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Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts

Edited by Gordon E. Smith & Robin Elliott
Subjects Indigenous Studies, Ethnography, Music
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Paperback : 9781554581771, 366 pages, April 2010
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781554582761, 366 pages, April 2010

Table of contents

Table of Contents for
Music Traditions: Cultures & Contexts, edited by Robin Elliott and Gordon E. Smith
List of Illustrations
List of Music Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Beverley Diamond: Life Stories, Academic Directions and Teaching, Research, and Scholarly Activity | Robin Elliott and Gordon E. Smith
2. Conservations with Clifford Crawley | Beverley Diamond
3. Ethnomusicology Critiques Itself: Comments on the History of a Tradition | Bruno Nettl
4. Is Fieldwork Still Necessary? | Ellen Koskoff
5. Toward a History of Ethnomusicology’s North Americanist Agenda | Kay Kaufman Shelemay
6. Encountering Oral Performance as Total Musical Fact | Regula Burckhardt Qureshi
7. You Also Work as a Church Organist? Whatever For? | Charlotte J. Frisbie
8. The Politics of Organology and the Nova Scotia Banjo: An Essay in Honour of Beverley Diamond | Neil V. Rosenberg
9. Strategies of Survival: Traditional Music, Politics, and Music Education among Two Minorities of Finland | Pirkko Moisala
10. Father of Romance, Vagabond of Glory: Two Canadian Composers as Stage Heroes | John Beckwith
11. Funk and James Brown, Re-Africanization, the Interlocked Groove, and the Articulation of Community | Rob Bowman
12. On the One: Parliament/Funkadelic, the Mothership, and Transformation | Rob Bowman
13. Politics through Pleasure: Party Music in Trinidad | Jocelyne Guilbault
14. A Festschrift for the Twenty-First Century: Student Voices | Kip Pegley and Virginia Caputo
Appendix: Beverley Diamond—Publications and Lectures
Contributors
Index
Contributors’ Biographies
John Beckwith, composer, writer, and professor emeritus, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, was one of Beverley Diamond’s teachers at the University of Toronto. His Arctic Dances for oboe and piano (1984) are based on her transcriptions of Inuit dance-songs. Recent works include A New Pibroch for Highland pipes, strings, and percussion (2003); Fractions for microtonal piano and string quartet (2006); and Beckett Songs for baritone and guitar (2008). A CD of selected vocal works, Avowals, appeared in 2007 from Centrediscs. Beckwith is the author of Music Papers: Articles and Talks by a Canadian Composer, 1961–1994 (1997), and In Search of Alberto Guerrero (2006). Talks given at a symposium in Toronto in 2007 marking his eightieth birthday appear in the ICM Newsletter 5, no. 3 (September 2007).
Rob Bowman has been writing professionally about rhythm and blues, rock, country, jazz, and gospel for over a quarter century. Nominated for five Grammy Awards, in 1996 Bowman won the Grammy in the “Best Album Notes” category for a 47,000-word monograph he penned to accompany a 10-CD box set that he also co-produced, The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles Volume 3: 1972–1975 (Fantasy Records). He is also the author of Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (Schirmer Books), winner of the 1998 ASCAP-Deems Taylor and ARSC Awards for Excellence in Music Research. On top of his popular press and liner note work, Bowman played a seminal role in the founding and creation of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (opened in Memphis in 2003), wrote the four-part television documentary series The Industry, and has helped pioneer the study and teaching of popular music in the world of academia. He is a tenured professor at York University in Toronto, and regularly lectures on popular music around the world.
Virginia Caputo received her Ph.D. from the Department of Social Anthropology at York University in 1996, holding a SSHRCC doctoral fellowship. She is associate professor and director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University where she has taught since 1997. An ethnomusicologist and social anthropologist, Virginia’s research lies at the intersection of feminism, anthropology, and child/girlhood research. Her work addresses theoretical and methodological approaches to research with children with a specific interest in children as social actors. Her research has included work on children’s experiences in schools, gender issues in music, children’s oral traditions, young women and technology, and third wave feminism.
Beverley Diamond, FRSC, is Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music and Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Music traditions, cultures, and contexts is a tribute to her outstanding scholarly contributions, which are discussed, along with her life and various aspects of her career, in Chapter 1 of this book.
Robin Elliott studied Canadian music with Beverley Diamond as an undergraduate student at Queen’s University. He is professor of musicology in the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, where he holds the Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian music, is the director of the Institute for Canadian Music, and is associate dean, undergraduate education. He has co-edited Istvan Anhalt: Pathways and memory (2001), Music and literature in German romanticism (2004), and Centre and periphery, roots and exile: Interpreting the music of Istvan Anhalt and György Kurtág (forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press). He is a senior fellow at Massey College.
Charlotte J. Frisbie is professor emerita of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville (SIUE). A former president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and co-founder, in 1982, of the Navajo Studies Conference, Inc., she continues both anthropological and ethnomusicological research. At present, her Navajo work focuses on ethnohistory, historic preservation and restoration, traditional foods and their preparation, traditional indigenous knowledge, repatriation and other responses to NAGPRA, and autobiographies. Other continuing interests include indigenous peoples of North America, gender studies, ritual drama, language and culture, Native American hymnody, action anthropology, collaborative/reciprocal ethnography, history of SEM and its early women, and the history of the Quercus Grove southern Illinois farming community where she and her family live. A music major in college years ago, Charlotte also maintains a lively interest in church music and performs it as a bell-ringer and an organist.
Jocelyne Guilbault is professor of ethnomusicology in the Music Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1980, she has done extensive fieldwork in the French Creole- and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean on both traditional and popular music. She has published articles on ethnographic writings, aesthetics, the cultural politics of Western Indian music industries, and world music. She is the author of Zouk: World music in the West Indies (1993) and the co-editor of Border crossings: New direction in music studies (1999–2000). Her recent book, Governing sound: The cultural politics of Trinidad’s Carnival musics (2007), explores the ways the calypso music scene became audibly entangled with projects of governing, audience demands, and market incentives.
Ellen Koskoff is professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and director of the Eastman School’s ethnomusicology programs as well as its Balinese gamelan angklung. She has published widely on Jewish music and on gender and music, and is the editor of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1987) and the author of Music in Lubavitcher Life (2000), which won the 2002 ASCAP Deems-Taylor award. Koskoff is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and is the general editor of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3, “The United States and Canada.” She is also the general editor of the University of Rochester Press’s Eastman/ Rochester Studies in Ethnomusicology Series and a former president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Pirkko Moisala is the professor of ethnomusicology at Helsinki University. Currently she is the president of Finland’s Society for Ethnomusicology. From 1993 to 2000 she was the co-chair of the Music and Gender Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music. Her research embraces the cultural study of all kinds of music, with particular specializations in Nepal and Finland. She co-edited Music and gender (2000) with Beverley Diamond, and is the author of Cultural cognition in music: Continuity and change in the Gurung music of Nepal (1991), the coauthor of Gender and qualitative methods (2003), and the author of Kaija Saariaho (2009).
Bruno Nettl was born in Prague, received his Ph.D. at Indiana University, and spent most of his career teaching at the University of Illinois, where he is now professor emeritus of music and anthropology. His main research interests are ethnomusicological theory and method, music of Native American cultures, and music of the Middle East, especially Iran. He has been concerned in recent years with the study of improvisatory musics, and with the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Among his books, the most recent are The study of ethnomusicology (1983), which, after over twenty years, appeared in a revised edition in 2005; and Encounters in ethnomusicology (2002), a professional memoir. He has served as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and in 2002 completed a second term as editor of its journal, Ethnomusicology.
Kip Pegley is an associate professor in the School of Music at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, with cross-appointments to the Department of Film and Media, and the Department of Women’s Studies. Her recent book, Coming to you wherever you are: MuchMusic, MTV, and youth identities, was published with Wesleyan University Press in 2008. She is currently co-editing (with Susan Fast, McMaster University) a volume of essays entitled Music, violence and geopolitics, which explores the role of music in geopolitical conflicts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including wars, revolutions, protests, genocides, and the post-9/11 “war on terror.”
Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, FRSC, is professor of music and director of the Folkways Alive Project, as well as founder and director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta. She has a special interest in ethnography, documentation, and collaborative research as well as music-making. Her publications focus on music as a social, cultural, and spiritual practice. A cellist and sarangi player, her numerous publications include Sufi music in India and Pakistan: Sound, context, and meaning in Qawwali (1986); Music and Marx: Ideas, practice, politics (2002); and Master musicians of India: Hindustani musicians speak (2007); she also co-edited Muslim society in North America (1983) and Muslim families in North America (1991).
Neil V. Rosenberg is professor emeritus at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he taught in the Department of Folklore from 1968 to 2004. A fellow of the American Folklore Society and recipient of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada’s Marius Barbeau Award for lifetime achievement, he has published extensively on Canadian and American folk music topics. His books include Bluegrass: A history (2005) and Transforming tradition: Folk music revivals examined (1993). He has been playing the banjo since 1959.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, the G. Gordon Watts professor of music and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, has carried out fieldwork in Africa (Ethiopia and Ghana), the Middle East (Israel), and the United States. A former president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and a member of the Board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Shelemay’s most recent books include the textbook Soundscapes: Exploring music in a changing world (2nd ed., 2006), and Pain and its transformations: The interface of biology and culture (2007), co-edited with Sarah Coakley. Shelemay has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, and was named the chair for Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. Her current research focuses on Ethiopian music and musicians new to North America.
Gordon E. Smith is professor of ethnomusicology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Formerly director of the School of Music, he is currently associate dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He is co-editor of Istvan Anhalt: Pathways and memory (2000), Folk music, traditional music, ethnomusicology: Canadian perspectives, past and present (2007), and Marius Barbeau: Modelling twentieth-century culture (2008). He is editor of MUSICultures (formerly The Canadian Journal for Traditional Music/La Revue de musique folklorique canadienne), and his current research also includes fieldwork in the Mi’kmaw community of Eskasoni, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Description

Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts is a tribute to the ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond in recognition of her outstanding scholarly accomplishments. The volume includes essays by leading ethnomusicologists and music scholars as well as a biographical introduction.
The book’s contributors engage many of the critical themes in Diamond’s work, including musical historiography, musical composition in historical and contemporary frameworks, performance in diverse contexts, gender issues, music and politics, and how music is nested in and relates to broader issues in society. The essays raise important themes about knowing and understanding musical traditions and music itself as an agent of social, cultural, and political change. Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts will appeal to music scholars and students, as well as to a general audience interested in learning about how music functions as social process as well as sound.

Reviews

The volume is both interesting and informative.... I recommend Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts to those interested in music and identity, cultural contexts of music, popular, and traditional music. Libraries boasting collections on said topics should consider purchasing this title, as it contributes to the discourse and provides additional insights into contemporary ethnomusicology.

- Joe C. Clark, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, Fontes Artis Musicae, 60/1, 2014 January

The editors have done an excellent job drawing together significant essays to honour Diamond. This festschrift is a valuable compilation that belongs in all music collections.

- Elaine Keillor, Carleton University, CAML Review, Vol 39, #1, 2011, 2011 May