Category Archives: Ethnomusicology

by | December 7, 2012 · 1:00 am

Folk music index

folkindex

Jane Keefer’s Folk music index is a database of U.S. old-time recordings that can be searched by title, recording, keyword, or publisher.

Cross references to alternate titles, related pieces, and similar melodies constitute around 18% of the nearly 39,000 titles in the title index. The recordings indexed generally have a major emphasis on tradition-based material from both commercial and non-commercial performers, including a considerable amount of old-time fiddle and banjo tunes.

Although most of the recordings included are LPs, many have been reissued as cassettes and CDs.

Below, Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers play Soldier’s joy in 1929—with a little help from some friends.

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by | August 25, 2012 · 1:00 am

Performing Islam

Launched by Intellect in 2012, Performing Islam is the first peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal about Islam and performance and their related aesthetics. It focuses on the sociocultural, historical, and political contexts of artistic practices in the Muslim world.

The journal covers dance, ritual, theater, performing arts, visual arts and cultures, and popular entertainment in Islam-influenced societies and their diasporas. It promotes insightful research of performative expressions of Islam by performers and publics, and encompasses theoretical debates, empirical studies, postgraduate research, interviews with performers, research notes and queries, and reviews of books, conferences, festivals, events, and performances.

Below, UNESCO’s introduction to the semā ceremony of Turkey’s Mevlevi order.

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by | August 4, 2012 · 1:00 am

Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana

Libreria Musicale Italiana (LIM) launched the series Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana in 2011 with La canzone napoletana: Le musiche e i loro contesti. Edited by Enrico Careri and Anita Pesce, the book comprises papers presented at the eponymous conference held from 4 through 5 June 2010 at the Casa Murolo-Palazzo Maddaloni, Naples.

Below, Enrico Caruso, who brought canzone napoletana to the world’s attention, sings the genre’s most famous song, Giovanni Capurro and Eduardo di Capua’s O sole mio.

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by | June 9, 2012 · 1:00 am

Tarzan redux

Of the many Hollywood films made about Africa, the Tarzan films are among the most influential in creating stereotyped notions of African peoples, geography, and social organization.

An examination of the portrayal of Africa and Africans in Cedric Gibbons’s Tarzan and his mate (1934) provides a window into how music has been used to generate these stereotypes and calls into question the degree to which these (mis)conceptions, under the same or different guises, have survived into the 21st century.

This according to “When hearts beat like native drums: Music and the sexual dimensions of the notions of savage and civilized in Tarzan and his mate, 1934” by Clara Henderson (Africa today XLVIII/4 [winter 2001] pp. 90–124).

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the apes, the first Tarzan story, is 100 years old this year! Above, an early dust jacket for this classic; below, the original 1934 trailer for Tarzan and his mate.

BONUS: The film’s notorious river scene, for which the Olympic swimmer Josephine McKim temporarily replaced Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.

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by | May 14, 2012 · 1:00 am

Digital Library of Appalachia

Produced by the Appalachian College Association, the Digital Library of Appalachia provides online access to archival and historical materials related to the culture of the southern and central Appalachian region. The database’s contents are drawn from special collections of Appalachian College Association member libraries.

Above, the Bog Trotters Band in Galax, Virginia, in 1937. Below, the legendary Roscoe Holcomb at home in Kentucky.

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by | April 20, 2012 · 1:00 am

Kotas and cows

A black cow leads the members of a South Indian hill tribe, the Kotas, to the Nilgiri Hills and, with its hoof, indicates where to found each village. This footprint acts as a moral center of gravity, an important place for music making, dancing, and other rituals.

The Kotas anchor their musical and other activities around such places and significant moments in time and, in the process, constitute themselves as individuals and as a group.

This according to The black cow’s footprint: Time, space, and music in the lives of the Kotas of South India by Richard K. Wolf (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Above, a Kota women’s festival dance; below, Kota men dancing at Kotagiri.

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by | April 5, 2012 · 1:00 am

Virtual Assyria

The ancient land of Assyria, long divided among modern nations, lives again—in cyberspace.

Exiled around the world, Assyrians have established an Internet homeland, Nineveh on line. This portal links to many other Assyrian websites and hosts articles about Assyrian concerns.

Music has proved to be a decisive factor in uniting this virtual community and its  corporeal counterparts. Assyrian songs have become powerful tools for shaping and communicating Assyrian identity—and even for learning the ancestral language.

This according to “Translocal communities: Music as an identity marker in the Assyrian disapora” by Dan Lundberg, an essay included in Music in motion: Diversity and dialogue in Europe (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009) pp. 153–172.

Below, the Iranian singer Gaggi performs Assyrian pop.

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by | March 13, 2012 · 1:00 am

Indian stamps redux

The music philatelist S. Sankaranarayanan has produced monthly articles for the magazine Sruti almost without a break since April 2004.

Each article covers the issuance of a stamp (or group of stamps) by the Indian Department of Posts and includes a philatelic report along with a first day cover and background information on the stamp’s subject—these have included exponents of the Karnatak and Hindustani traditions as well as Indian folk musicians, dancers, musicologists, and patrons of the arts.

Above, a first day cover of a 1961 stamp honoring the Karnatak composer Tyāgarāja (1767–1847); Sankaranarayanan’s article about this stamp appeared in Sruti 269 (February 2007), pp. 40–41.

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by | March 8, 2012 · 1:00 am

Balkan studies

E.J. Brill inaugurated its series Balkan studies in 2011 with Staging socialist femininity: Gender politics and folklore performance in Serbia by Ana Hofman. The book examines the negotiation of gendered performances in Serbian rural areas as a result of the socialist gender policy and the creation of a new femininity in the public sphere from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, with particular attention to musical performances.

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by | March 3, 2012 · 1:00 am

World & traditional music

Part of the British Library’s Sounds project, World & traditional music features tens of thousands of recordings by ethnomusicologists and collectors, including those of the pioneering Africanists Peter Cooke (b.1930), Kenneth Gourlay (1919–95), Hans-Joachim Heinz (1917–2000), Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980), David Rycroft (1924–97), and Klaus Wachsmann (1907–84).

This online resource is available free of charge for noncommercial research, study, and private enjoyment.

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