Music in East Africa is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present.

In February 2014 an international seminar on musical dynamics and creativity in Africa was held at Tor Vergata University of Rome. The topic and the approach were strongly influenced by issues that Gerhard Kubik believed should have been addressed for a long time, such as the attention to cultural and social dynamics, with a specific emphasis on the creativity of individuals. Beside his keynote address, Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa includes the contributions presented by scholars from different countries, particularly active in the East African area and in dialogue with Italian researchers who have field experience in the same region. Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa is the first monograph of a series of volumes connected and inspired to the journal Etnografie Sonore / Sound Ethnographies (www.soundethnographies.it), which Giorgio Adamo and his colleagues recently founded. Along with the papers multimedia contents are also available online.

"[The author] revisits the diverse eastern region of Africa, including the modern nations of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda."--

Contains songs drawn from a rich and vast folk heritage from the eastern Africa region.

Focusing on runyege, the main traditional performance genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda. Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender. Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http: //hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.