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Long a taboo subject among critics, rhythm finally takes center stage in this book's wide-ranging examination of diverse black cultures across the New World. This book traces the central—and contested—role of music in shaping identities, politics, social history, and artistic expression. Starting with enslaved African musicians, the book takes us to Haiti, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, and to the civil rights era in the United States. Along the way, it highlights such figures as Toussaint Louverture, Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, The Mighty Sparrow, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Zobel, Daniel Maximin, James Brown, and Amiri Baraka. Bringing to light new connections among black cultures, the book shows how rhythm has been both a persistent marker of race as well as a dynamic force for change at virtually every major turning point in black New World history.

This book uses music to understand the experiences of Tibetans living in Dharamsala, a town in the Indian Himalayas that for more than forty years has been home to Tibet's government-in-exile. The Dalai Lama's presence lends Dharamsala's Tibetans a feeling of being “in place”, but at the same time they have physically and psychologically constructed Dharamsala as “not Tibet”, as a temporary resting place to which many are unable or unwilling to become attached. Not surprisingly, this community struggles with notions of home, displacement, ethnic identity, and assimilation. This ethnography explores the contradictory realities of cultural homogenization, hybridity, and concern about ethnic purity as they are negotiated in the everyday lives of individuals. In this way, the book complicates explanations of culture change provided by the popular idea of “global flow”. This narrative argues that the exiles' focus on cultural preservation, while crucial, has contributed to the development of essentialist ideas of what is truly “Tibetan”. As a result, “foreign” or “modern” practices that have gained deep relevance for Tibetan refugees have been devalued. The book scrutinizes this tension in the discussion of the refugees' enthusiasm for songs from blockbuster Hindi films, the popularity of Western rock and roll among Tibetan youth, and the emergence of a new genre of modern Tibetan music. The insights presented here into the soundscape of Dharamsala is enriched by personal experiences as the keyboard player for a Tibetan refugee rock group called the Yak Band.

This book examines the role music has played in the formation of the political and national identity of the Bahamas. It analyzes Bahamian musical life as it has been influenced and shaped by the islands' location between the United States and the rest of the Caribbean; tourism; and Bahamian colonial and postcolonial history. Focusing on popular music in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, in particular rake-n-scrape and Junkanoo, it finds a Bahamian music that has remained culturally rooted in the local even as it has undergone major transformations. Highlighting the ways entertainers have represented themselves to Bahamians and to tourists, the book illustrates the shifting terrain that musicians navigated during the rapid growth of tourism and in the aftermath of independence.

This ethnographic study of Trinidadian gospel music engages the multiple musical styles circulating in the nation's Full Gospel community and illustrates the carefully negotiated and contested spaces that they occupy in relationship to questions of identity. By exploring gospelypso, jamoo (“Jehovah's music”), gospel dancehall, and North American gospel music, along with the discourses that surround performances in these styles, the book illustrates the extent to which value, meaning, and appropriateness are continually circumscribed and reinterpreted in the process of coming to terms with what it looks and sounds like to be a Full Gospel believer in Trinidad. The local, regional, and transnational implications of these musical styles, moreover, are read in relationship to their impact on belief (and vice versa), revealing the particularly nuanced poetics of conviction that drive both apologists and detractors of these styles. The book sets the investigation against a historical narrative and introduces a theoretical approach that the book calls the “ethics of style”—a model that privileges the convictions embedded in this context and which emphasizes their role in shaping the terms upon which identity is continually being constructed in Trinidad. The result is an extended meditation on the convictions that lie behind the creation and reception of style in Full Gospel Trinidad.

This book provides an introduction to the most prominent artists and musical styles that have emerged in Cuba since 1959 and to the policies that have shaped artistic life. The author gives readers a chronological overview of the first decades after the Cuban Revolution, documenting the many ways performance has changed and emphasizing the close links between political and cultural activity. Offering a wealth of details about music and the milieu that engendered it, he traces the development of dance styles, nueva trova, folkloric drumming, religious traditions, and other forms. The author describes how the fall of the Soviet Union has affected Cuba in material, ideological, and musical terms, and considers the effect of tense international relations on culture. Most importantly, the book chronicles how the arts have become a point of negotiation between individuals, with their unique backgrounds and interests, and official organizations. It uses music to explore how Cubans have responded to the priorities of the revolution and have created spaces for their individual concerns.

This book deals with creating, teaching, and contextualizing academic world music performing ensembles. Considering the formidable theoretical, ethical, and practical issues that confront ethnomusicologists who direct such ensembles, the sixteen chapters it contains discuss problems of public performance and the pragmatics of pedagogy and learning processes. Their perspectives, drawing upon expertise in Caribbean steelband, Indian, Balinese, Javanese, Philippine, Mexican, Central and West African, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Jewish klezmer ensembles, provide a uniquely informed and many-faceted view of this complicated and rapidly changing landscape. The chapters examine the creative and pedagogical negotiations involved in intergenerational and intercultural transmission and explore topics such as reflexivity, representation, hegemony, and aesthetically determined interaction. The book affords insights into the structuring of ethnomusicologists' careers and methodologies. It offers a history and contemporary examination of academic world music performance in the West, especially in the United States.

Had Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) written a book on music, it would have been Song Loves the Masses. One of the great polymaths of modern intellectual history, Herder wrote influential contributions to philosophy, theology, anthropology, aesthetics, history—and music. His writings on musical subjects are among his most comprehensive, ranging from studies of music in the origins of human speech to the song practices underlying a universal humanity. Herder’s collections of these practices, to which he referred collectively as “folk songs” sounded world music in its complex diversity and provided the modern foundations for the fields of anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Many of the folk songs themselves entered the classical music of Europe, significantly transforming its aesthetics and history. The first-ever translations of Herder’s nine most sweeping works on music unfold across the chapters of this book. From the first attempts to forge theories of folk song and publish anthologies in the 1770s through the translations of the Spanish epic, El Cid, and the biblical Song of Songs to the aesthetics of transcendence that imbued his final essays, the chapters in Song Loves the Masses together transform our modern understanding of music and history.

This book takes readers to the heart of religious musical praxis in Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population in the world. The author explores a rich public soundscape, where women recite the divine texts of the Qur'an, and where an extraordinary diversity of Arab-influenced Islamic musical styles and genres, also performed by women, flourishes. Based on ethnographic research beginning at the end of Suharto's “New Order” and continuing into the era of “Reformation,” the book considers the powerful role of music in the expression of religious nationalism. In particular, it focuses on musical style, women's roles, and the ideological and aesthetic issues raised by the Indonesian style of recitation.