Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java: Bamboo Murmurs explores how current residents of Bandung, Indonesia, have (re-)adopted bamboo musical instruments to forge meaningful bridges between their past and present—between traditional and modern values. Although it focuses specifically on Bandung, the cosmopolitan capital city of West Java, the book grapples with ongoing issues of global significance, including musical environmentalism, heavy metal music, the effects of first-world hegemonies on developing countries, and cultural “authenticity.” Bamboo music's association with the Sundanese landscape, old agricultural ceremonies, and participatory music making, as well as its adaptability to modern society, make it a fertile site for an ecomusicological study.

"Providing numerous case studies ranging across the Indian Ocean--across disparate time periods and historical and ethnographic approaches--Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape brings together the disciplines of Indian Ocean and music studies. As glimpsed above in the Sufi and Catholic networks connecting South and Southeast Asia, the chapters in this volume explore how music helps materialize networks of connection across the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and in several of its distinct locales. Our focus is not simply the well-worn tropes of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism, however, nor a definition of the IOR as a site for the harmonious mixing of populations (though some of our chapters do one or both of these). Rather, we show how music contributes to placemaking in distinct 'Indian Ocean worlds' (Srinivas et al. 2020). Instead of defining music's value in its ability to provide either narratives of identity formation or the celebration of mixture, Sounding the Indian Ocean explores the role music plays in both boundary-formation and boundary-crossing in Indian Ocean contexts, past and present"--

Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada draws on a collection of over 600 songs relating to Atlantic Canadian disasters from 1891 up until the present and describes the characteristics that define them as intangible memorials. The book demonstrates the relationship between vernacular memorials – informal memorials collectively and spontaneously created from a variety of objects by the general public – and disaster songs. The author identifies the features that define vernacular memorials and applies them to disaster songs: spontaneity, ephemerality, importance of place, motivations and meaning-making, content, as well as the role of media in inspiring and disseminating memorials and songs. Visit the companion website: www.disastersongs.ca.

Dhrupad is believed to be the oldest style of classical vocal music performed today in North India. This detailed study of the genre considers the relationship between the oral tradition, its transmission from generation to generation, and its re-creation in performance. There is an overview of the historical development of the dhrupad tradition and its performance style from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and of the musical lineages that carried it forward into the twentieth century, followed by analyses of performance techniques, processes and styles. The authors examine the relationship between the structures provided by tradition and their realization by the performer to throw light on the nature of tradition and creativity in Indian music; and the book ends with an account of the ‘revival’ movement of the late twentieth century that re-established the genre in new contexts. Augmented with an analytical transcription of a complete dhrupad performance, this is the first book-length study of an Indian vocal genre to be co-authored by an Indian practitioner and a Western musicologist.

This book demonstrates the processes of intercultural musical collaboration and how these processes contribute to facilitating positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. Each of the chapters in this edited collection examines specific examples in diverse contexts, and reflects on key issues that underpin musical exchanges, including the benefits and challenges of intercultural music making. The collection demonstrates how these musical collaborations allow Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to work together, to learn from each other, and to improve and strengthen their relationships. The metaphor of the “third space” of intercultural music making is interwoven in different ways throughout this volume. While focusing on Indigenous Australian/non-Indigenous intercultural musical collaboration, the book will be of interest globally as a resource for scholars and postgraduate students exploring intercultural musical communication in countries with histories of colonisation, such as New Zealand and Canada.

Music and Temple Ritual in South India: Performing for Śiva documents the musical practices of the periya mēḷam, a South Indian instrumental ensemble of professional musicians who perform during the rituals and festivals of high-caste (Brahmanical) Tamil Hindu temples dedicated to the Pan-Indian god Śiva – an important patron of music since at least the tenth century. It explores the ways in which music and ritual are mutually constitutive, illuminating the cultural logics whereby performing and listening are integral to the kinetic, sensory and affective experiences that enable, shape and stimulate ritual communication in present-day devotional Hinduism. More than a rich and vivid ethnographic description of a local tradition, the book also develops a comprehensive and original analytical model, in which music is understood as both a situated and creative activity, and where the fluid relationship between humans and non-humans, in this case divine beings, is truly taken into consideration.

This panorama is a pictorial view of music instruments starting with older bamboo and other instruments of undetermined age, going on two types of gongs-flat in Northern Luzon and bossed in the South. These two areas may be viewed as pocket cultures comparable to other pocket cultures in Borneo, Sumatra, other islands in Southeast Asia and the mountain regions south of and including Yunnan province of China, thus placing the music of Luzon and Mindanao in a larger geographical context. For example, mouth organs in Borneo and continental Southeast Asia are absent in the Philippines, where, however, separate pipes of panpipes are on occasion still being played by groups of boys among the Kalingga of Luzon. The musical elements of drone and melody identified in two lutes in Borneo or ensembles in Yunnan find examples in two players of the same tube zither in Mindanao and flat gongs in Luzon. The nearly 500 photographs in the book are almost all taken in the field, showing details of making and playing bamboo buzzers, jaw harps, zithers, percussion tubes, flutes and other instruments. Manners of tapping and sliding with the hands on flat gongs differ from beating them with sticks. Examples of big bossed gongs with wide rims (agung) struck with a mallet on the boss and a stick on the rim show affinities with a manner of playing bronze drums in Yunnan. In North Luzon, men and women dancing in circles with outstretched hands distinguish them from solo dancers with minimum body movements in the South.