New Musical Figurations

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New Musical Figurations

Author : Ronald M. Radano
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226701948
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis New Musical Figurations by : Ronald M. Radano

Download or read book New Musical Figurations written by Ronald M. Radano and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-20 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new way of configuring jazz music and history. By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture—a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the most emblematic figures of this cultural crisis. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz," "black music," "popular music," and "art music" are founded. New Musical Figurations gives the richest view available of this many-sided artist. Radano examines Braxton's early years on the South Side of Chicago, whose vibrant black musical legacy inspired him to explore new avenues of expression. Here is the first detailed history of Braxton's central role in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the principal musician-run institution of free jazz in the United States. After leaving Chicago, Braxton was active in Paris and New York, collaborating with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and other composers affiliated with the experimental-music movement. From 1974 to 1981, he gained renown as a popular jazz performer and recording artist. Since then he has taught at Mills College and Wesleyan University, given lectures on his theoretical musical system, and written works for chamber groups as well as large, opera-scale pieces. The neglect of radical, challenging figures like Braxton in standard histories of jazz, Radano argues, mutes the innovative voice of the African-American musical tradition. Refreshingly free of technical jargon, New Musical Figurations is more than just another variation on the same jazz theme. Rather, it is an exploratory work as rich in theoretical vision as it is in historical detail.

New Musical Figurations

Author : Ronald M. Radano
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226701950
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis New Musical Figurations by : Ronald M. Radano

Download or read book New Musical Figurations written by Ronald M. Radano and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new way of configuring jazz music and history. By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture—a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the most emblematic figures of this cultural crisis. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz," "black music," "popular music," and "art music" are founded. New Musical Figurations gives the richest view available of this many-sided artist. Radano examines Braxton's early years on the South Side of Chicago, whose vibrant black musical legacy inspired him to explore new avenues of expression. Here is the first detailed history of Braxton's central role in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the principal musician-run institution of free jazz in the United States. After leaving Chicago, Braxton was active in Paris and New York, collaborating with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and other composers affiliated with the experimental-music movement. From 1974 to 1981, he gained renown as a popular jazz performer and recording artist. Since then he has taught at Mills College and Wesleyan University, given lectures on his theoretical musical system, and written works for chamber groups as well as large, opera-scale pieces. The neglect of radical, challenging figures like Braxton in standard histories of jazz, Radano argues, mutes the innovative voice of the African-American musical tradition. Refreshingly free of technical jargon, New Musical Figurations is more than just another variation on the same jazz theme. Rather, it is an exploratory work as rich in theoretical vision as it is in historical detail.

Message to Our Folks

Author : Paul Steinbeck
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022641809X
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Message to Our Folks by : Paul Steinbeck

Download or read book Message to Our Folks written by Paul Steinbeck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices—members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world’s premier musical groups.

Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations

Author : Esti Sheinberg
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351557203
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations by : Esti Sheinberg

Download or read book Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations written by Esti Sheinberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United in their indebtedness to the scholarship of Raymond Monelle, an international group of contributors, including leading authorities on music and culture, come together in this state of the art volume to investigate different ways in which music signifies. Music semiotics asks what music signifies as well as how the signification process takes place. Looking at the nature of musical texts and music's narrativity, a number of the essays in this collection delve into the relationship between music and philosophy, literature, poetry, folk traditions and the theatre, with opera a genre that particularly lends itself to this mode of investigation. Other contributions look at theories of musical markedness, metaphor and irony, using examples and specific musical texts to serve as case studies to validate their theoretical approaches. Musical works discussed include those by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Stravinsky, BartXenakis, Kutavicius and John Adams, offering stimulating discussions of music that attest to its beauty as much as to its intellectual challenge. Taking Monelle's writing as a model, the contributions adhere to a method of logical argumentation presented in a civilized and respectful way, even - and particularly - when controversial issues are at stake, keeping in mind that contemplating the significance of music is a way to contemplate life itself.

Spirits Rejoice!

Author : Jason Bivins
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190230916
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Spirits Rejoice! by : Jason Bivins

Download or read book Spirits Rejoice! written by Jason Bivins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bivins explores the relationship between American religion and American music, and the places where religion and jazz have overlapped" --Dust jacket flap.

It's Figuration, Groundly

Author : John McGreal
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1788036433
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis It's Figuration, Groundly by : John McGreal

Download or read book It's Figuration, Groundly written by John McGreal and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John McGreal's three new books – It’s Abstraction, Concretely, It’s Figuration, Groundly and It’s Representation, Really – continue the ‘It’ Series published by Matador since 2010. They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. Emerging out of the first books on the Bibliograph published in 2016, initiated with It’s Nothing, Seriously, these new texts retain some of the same structural features. The Bibliographs contain the same focus on repetition and variation in meaning of their dominant motifs of representation, abstraction and figuration which have framed philosophical discourse on epistemology and ontology in aesthetics; their chance placement in each Bibliograph interspersed with one another displaying and enhancing similarities and differences. At the same time these works constitute a development in the aesthetic form of the Bibliograph. In earlier works on Nothing, Absence and Silence, it was just a question of finding and transferring given textual references from their source to construct their Bibliographs, with the focus being on the strategic position of the latter within each book. In these new works, the concern has been with working on the line and shape of the references themselves, with their enhanced spacial form as well as that of each Bibliograph as a whole. In shaping and spacing the referential images, the place of words and letters became as important as their semantic & syntactical role. Expansion and contraction of whole words was used to enhance this process. Under such detailed attention their breakdown into particles of language, into part-words and single letters was a result. The recombination of elements produced new words in a process of restrangement with new sequences of letters having visual rather than semantic value. The play on prefixes of dominant motifs yielded new words as did tmesis. This concern with the form of referential images does not preclude an equal commitment to their content. The aleatory character of textual entries in each Bibliograph encourage the reader to let his or her mind go; to read in a new way on diverse contemporary issues across conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical and social reproduction.

The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

Author : Björn Heile
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131704245X
Total Pages : 518 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music by : Björn Heile

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music written by Björn Heile and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ‘new musicology’. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the ‘contemporary’, and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a ‘popular modernism’, a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

Avant-Garde on Record

Author : Jonathan Goldman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009363441
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Avant-Garde on Record by : Jonathan Goldman

Download or read book Avant-Garde on Record written by Jonathan Goldman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative contribution to music history, cultural studies, and sound studies, Avant-garde on Record revisits post-war composers and their technologically oriented brand of musical modernism. It describes how a broad range of figures (including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Claire Schapira, Anthony Braxton and Gunther Schuller) engaged with avant-garde aesthetics while responding to a rapidly changing, technologically fuelled, spatialized audio culture. Jonathan Goldman focuses on how contemporary listeners understood these composers' works in the golden age of LPs and explores how this reception was mediated through consumer-oriented sound technology that formed a prism through which listeners processed the 'music of their time'. His account reveals unexpected aspects of twentieth-century audio culture: from sonic ping-pong to son et lumière shows, from Venetian choral music by Stravinsky to the soundscape of Niagara Falls, from a Buddhist Cantata to an LP box set cast as a parlour game.

Music and the Elusive Revolution

Author : Eric Drott
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520950089
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Music and the Elusive Revolution by : Eric Drott

Download or read book Music and the Elusive Revolution written by Eric Drott and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-07-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1968, France teetered on the brink of revolution as a series of student protests spiraled into the largest general strike the country has ever known. In the forty years since, May ’68 has come to occupy a singular place in the modern political imagination, not just in France but across the world. Eric Drott examines the social, political, and cultural effects of May ’68 on a wide variety of music in France, from the initial shock of 1968 through the "long" 1970s and the election of Mitterrand and the socialists in 1981. Drott’s detailed account of how diverse music communities developed in response to 1968 and his pathbreaking reflections on the nature and significance of musical genre come together to provide insights into the relationships that link music, identity, and politics.

Noise Orders

Author : David Brown
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 0816643512
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (166 download)

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Book Synopsis Noise Orders by : David Brown

Download or read book Noise Orders written by David Brown and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively book, David Brown locates jazz music within the broad aesthetic, political, and theoretical upheavals of our time, asserting that modern architecture and urbanism in particular can be strongly influenced and defined by the ways that improvisation is facilitated in jazz. Improvised music consists of diverse properties that fail to register in the object-oriented understanding of composition. As a result, it is often dismissed as noise—an interfering signal. However, Brown asserts, such interference can bear meaning and stimulate change. Noise Orders identifies how architecture can respond to the inclusive dynamics of extemporaneous movements, variable conceptions of composition, multiple durations, and wide manipulation of resources found in jazz to enable outcomes that far exceed a design’s seeming potential. By exploring overlapping moments between modernism and the cultural dimensions of jazz, Noise Orders suggests that the discipline of improvisation continues to open and redefine architectural theory and practice, creating a world where designers contribute to emerging environments rather than make predetermined ones. Comparing modern and avant-garde artists and architects with individuals and groups in jazz—including Piet Mondrian and boogie-woogie, John Cage and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Le Corbusier and Louis Armstrong, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)—Brown examines how jazz can offer alternative design ideas and directions, be incorporated in contemporary architectural practices, and provide insight on how to develop dynamic metropolitan environments. Interdisciplinary in its approach, innovative in its methodology, and unexpected in its conclusions, Noise Orders argues for a deeper understanding of the infinite potential inherent in both music and architecture. David P. Brown is associate professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This Is Our Music

Author : Iain Anderson
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 9780812220032
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis This Is Our Music by : Iain Anderson

Download or read book This Is Our Music written by Iain Anderson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007-06-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz. By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters—and potentially those in other arts—have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification.

Music of Anthony Braxton

Author : Mike Heffley
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136566279
Total Pages : 572 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (365 download)

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Book Synopsis Music of Anthony Braxton by : Mike Heffley

Download or read book Music of Anthony Braxton written by Mike Heffley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2001. For three decades, Anthony Braxton has been alternately celebrated, dismissed, and attacked for his musical innovations. His ambitious efforts to reconcile and personalize the historically divergent and often conflicting worldviews and principles of African-American (jazz), American Experimental (post-Ives), and Western European (post-serial) traditions have attracted both loyal supporters and passionate critics. Mike Heffley has followed Braxton's widely varied music from its beginning, and in 1988 began a professional musical relationship with him. His biography of Braxton's music is just that-a look at the music as if it were a living entity, with a traceable ancestry, a describable place in the world, and a history full of drama, intrigue, and passion. The music scholar will find here all the information necessary to understand the contents, contexts, and concepts of Braxton's music, and to further that understanding. The general reader will find the human and trans-human qualities that make the music so compelling to its makers and lovers.

Postmodern Music/postmodern Thought

Author : Judith Irene Lochhead
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 9780815338208
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (382 download)

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Book Synopsis Postmodern Music/postmodern Thought by : Judith Irene Lochhead

Download or read book Postmodern Music/postmodern Thought written by Judith Irene Lochhead and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2002 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

French Music and Jazz in Conversation

Author : Deborah Mawer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316194612
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (161 download)

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Book Synopsis French Music and Jazz in Conversation by : Deborah Mawer

Download or read book French Music and Jazz in Conversation written by Deborah Mawer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French concert music and jazz often enjoyed a special creative exchange across the period 1900–65. French modernist composers were particularly receptive to early African-American jazz during the interwar years, and American jazz musicians, especially those concerned with modal jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibited a distinct affinity with French musical impressionism. However, despite a general, if contested, interest in the cultural interplay of classical music and jazz, few writers have probed the specific French music-jazz relationship in depth. In this book, Deborah Mawer sets such musical interplay within its historical-cultural and critical-analytical contexts, offering a detailed yet accessible account of both French and American perspectives. Blending intertextuality with more precise borrowing techniques, Mawer presents case studies on the musical interactions of a wide range of composers and performers, including Debussy, Satie, Milhaud, Ravel, Jack Hylton, George Russell, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.

Forgeries of Memory and Meaning

Author : Cedric J. Robinson
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469606755
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis Forgeries of Memory and Meaning by : Cedric J. Robinson

Download or read book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning written by Cedric J. Robinson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cedric J. Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson grounds his study in contexts that illuminate the parallel growth of racial beliefs and capitalism, beginning with Shakespearean England and the development of international trade. He demonstrates how the needs of American commerce determined the construction of successive racial regimes that were publicized in the theater and in motion pictures, particularly through plantation and jungle films. In addition to providing new depth and complexity to the history of black representation, Robinson examines black resistance to these practices. Whereas D. W. Griffith appropriated black minstrelsy and romanticized a national myth of origins, Robinson argues that Oscar Micheaux transcended uplift films to create explicitly political critiques of the American national myth. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings of American narrative cinema.

Aesthetics of Music

Author : Stephen Downes
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136486917
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (364 download)

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Book Synopsis Aesthetics of Music by : Stephen Downes

Download or read book Aesthetics of Music written by Stephen Downes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approaches is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

Encyclopedia of African American Music [3 volumes]

Author : Tammy L. Kernodle
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0313342008
Total Pages : 1267 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (133 download)

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Book Synopsis Encyclopedia of African American Music [3 volumes] by : Tammy L. Kernodle

Download or read book Encyclopedia of African American Music [3 volumes] written by Tammy L. Kernodle and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 1267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Americans' historical roots are encapsulated in the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of their music. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves, longing for emancipation, expressed their hopes and dreams through spirituals. Inspired by African civilization and culture, as well as religion, art, literature, and social issues, this influential, joyous, tragic, uplifting, challenging, and enduring music evolved into many diverse genres, including jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, swing, and hip hop. Providing a lyrical history of our nation, this groundbreaking encyclopedia, the first of its kind, showcases all facets of African American music including folk, religious, concert and popular styles. Over 500 in-depth entries by more than 100 scholars on a vast range of topics such as genres, styles, individuals, groups, and collectives as well as historical topics such as music of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and numerous others. Offering balanced representation of key individuals, groups, and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and other perspectives not usually approached, this indispensable reference illuminates the profound role that African American music has played in American cultural history. Editors Price, Kernodle, and Maxile provide balanced representation of various individuals, groups and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and perspectives. Also highlighted are the major record labels, institutions of higher learning, and various cultural venues that have had a tremendous impact on the development and preservation of African American music. Among the featured: Motown Records, Black Swan Records, Fisk University, Gospel Music Workshop of America, The Cotton Club, Center for Black Music Research, and more. With a broad scope, substantial entries, current coverage, and special attention to historical, political, and social contexts, this encyclopedia is designed specifically for high school and undergraduate students. Academic and public libraries will treasure this resource as an incomparable guide to our nation's African American heritage.