Poems by Kamau Brathwaite	Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa
The Peacock Poems by Sherley Anne Williams	semiautomatic by Evie Shockley	In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
To See the Earth Before the End of the World by Ed Roberson	Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha by Ananya Chatterjea	Trophic Cascade by Camille T. Dungy
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers	Fela: Kalakuta Notes by John Collins	The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas
Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae by Michael E. Veal	Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle by Gina Athena Ulysse	Come home Charley Patton by Ralph Lemon
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America by Tricia Rose	The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory by Anne Farrow	The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany
How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy	Blue Ravens by Gerald Vizenor	In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo

Announcing “Haunthenticity” — Preorder Now!

by jhumphrey • April 4, 2019

An interdisciplinary and existential exploration of live musical reenactment

“With Haunthenticity, Tracy McMullen challenges us to re-examine what we think we know about musical and cultural re-enactment, objectivity ad subjectivity, live performance, and the very nature of our collective yearning for the past. An essential read for anyone interested in contemporary music and performance.”
-Philip Auslander, author of Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation

In this persuasive study, Tracy McMullen draws on philosophy, psychology, musicology, performance studies, and popular music studies in order to analyze the rise of obsessively precise live musical reenactments in the United States at the turn of the millennium. She investigates these reenactments in popular music, jazz, and performance art, and shows how they claim a type of authenticity that is grounded in the exact material details of the original (instruments, props, costumes, people). Haunthenticity ultimately argues for a new way of conceiving subjectivity and identity within critical and cultural studies.

Tracy McMullen is a saxophonist, composer, and associate professor of American vernacular music at Bowdoin College.

July 2, 2019
256 pp., 9 x 6″
Paperback, $24.95 9780819578532
Unjacketed Cloth, $80.00 9780819578525

Announcing “Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America”

by jgagne • February 4, 2019

Revisioning Indigenous musicology

“This volume provides an exciting collection of diverse, multigenerational Indigenous and settler perspectives on Indigenous musical modernities. Case studies considering multiple topics and genres are thoughtfully interwoven to provide models for continuing the much-needed work of decolonizing Native North American ethnomusicology.”
— Charlotte Frisbie, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States explore topics that range from powwow, Native Classical, and hip-hop to television soundtracks and experimental music in Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America. Working from the premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music.

Contributors:
Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk
Victoria Lindsay Levine
Gordon E. Smith
Anna Hoefnagels
Christina Leza
Elyse Carter Vosen
T. Christopher Aplin
John-Carlos Perea
Byron Dueck
Jessica Bissett Perea
Dawn Avery
Dylan Robinson
Beverley Diamond
Trevor Reed

About the Editors
Victoria Lindsay Levine is professor of music at Colorado College and is the author of Writing American Indian Music, coauthor of Choctaw Music and Dance, and co-editor of This Thing Called Music. Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō) is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University and is the co-editor of Opera Indigene and Arts of Engagement.

February 5, 2019
360 pp. 6 x 9”
Paper $26.95, 978-0-8195-7863-1
Unjacketed Cloth $85.00, 978-0-8195-7862-4

Announcing “Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form” by Katherine In-Young Lee

by sshehreen • October 2, 2018

South Korean percussion genre samul nori goes global

“This book is a timely and sorely needed contribution to ongoing intellectual debates within ethnomusicology and world music studies. Lee’s investment in musical form as both a physical force and explanatory object reveals processes and motivations not solely accessible by so-called “cultural” or “extra”-musical explanations.”— Nathan Hesselink, professor of Ethnomusicology, University of British Columbia

The South Korean percussion genre, samul nori, is a world phenomenon whose rhythmic form is the key to its popularity and mobility. Based on both ethnographic research and close formal analysis, author Katherine In-Young Lee focuses on the kinetic experience of samul nori in Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form, drawing out the concept of dynamism to show its historical, philosophical, and pedagogical dimensions. Breaking with traditional approaches to the study of world music that privilege political, economic, institutional, or ideological analytical frameworks, Lee argues that because rhythmic forms are experienced on a somatic level, they swiftly move beyond national boundaries and provide sites for cross-cultural interaction.

Katherine In-Young Lee is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2012. Her work has appeared in Journal of Korean Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Journal of Korean Traditional Performing Arts.

200 pp., 31 illus., 6 x 9”
Paper, $24.95
978-0-8195-7706-1
Unjacketed Hardcover, $80.00
978-0-8195-7705-4
Ebook, $19.99
978-0-8195-7707-8

An inside view of experimental music, with Alvin Lucier

by sgerton • October 8, 2014

Alvin Lucier’s Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music. is now available in paperback!

Lucier’s new CD was recently reviewed by Robert Carl for Fanfare Magazine. Carl wrote: “Lucier has fruitfully pursued his passion for a uniquely personal form of research and experiment over the decades. He could have been a ‘one-hit wonder,’ but definitely was (and is) not. This is another I’d love for the Want List, though by now the waiting room is getting crowded. Highly recommended, and even those who think they won’t like it should confront this. It’s bracing, and one hears everything differently, and fresher, afterwards.”

Composer and performer Alvin Lucier brings clarity to the world of experimental music as he takes the reader through more than a hundred groundbreaking musical works, including those of Robert Ashley, John Cage, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Lucier explains in detail how each piece is made, unlocking secrets of the composers’ style and technique. The book as a whole charts the progress of American experimental music from the 1950s to the present, covering such topics as indeterminacy, electronics, and minimalism, as well as radical innovations in music for the piano, string quartet, and opera. Clear, approachable and lively, Music 109 is Lucier’s indispensable guide to late 20th-century composition. No previous musical knowledge is required, and all readers are welcome.

For more details, click here.

Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

This project is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.