Ethnomusicology

In Austronesia--the region that stretches from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east--music plays a vital role in both the construction and expression of social and cultural identities. Yet research into the music of Austronesia has hitherto been sparse. Drawing together contemporary cultural studies and musical analysis, Austronesian Soundscapes will fill this research gap, offering a comprehensive analysis of traditional and contemporary Austronesian music and, at the same time, investigating how music reflects the challenges that Austronesian cultures face in this age of globalization.

"Broken Voices" is the first English-language book on Korea's rich folksong heritage, and the first major study of the effects of Japanese colonialism on the intangible heritage of its former colony. Folksongs and other music traditions continue to be prominent in South Korea, which today is better known for its technological prowess and the Korean Wave of popular entertainment. "Broken Voices" describes how the major repertoires were transmitted and performed in and around Seoul. It sheds light on the training and performance of professional entertainment groups and singers, including kisaeng, the entertainment girls often described as Korean geisha. Personal stories of noted singers describe how the colonial period, the media, the Korean War, and personal networks have affected work opportunities and the standardization of genres. As the object of resentment (and competition) and a source of creative inspiration, the image of Japan has long affected the way in which Koreans interpret their own culture. Ultimately, "Broken Voices" raises an important issue of cultural preservation--traditions that fail to attract practitioners and audiences are unsustainable, so compromises may be unwelcome, but imperative.

This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs of Bollywood to contemporary remixes, summarized by a reflective afterword by popular music scholar Timothy Taylor. The chapters in this volume address the impact of media and technology on contemporary music, the variety of industrial developments and contexts for Indian popular music, and historical trends in popular music development both before and after the Indian Independence in 1947. The book identifies new ways of engaging popular music in India beyond the Bollywood musical canon, and offers several case studies of local and regional styles of music. The contributors address the subcontinent's historical relationships with colonialism, the transnational market economies, local governmental factors, international conventions, and a host of other circumstances to shed light on the development of popular music throughout India.

"Sounding the Indian Ocean" is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be "heard" outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the history and anthropology of the region. Challenging the area studies paradigm--which has long cast Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as separate musical cultures--the book shows how music both forms and crosses boundaries in the Indian Ocean world.

The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. "Vamping the Stage" is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women's voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of "voice" in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women's voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.

The first in-depth, comparative, and interdisciplinary study of indigenous Amazonian musical cultures, "Burst of Breath" showcases new research on the dynamic range of ritual power and social significance of various wind instruments--including flutes, trumpets, clarinets, and whistles--played in sacred rituals and ceremonies in Lowland South America. The editors provide a detailed overview of the historical significance, scientific classification, shamanic and cosmological associations, and changing social meanings of ritual wind instruments within Amazonian cultures. These essays present a wide perspective that goes beyond better-documented areas such as the Upper Xingu and northwest Amazon. Some of the authors explore the ways ritual wind instruments are used to introduce natural sounds into social contexts and to cross boundaries between verbal and nonverbal communication. Others look at how ritual wind instruments and their music enter into local definitions and negotiations of relations between men, women, kin, insiders, and outsiders. Closely considering these instruments in their many roles and contexts--in curing and purification, negotiating relations, connecting mythic ancestors and humans today--this volume reveals the power and complexity of the music at the heart of collective rituals across lowland South America.

This title tells the saga of popular music of Cuban origin, and its major artists from the 1920s to today. Afro-Cuban music derives its richness from the fusion of various cultures. On the island of tobacco, rum and coffee, the marriage of sacred and secular African musical genres with Spanish and French melodies has given rise to numerous genres which have gained international fame: son, rhumba, guaracha, conga, mambo, cha-cha-cha, pachanga, nueva timba. In the US, Cubans have settled alongside other Hispanic communities. In New York, the boogaloo, salsa and Latin jazz, created by musicians such as Machito, Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo emerged from contact with Puerto Ricans and African-Americans, and the rhythms of Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo were integrated into salsa and Latin jazz.

Music has been critical to national identity in Latin America, especially since the worldwide emphasis on nations and cultural identity that followed World War I. Unlike European countries with unified ethnic populations, Latin American nations claimed blended ethnicities--indigenous, Caucasian, African, and Asian--and the process of national stereotyping that began in the 1920s drew on themes of indigenous and African cultures. Composers and performers drew on the folklore and heritage of ethnic and immigrant groups in different nations to produce what became the music representative of different countries. Mexico became the nation of mariachi bands, Argentina the land of the tango, Brazil the country of Samba, and Cuba the island of Afro-Cuban rhythms, including the rhumba. The essays collected here offer a useful introduction to the twin themes of music and national identity and melodies and ethnic identification. The contributors examine a variety of countries where powerful historical movements were shaped intentionally by music.

The 'Special Period' in Cuba was an extended era of economic depression starting in the early 1990s, characterized by the collapse of revolutionary values and social norms, and a way of life conducted by improvised solutions for survival, including hustling and sex-work. During this time there developed a thriving, though constantly harassed and destabilized, clandestine gay scene (known as the 'ambiente'). In the course of eight visits between 1995 and 2007, the last dozen years of Fidel Castro's reign, Moshe Morad became absorbed in Havana's gay scene, where he created a wide social network, attended numerous secret gatherings-from clandestine parties to religious rituals-and observed patterns of behavior and communication. He discovered the role of music in this scene as a marker of identity, a source of queer codifications and identifications, a medium of interaction, an outlet for emotion and a way to escape from a reality of scarcity, oppression and despair. Morad identified and conducted his research in different types of 'musical space,' from illegal clandestine parties held in changing locations, to ballet halls, drag-show bars, private living-rooms and kitchens and santería religious ceremonies. In this important study, the first on the subject, he argues that music plays a central role in providing the physical, emotional, and conceptual spaces which constitute this scene and in the formation of a new hybrid 'gay identity' in Special-Period Cuba.

This book explores the complexity of Cuban dance music and the webs that connect it, musically and historically, to other Caribbean music, to salsa, and to Latin Jazz. Establishing a scholarly foundation for the study of this music, Raul A. Fernandez introduces a set of terms, definitions, and empirical information that allow for a broader, more informed discussion. He presents fascinating musical biographies of prominent performers Cachao López, Mongo Santamaría, Armando Peraza, Patato Valdés, Francisco Aguabella, Cándido Camero, Chocolate Armenteros, and Celia Cruz. Based on interviews that the author conducted over a nine-year period, these profiles provide in-depth assessments of the musicians' substantial contributions to both Afro-Cuban music and Latin Jazz. In addition, Fernandez examines the links between Cuban music and other Caribbean musics; analyzes the musical and poetic foundations of the Cuban son form; addresses the salsa phenomenon; and develops the aesthetic construct of sabor, central to Cuban music.

"The Garland Handbook of Latin American Music" is comprised of essays from The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Volume 2, South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Carribean, (1998). Revised and updated, the essays offer detailed, regional studies of the different musical cultures of Latin America and examine the ways in which music helps to define the identity of this particular area. The second edition has been expanded to cover Haiti, Panama, several more Amerindian musical cultures, and Afro-Peru. Questions for Critical Thinking at the end of each major section guide focus attention on what musical and cultural issues arise when one studies the music of Latin America -- issues that might not occur in the study of other musics of the world. Two audio compact discs offer musical examples of some of the music of Latin America.

The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernization of musical practices in Latin America. He focuses on the intellectual, commercial, musicological, and diplomatic actors that spurred these changes in the region between the 1920s and the 1960s, offering a transnational story based on primary sources from countries in and outside of Latin America. "The Invention of Latin American Music" portrays music as the field where, for the first time, the cultural idea of Latin America disseminated through and beyond the region, connecting the culture and music of the region to the wider, global culture, promoting the now-established notion of Latin America as a single musical market. Palomino explores multiple interconnected narratives throughout, pairing popular and specialist traveling musicians, commercial investments and repertoires, unionization and musicology, and music pedagogy and Pan American diplomacy. Uncovering remarkable transnational networks far from a Western cultural center, "The Invention of Latin American Music" firmly asserts that the democratic legitimacy and massive reach of Latin American identity and modernization explain the spread and success of Latin American music.

Taking as a thread the concept of national identity, this book elucidates the sound transformations that have taken place in the world of the Latin American art song since its appearance in the late nineteenth century to the present day. The book focuses in the art songs of Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Perú, and Colombia. The book addresses the subject of performance practice of the Latin American song and ends with a proposal for its interpretation. The book also addresses the subject of performance practice of the Latin American song and ends with a proposal for its interpretation.

"Living from Music in Salvador" examines the labor of musicians in Salvador da Bahia, widely regarded as Brazil's most African city. Drawing on fieldwork that spans sixteen years, the book explores local musicians' lives as members of a flexible work force, emphasizing questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in relation to professional music making. From clubs and restaurants to Carnaval parades and festival celebrations, to concert stages and recordings, the ability of musicians to earn a living wage is contingent on their navigating industry and societal conditions that are profoundly informed by the entrenched legacies of colonization and slavery.

"The Music of Latin America and the Caribbean" is the first text written on the rich musical heritage of this region specifically for the non-music major. The text is arranged by region, focusing on the major countries/regions (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, etc. in Latin America and Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, etc. in the Caribbean). In each chapter, the author gives a complete history of the region's music, ranging from classical and classical-influenced styles to folk and traditional music to today's popular music.

Discusses contemporary Aboriginal music from powwow to hip hop, the people that make it, and the issues that shape it.

"African American Music: An Introduction" is a collection of thirty essays by leading scholars which survey major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. The work brings together, in a single volume, treatments of African American music that have existed largely independent of each other. The research is based in large part on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, while interpreting their narratives through a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. The book is replete with references to seminal recordings and recording artists, musical transcriptions, photographs, and illustrations that bring the music to life as expressions of human beings. At the same time, it includes the kind of musical specificity that brings clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify the music of African-Americans.

Despite centuries of suppression and oppression, American Indian music survives today as a profound cultural force. "Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow" celebrates in depth the vibrant soundscape of Native North America, from the "heartbeat" of intertribal drums and "warble" of Native flutes to contemporary rock, hip-hop, and electronic music. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with musicians, producers, ethnographers, and record-label owners, author and musician Craig Harris conjures an aural tapestry in which powwow drums and end-blown woodwinds resound alongside operatic and symphonic strains, jazz and reggae, country music, and blues. Harris also punctuates his survey with commentary from such artists as Tom Bee, founder of Native America's first rock band, XIT. Grammy-winner Taj Mahal recalls influential guitarist Jesse Ed Davis; ex-bandmates reflect on Rock Hall of Fame inductee Redbone; Robbie Robertson, Pura Fe, and Rita Coolidge describe how their groundbreaking 1993 album, Music for the Native Americans, evolved; and DJs A Tribe Called Red discuss their melding of archival powwow recordings into fiery dance music. The many voices and sounds that weave throughout Harris's engaging, accessible account portray a sonic landscape that defies stereotyping and continues to expand. Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow is the story--told by those who live it--of resisting a half-millennium of cultural suppression to create new sounds while preserving old roots.

First published in 1980 and now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, this classic compilation of New Mexico folk music is based on thirty-five years of field research by a giant of modern music. Composer John Donald Robb, a passionate aficionado of the traditions of his adopted state, traveled New Mexico recording and transcribing music from the time he arrived in the Southwest in 1941.

"Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America" is a collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States. The contributors explore the intersections between music, modernity, and Indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip-hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music. The essays coalesce around four main themes: innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange. Closely related topics include cosmopolitanism, hybridity, alliance studies, code-switching, and ontologies of sound. Featuring the work of both established and emerging scholars, the collection demonstrates the centrality of music in communicating the complex, diverse lived experience of Indigenous North Americans in the twenty-first century and brings ethnomusicology into dialogue with critical Indigenous studies.

This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to an ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this collection promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods.

Olivia A. Bloechl reconceives the history of French and English music from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century from the perspective of colonial history. She demonstrates how encounters with Native American music in the early years of colonization changed the course of European music history. Colonial wealth provided for sumptuous and elite musical display, and American musical practices, materials, and ideas fed Europeans' taste for exoticism, as in the masques, ballets, and operas discussed here. The gradual association of Native American song with derogatory stereotypes of musical 'savagery' pressed Europeans to distinguish their own music as civilized and rational. Drawing on evidence from a wide array of musical, linguistic, and visual sources, this book demonstrates that early American colonization shaped European music cultures in fundamental ways, and it offers a fresh, politically and transculturally informed approach to the study of music in the early colonial Atlantic world.

Hawaiian Music in Motion explores the performance, reception, transmission, and adaptation of Hawaiian music on board ships and in the islands, revealing the ways both maritime commerce and imperial confrontation facilitated the circulation of popular music in the nineteenth century. James Revell Carr draws on journals and ships' logs to trace the circulation of Hawaiian song and dance worldwide as Hawaiians served aboard American and European ships. He also examines important issues like American minstrelsy in Hawaii and the ways Hawaiians achieved their own ends by capitalizing on Americans' conflicting expectations and fraught discourse around hula and other musical practices.

The islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia are steeped in diverse musical traditions that reach far beyond the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Based on the authors' extensive fieldwork and experiences in Pacific Island cultures, the text draws on interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, vivid illustrations, and insights gained from ongoing participation in Pacific music. The authors use four themes - colonialism, belief systems, musical flows, and the re/presentation of Pacific cultures - to survey the region and draw parallels and contrasts between its various musical traditions.

An anthology of essays on the new syncretic, or 'fusion', styles of music of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific region, who have adopted forms of popular music as an expression of their cultural identity. Its strength lies in the layering up of a sense of community of inquiry, and the fostering of an intertextual head of steam, grounded in a set of empirical, rather than theoretical, concerns. It considers the interrelation between music, popular culture, politics and (national) identity, but also looks at the business aspect of producing and distributing music in the Pacific region.

An exploration of traditional dance and music in Polynesia. The first section studies the individual countries from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand; the second sections is headed 'Comparisons', and includes material on the impact of European music. Illustrated with photographs, drawings of instruments, music examples in notation, and a CD of recordings.

In "Black Diamond Queens," Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

In "A City Called Heaven," Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. "A City Called Heaven" celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

The long-lasting effects of colonialism--racism, political persecution, ethnic extermination, and extreme capitalism--are still felt throughout Latin America. This volume explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to challenge coloniality and its present-day manifestations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, Nelson Varas-Díaz documents how metal musicians and listeners engage in "extreme decolonial dialogues" as a strategy to challenge past and present forms of oppression. Most existing work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the global North. By contrast, this volume explores the region through its own history and experiences, providing a roadmap for this emerging mode of musical analysis by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved.

"Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry" combines interview data with music industry professionals with theoretical frameworks from sociology, mass communication, and marketing to explain and explore the gender differences female artists experience. This book provides a rare lens on the rigid packaging process that transforms female artists of various genres into female pop stars. Stars--and the industry power brokers who make their fortunes--have learned to prioritize sexual attractiveness over talent as they fight a crowded field for movie deals, magazine covers, and fashion lines, let alone record deals. This focus on the female pop star's body as her core asset has resigned many women to being "short term brands," positioned to earn as much money as possible before burning out or aging ungracefully. This book, which includes interview data from music industry insiders, explores the sociological forces that drive women into these tired representations, and the ramifications for the greater social world.

Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of "Indigenous Pop" showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. "Indigenous Pop" vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent. Arranged both chronologically and according to popular generic forms, the book gives Indigenous pop a broad new meaning. In addition to examining the transitive influences of popular music on Indigenous expressive forms, the contributors also show ways that various genres have been shaped by what some have called the "Red Roots" of American-originated musical styles. This recognition of mutual influence extends into the ways of understanding how music provides methodologies for living and survival. Each in-depth essay in the volume zeros in on a single genre and in so doing exposes the extraordinary whole of Native music. This book showcases the range of musical genres to which Native musicians have contributed and the unique ways in which their engagement advances the struggle for justice and continues age-old traditions of creative expression.

While the growing field of scholarship on heavy metal music and its subcultures has produced excellent work on the sounds, scenes, and histories of heavy metal around the world, few works have included a study of gender and sexuality. This cutting-edge volume focuses on queer fans, performers, and spaces within the heavy metal sphere, and demonstrates the importance, pervasiveness, and subcultural significance of queerness to the heavy metal ethos. Heavy metal scholarship has until recently focused almost solely on the roles of heterosexual hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity in fans and performers. The dependence on that narrow dichotomy has limited heavy metal scholarship, resulting in poorly critiqued discussions of gender and sexuality that serve only to underpin the popular imagining of heavy metal as violent, homophobic and inherently masculine. This book queers heavy metal studies, bringing discussions of gender and sexuality in heavy metal out of that poorly theorized dichotomy. In this interdisciplinary work, the author connects new and existing scholarship with a strong ethnographic study of heavy metal's self-identified queer performers and fans in their own words, thus giving them a voice and offering an original and ground-breaking addition to scholarship on popular music, rock, and queer studies.

The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public assume--but not see--their queerness. That these artists cultivated ambiguous sexual personas often reflected an understandable fear, but also a struggle to fulfill personal and professional expectations. Vincent L. Stephens confronts notions of the closet--both coming out and staying in--by analyzing the careers of Liberace, Johnny Mathis, Johnnie Ray, and Little Richard. Appealing to audiences hungry for novelty and exoticism, the four pop icons used performance and queering techniques that ran the gamut. Liberace's flamboyance shared a spectrum with Mathis's intimate sensitivity while Ray's overwrought displays as "Mr. Emotion" seemed worlds apart from Little Richard's raise-the-roof joyousness. As Stephens shows, the quartet not only thrived in an era of gray flannel manhood, they pioneered the ways generations of later musicians would consciously adopt sexual mystery as an appealing and proven route to success.

Popular music grew out of ragtime, vaudeville and the blues to become global mass entertainment. Women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were the original pop divas, yet eighty years after they blazed a trail, have their successors achieved the recognition and affirmation they deserve? Or has the only way to success been to slot into saleable images of the cute baby or sexy chanteuse?

Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century.

"The African Diaspora" presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music.

African-American women composers remain largely unknown despite their important musical contributions. Active in the United States since the late-19th century, several gained national and international recognition during their lifetimes, only to have their work neglected after their deaths. "From Spirituals to Symphonies" is a unique, extensively researched examination of the history and scope of musical composition by African-American women, focusing on the implications of race, gender, and class for their musical creativity, and demonstrating how this important, underappreciated category of American art was shaped by the unique individual personalities of its participants. Their particular times, communities, families, racial heritages, economic circumstances, education, and musical training were all brought to bear on their music, and author Helen Walker-Hill challenges the assumption that black women's only important musical contributions have been in folk, jazz, and pop. With unprecedented detail, she charts the lives and the output of a group of artists whose work has gone unnoticed for too many years.

Powerful and embracive, "The Transformation of Black Music" explores the full spectrum of black musics over the past thousand years as Africans and their descendants have traveled around the globe making celebrated music both in their homelands and throughout the Diaspora. Authors Samuel A. Floyd, Melanie Zeck, and Guthrie Ramsey brilliantly discuss how the music has blossomed, permeated present traditions, and created new practices. As a companion to the ground-breaking "The Power of Black Music," this text brilliantly situates emerging, morphing, and influential black musics in a broader framework of cultural, political, and social histories. This work covers overlooked topics that include classical musicians of African descent, and builds upon the contributions of esteemed predecessors in the field of black music study. Providing a sweeping list of figures rarely included in conventional music history and theory textbooks, the text elucidates the findings of ethnomusicologists, cultural historians, Americanists, Africanists, and anthropologists, and weaves these accounts into a powerful and informative narrative. Filling in critical musical and historical gaps previously ignored, authors Floyd, Zeck, and Ramsey infuse an engaging musical dialogue with a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between black musical genres and mainstream music. The "Transformation of Black Music" will solidify not only the inestimable value of black musics, but also the importance and relevance of black music research to all musical endeavors.