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Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunisia that invoke the healing powers of long-deceased Muslim saints through music-driven trance ceremonies. It illuminates the virtually undocumented role of women and minorities in shaping the ritual musical landscape of the region, with chapters covering men’s Sufism (‘Isawiyya, Shadhuliyya, Tijaniyya), women’s Sufism (Mannubiyya, Tijaniyya al-Nisa’), the trance healing musics of black Tunisians (stambeli) and Tunisian Jews (rebaybiyya), the popular music genre associated with drinking parties of urban laborers (mizwid), and a growing industry of staged spectacles and concerts that continue to inject ritual sounds into the public sphere. The concept “ambient Sufism” captures how each of these adjacent ritual practices serves as a musical, social, and devotional-therapeutic niche while also contributing to a larger, shared ecology of practices surrounding and invoking the figures of saints. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the years preceding and following the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, Ambient Sufism also argues that ritual musical form—that is, the large-scale structuring of ritual through musical organization—has agency; that is, form is revealing and constitutive of experience and encourages particular subjectivities.

When, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Japanese leaders put into motion processes of modernization, Western music was adopted into the curriculum of a new educational system as a technology for producing shared cultural space for all Japanese people. As the infrastructures of modernity developed, a new role of composer apart from performer was created to meet the needs that emerged in education, industry and commerce (Part 1). The absorption of Western music in Japan did indeed create an environment of shared cultural space— shared internally by all Japanese people including those who have continued to cultivate traditional musical practices (albeit marginalized), and also shared internationally as Japanese composers have increasingly benefitted from, participated in, and contributed to global cosmopolitan culture (Part 2). The particular nature of the reception in Japan of European spheres of musical participation— orchestras, small ensembles for chamber and contemporary music, wind bands, and choruses--has afforded composers a variety of opportunities to create repertoire for musicians both professional and amateur (Part 3). Although the role of composer was new, based on primarily ethnographic research this book argues that most Japanese composers have maintained a socially relational role in their society as performer-composers previously did, as they respond with artistic flexibility to expectations of Japanese musical modernity.

Can music help us make sense of a form of (post)colonialism that is defined not by anticolonial rupture, but by an ongoing negotiation of the relationship between (former) colonies and their metropole? Along with Martinique, Guiana, and Rion, the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe chose to decolonize by fully integrating into the French state. In the late 1960s, as political integration failed to deliver on its social and economic promises, gwoka–a form of secular drum-based music and dance–became associated with a renewed and more radical form of anticolonial, separatist, activism. Today, while the music is still hailed as a tool and a symbol of resistance, its sounds mix with other musical genres to provide a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. From colonialism to anticolonialism, from nationalism to postnationalism, the book explores how gwoka participates in five auralities, fields of sonic relations that make audible multiple–and often seemingly contradictory–cultural belongings and political longings. Drawing from Edouard Glissant's poetics of Relation and re-interpreting creolization as a double play of resistance and accommodation, Creolized Aurality moves away from narratives of anticolonial rupture and overcoming to elucidate (post)coloniality as an unstable relational matrix from which emerges a politics caught in the tension between a struggle for sovereignty and demands for full citizenship.

In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman's voice and a drum beat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there—be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen—breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. This book draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities. Framing the three crucial elements of Sundanese dance—the female entertainer, the drumming, and men's sense of freedom—as a triangle, the book connects them to a range of other theoretical perspectives, drawing on thinkers from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lév–Strauss, and Freud to Euclid. By granting men permission to literally perform their masculinity, the book ultimately concludes, dance provides a crucial space for both reinforcing and resisting orthodox gender ideologies.

This book's author's imagination was captured the very first time that, as a girl visiting the Himalayas, she heard Kangra women join their voices together in song. Returning as an anthropologist, she became fascinated by how they spoke of singing as a form of enrichment, bringing feelings of accomplishment, companionship, happiness, and even good health—all benefits of the “everyday creativity” are explored in this book. Part ethnography, part musical discovery, part poetry, part memoir, and part unforgettable portraits of creative individuals, this work brings this remote region in North India alive in sight and sound while celebrating the incredible powers of music in our lives. The text portrays Kangra songs about difficulties on the lives of goddesses and female saints as a path to well-being. Like the intricate geometries of mandalu patterns drawn in courtyards or the subtle balance of flavors in a meal, well-crafted songs offer a variety of deeply meaningful benefits: as a way of making something of value, as a means of establishing a community of shared pleasure and skill, as a path through hardships and limitations, and as an arena of renewed possibility.

Exploring Peru’s lively music industry and the studio producers, radio DJs, and program directors that drive it, this book is an account of the deliberate development of artistic taste. Focusing on popular huayno music and the ways it has been promoted to Peru’s emerging middle class, the author tells a complex story of identity making and the marketing forces entangled with it, providing insights into the dynamics among art, class, and ethnicity that reach far beyond the Andes. He focuses on the music of Ayacucho, Peru, examining how media workers and intellectuals there transformed the city’s huayno music into the country’s most popular style. By marketing contemporary huayno against its traditional counterpart, these agents, the author argues, have paradoxically reinforced ethnic hierarchies at the same time that they have challenged them. Navigating between a burgeoning Andean bourgeoisie and a music industry eager to sell them symbols of newfound sophistication, the book is an account of the real people behind cultural change.

This book examines kwaito, a form of electronic music that emerged alongside the democratization of South Africa in the mid-1990s and came to represent the voice of the black youth in the post-apartheid period. It investigates the often contradictory relationship between political processes and musical processes during the first twenty years of South African democracy (1994-2014)—a period that began with a euphoric and hopeful moment but that quickly led to disenchantment and even despair. Contemporary South Africa is marked by high rates of unemployment, extreme inequality, and endemic crime. Politicians and cultural critics have called kwaito immature, apolitical, and disconnected from social issues, and have complained that it has failed to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. Its practitioners and listeners have been accused of irresponsibility in the face of major social ills and of ignoring the actual social conditions in which South Africans—and black South Africans in particular—live. I argue, however, that these criticisms harbor problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Based on extensive ethnographic evidence, I show that if kwaito musicians and listeners ignore actual social conditions they do this intentionally in order to forge another body and another way of hearing. I argue, in other words, that kwaito is less a form of escapism or illusion that hides reality than an aesthetic practice of multiplying sensory reality and thus generating new possibilities. This book is dedicated to kwaito’s aesthetics of freedom, to kwaito’s promise.

Patrimony--the idea of a collective, inalienable inheritance--is a powerful way for nation-states to externalize notions of continuity, discreteness, and vigilance against loss. But in the process of being externalized through a patrimonial object, such notions become entangled with the object's particular qualities and conditions of existence. This book asks what happens when that patrimonial object is a musical practice--in this case, an urban North African vocal and instrumental tradition known as Andalusi music. For many North Africans, Andalusi music is an emblem of local, national, and transnational authenticity that transcends the European colonial intrusion, a high-prestige, Arabic-language repertoire said to originate in "the lost paradise" of al-Andalus, medieval Islamic Spain. For more than a century, its devotees have rallied a range of technologies and institutions to attempt to save Andalusi music from the threat of disappearance. But these revivalist efforts come back to a common question: how to fashion a national, public, resilient musical patrimony out of a practice that is understood to be embodied in highly localized, genealogically embedded, and sometimes secretive individual authorities? Rooted in ethnographic and archival research that focuses on the Andalusi musical tradition of Algiers, Tlemcen, and their Algerian and Moroccan borderlands since the end of the nineteenth century, The Lost Paradise is a meditation on temporality, value, labor, personhood, and the relationship of the living to the dead.

Collective, or group, improvisation exists in almost every music culture, but its manifestations differ widely. This book proposes terminology, concepts, and methods for examining divergent practices in a unified way, developing and testing broadly-applicable analytical frameworks of improvisatory process and collectivity through musical analysis. At the micro-level, the book offers insight into the note-by-note decisions of improvising performers. Its two central case studies present contrasting Balinese gamelan practices, of the interlocking four-person melodic reyong norot and paired kendang arja drumming, as examples of the book's analytical frameworks in action. Detailed, ethnographically-informed musical analyses uncover models and knowledge bases guiding improvisation in these practices and elucidate idiomatic ways of diverging from them in the course of performance. These case studies are punctuated and complemented throughout by analytical forays into diverse non-Balinese practices, which help refine typologies of collective improvisation with comparative and cross-cultural relevance. At the macro-level, the book illuminates the larger musical, discursive, structural, and cultural factors that shape collectively improvised performances in Bali and beyond, drawing from theories of communication and interaction, creativity and cognition, to unpack how performers play and imagine as a collective. It places collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and argues that music analysis, framed in specific ethnographic insights but with an eye to cross-genre applicability and comparative analysis, is a powerful tool for exploring complex musical and interactional relationships. And by placing diverse practices on a level playing field for analysis, the book enables deeper insight into collectivity and improvisatory processes across cultures.

Making Music Indigenous focuses on indigenous chimaycha music from the Peru’s highland region. It explores the transformation of this Quechua-language song genre over the last half-century, in relation to three central themes: nature, mass mediation, and social politics. The first part of the book explores an era past, when chimaycha was linked to seasonal cycles of animal husbandry and climactic variation, on one hand, and on the other to the human life cycle, particularly via its role in youthful courtship. In this period the genre was an aesthetic means of mediating relations between human actors and their ecological circumstances, and the book shows how such relations became embedded in such musical elements as song lyrics and timbral preferences. The second part explores the genre’s conversion into a self-conscious symbol of cultural identity, first under the influence of development organizations and educators between the 1970s and 1990s, and then under the direction of popular cultural entrepreneurs after 2000. It focuses especially on activities of folkloric promotion associated with the local state university, and the later interventions of indigenous radio broadcasters, whose work was made possible by those folkloric activities. The final part of the book explores the genre from the perspective of an instrument maker and performer whose expertise has been central to its development since the late 1980s. It focuses especially on the relationship between natural knowledge, the manual skills germane to the maker’s trade, and the objects that makers produce, which shape contemporary performers’ relation to the sonorous past.

Message to Our Folks is the first book about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most influential groups in jazz and experimental music. Unlike many texts in jazz studies and improvisation studies, Message to Our Folks combines musical analysis with historical inquiry. The book offers a detailed history of the Art Ensemble, from its 1966 founding on Chicago’s South Side to its final performances in the 2010s. But the book’s greatest contribution to music theory (and a range of other disciplines) may be its analyses of the Art Ensemble’s performances. Message to Our Folks proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the Art Ensemble members are able to improvise together in many different styles while drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. The book also examines the intermedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances, which integrate music with poetry, theater, costumes, and movement. Additionally, Message to Our Folks investigates the connections between the group’s performances and its distinctive model of social relations—practices of cooperation and personal autonomy that the group members adapted from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Chicago collective from which the Art Ensemble emerged.

This book on musical experience in African ritual focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. It presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums, all come under careful scrutiny, as does the author's own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

At the heart of this book are the voices of three musicians—queer nightclub star Zeki Müren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu—who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Their fame and ubiquity have made them national icons, but this book contends, they do not represent the official version of Turkish identity propagated by anthems or flags; instead they evoke a much more intimate and ambivalent conception of Turkishness. Using these three singers as a lens, this book examines Turkey's repressive politics and civil violence as well as its uncommonly vibrant public life in which music, art, literature, sports, and journalism have flourished. However, this book's primary concern is how Müren, Gencebay, and Aksu's music and careers can be understood in light of theories of cultural intimacy. In particular, it considers their contributions to the development of a Turkish concept of love, analyzing the ways these singers explore the private matters of intimacy, affection, and sentiment on the public stage.

This book explores the aesthetics of authoritarianism through a study of music and performance in the Republic of Guinea. Academic and popular commentators often emphasize music as a site for resistance and oppositional politics, while musicians who do support the state are framed as unwitting tools of propaganda. Moving beyond these assumptions, this book examines the choices and subjectivities of musicians who sing for an authoritarian state, and the experiences and desires of audiences who derive pleasure from this music. Since Guinea’s independence from France in 1958, music, performance, and voice have been central features of local cultural policies and ideologies. Key here was the adaptation of older forms of praise-singing – musical homage to nobles and rulers – in promotion of the postcolonial state. Yet this practice involves the active participation not just of government officials, but equally of musicians and audiences, who together maintain its relevance and great popularity. Today as Guinea makes an uneasy transition to democratic rule, such spectacles of public pleasure are becoming increasingly unstable, as new forms of protest and political voice complicate older aesthetic practices. Examining this shifting dynamic allows us to understand the lingering legacies of authoritarianism, and the ways in which post-socialist publics renegotiate the past, present, and future.

In this book we can observe an interaction between three seemingly distinct, but surprisingly connected worlds in the first half of the twentieth century: that of the founders of comparative musicology in Germany who searched for the origins of music and were convinced that medieval music must have been similar to the music they encountered and recorded in "primitive" societies; that of the scholars and musicians—for the most part members of the German youth movements, the Jugendmusik—and Singbewegung—who were studying, reconstructing, and performing early European music; and that of the Protestant and Catholic missionaries in German East Africa who introduced medieval music in Africa in the belief that it was similar to African music. The result of studying these three interconnected worlds in one volume is an alternative music history of Germany, a history not concerned with high culture and the repertoire of the concert hall, but with scholars, musicians, and missionaries who shared a passionate interest in music of the Middle Ages, folk music, and participatory music making (Gemeinschaftsmusik). The three overlapping circles, music scholars, members of the youth movement, and missionaries, together introduced a new strand into the musical culture of early twentieth-century Germany—one that favored communal music making and emphasized the proximity of the European early music to the "primitive" music in Africa. Interestingly, this strand transformed music making in Africa itself, where Lutheran chorales, Gregorian chant, and Sankey songs were fully assimilated by local populations.

Though often thought of as rivals, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka shared a range of interests, especially a passion for music. Jazz, in particular, was a decisive influence on their thinking, and, as this book reveals, they drew on their insights into the creative process of improvisation to analyze race and politics in the civil rights era. In this inspired study, the author situates them as a jazz trio, demonstrating how Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin's individual works form a series of calls and responses with each other. He connects their writings on jazz to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, particularly its support for more freedom for individuals and more democratic societies. He also examines the way they responded to and elaborated on that lineage, showing how they significantly broadened it by addressing the African American experience, especially its aesthetics. Ultimately, the author contends, the trio enacted pragmatist principles by effectively communicating the social and political benefits of African Americans fully entering society, thereby compelling America to move closer to its democratic ideals.

This book explores contrasting histories of western Maputaland, a remote South African rural locality bordering Mozambique and the kingdom of Swaziland. It builds on interweaving narratives, offsetting its documented history with the experiences of two groups of elderly women whose memories, songs and practices narrativise a century of borderland politics. Specifically, it draws on memories inspired by the mouth harp (isitweletwele), a tiny metal instrument introduced into the region by European traders in the mid-1800s and adopted by women to accompany long-distance walking. Extending the premise that sound and motion represent elemental though much under-explored mnemonics in the construction of oral histories, the book engages women’s walking songs (amaculo manihamba) as the prompts that guide the recovery of a gendered epistemology of place. The book is structured as a dialogue between contrasting political histories of land in western Maputaland. Its concern is essentially the tension between macro-level spatial planning and local dwelling practices, manifest especially in the disparity between human livelihood needs based on localized mobilities, and environmental conservation, invested in enclosure. Seeking to better understand the social and emotional ecologies of this longstanding conflict, it exposes through the intimacy of women’s songs, stories, and silence, situated meanings of land and legacies of environmental injustice resulting from its annexation. By bringing to the fore an everyday dimension to this historical encounter, it aims to draw attention to the consequences of contemporary transfrontier conservation expansion, arguing that the globalist rhetoric of ‘conservation-with-development’ camouflages entrenched colonial patterns of land appropriation and control.

This book examines the new and different ways contemporary tango music has been drawn upon and used as a resource for cultural, social, and economic development in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In doing so, it addresses broader concerns with how the value and meaning of musical culture has been profoundly reframed in the age of expediency—where music and the arts are called upon and often compelled to address social, political and economic problems that were previously located outside the cultural domain. Long hailed as Argentina’s so-called national genre of popular music and dance, tango has not been musically or socially popular in Argentina since the late 1950s. Nevertheless, tango continues to have salience as a potent symbol of Argentine culture within the national imaginary and global representations. It is precisely this dual trend of detachment and connection that has made tango an exceptionally productive resource for bolstering so many different types of projects in contemporary Buenos Aires. This book examines how these projects have reshaped the field of cultural production regarding tango in Buenos Aires, turning previous ambivalences if not outright antagonisms between cultural producers, private enterprise, the state, and so-called third sector or civil society organizations into synergistic opportunities for development of all sorts. While these newly configured relationships are usually not the straightforward win-win that many advocates claim, they certainly confound conventional notions of left/right politics—cultural and otherwise—and in that sense present a serious challenge to the critical scholarship of music.

This feminist-oriented ethnography of Dominican gender performance focuses on masculinity and femininity in accordion-based merengue típico while also touching on cross-dressing and queer performance in other popular genres like bachata, reggaetón, orquesta merengue, merengue de calle, and fusion musics. By combining music, movement, video, and literary analysis with oral history, Tigers offers a new model for the holistic study of gender, while demonstrating the importance of local feminisms and local musics for understanding as well as destabilizing traditional notions of gender and genre. As a whole, the book aims to provide a new perspective on Caribbean gender that considers classic binaries but goes beyond them; to show how music can either reinforce entrenched gender roles or help to open up possibilities by imagining new roles and identities for all genders; to give concrete examples demonstrating the performativity of gender; and to show how powerfully musical performance unites gender, racial, national, and other identities, with both the problems and opportunities that such conjunctions entail.