Music - Book chapters

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    Music in the moment, or one day in Buklavu
    (Routledge, 2021-04-20) Stock, Jonathan P. J.; Chiener, Chou
    This chapter presents a range of music that villager or visiting ethnomusicologist alike might encounter on a single day in the village of Buklavu in the mid-2000s. With these various sounds in mind, it's now timely to reflect more theoretically on what this set of usages tell us about the study of music in daily life. In Buklavu and beyond, moments of special musical activity are part of, and are woven into and provide respite from, established daily routines. After lunch, and particularly in the summer months, there's some quiet in Buklavu, as many take a short siesta. It's a moment when a Bunun mother might soothe her infant with soft, comforting singing. In the evenings after work, when the forest was dark, and when waiting onsite some days to clear the weeds that inevitably sprang up around the newly planted saplings, the work teams typically occupied themselves by singing together and making up new songs.
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    Ethics in ethnomusicological research: Historical perspectives, emergent challenges
    (Routledge, 2022-11-30) Stock, Jonathan P. J.
    It is not surprising that ethical research practices are important in ethnomusicology, given the discipline's foundational interest in the study of music making of diverse peoples worldwide and its reliance upon long-term, immersive fieldwork. After describing why ethics remains a key focus and summarizing the distribution of the book into four parts, this chapter provides a disciplinary history for anglophone ethnomusicology of our engagement with ethics. First, in the period from the formation of the discipline from its several disciplinary predecessors, from the 1880s to the 1960s, we see that while ethical issues sometimes arose in the contact between researcher and researched, they were rarely treated as topics of in-depth, direct consideration. By contrast, in a second phase, embracing the 1970s and 1980s, some ethnomusicologists actively recorded the steps they took to ensure that they were able to form ethical relationships with those whom they studied, and so a new sensitivity to such matters begins to take form. This period overlaps with the so-called crisis of representation in anthropology, and in a third historical phase, from the 1990s onward, new ethical concerns accompany the reflexive turn that entered ethnomusicology at that time. The chapter concludes by noting that current global challenges - conflict, decolonization, democracy, education, environment, gender equality, human rights, migration, security, and more - demand an ethical turn that related the production of close-up, nuanced understandings to collaborative action toward sounder social formations.
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    Filming a vocal contest in context: A case study on a form of extemporary sung poetry in Tuscany (Italy)
    (Zhejiang University Press, 2018-07) D'Amico, Leonardo; Hui, Yu; D'Amico, Leonardo; Defrance, Yves
    The contrasto is a traditional performance practice widespread in some rural villages of Maremma, southern Tuscany, Italy. It consists of a vocal challenge between two or more traditional extemporary singer-poets called poeti in ottava rima. The contrasto was traditionally performed in informal convivial gatherings a tavolino (at the table) in peasant societies, but in the last decades it has become a theatrical performance in which the poeti increasingly perform sul palco (on stage) in front of an audience, in planned festivals. My paper is intended to highlight the relevance of the visual dimension in a vocal extemporary performance whose codes are orally-aurally-visually transmitted, in which the interaction between the extemporary poets and the audience tend to condition, influence and sometimes determine, the development of the performance. In such a case, the audiovisual recording becomes an essential research tool allowing to "catch" the visual dimension of this context sensitive performance in its multidimensionality and with all contextual dynamics that it implies.
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    Cumbia music in Colombia: Origins, transformations, and evolution of a coastal music genre
    (Duke University Press, 2013) D'Amico, Leonardo; Fernández L'Hoeste, Héctor; Vila, Pablo
    Cumbia is a musical form that originated in northern Colombia and then spread throughout Latin America and wherever Latin Americans travel and settle. It has become one of the most popular musical genre in the Americas. Its popularity is largely due to its stylistic flexibility. Cumbia absorbs and mixes with the local musical styles it encounters. Known for its appeal to workers, the music takes on different styles and meanings from place to place, and even, as the contributors to this collection show, from person to person. Cumbia is a different music among the working classes of northern Mexico, Latin American immigrants in New York City, Andean migrants to Lima, and upper-class Colombians, who now see the music that they once disdained as a source of national prestige. The contributors to this collection look at particular manifestations of cumbia through their disciplinary lenses of musicology, sociology, history, anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism. Taken together, their essays highlight how intersecting forms of identity such as nation, region, class, race, ethnicity, and gender are negotiated through interaction with the music.
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    Reality and fiction in screened music: Chinese traditional music re-presented in documentary and fiction films
    (Zhejiang University Press, 2019) D'Amico, Leonardo; Hui, Yu; Wild, Stephen