Investigates the significance of a range of digital technologies in contemporary Indigenous musical performance, exploring interdisciplinary issues of music production, representation, and transmission.

The Sámi are Europe’s only recognized indigenous people living across regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola peninsula. The subjects of a history of Christianization, land dispossession, and cultural assimilation, the Sámi have through their self-organization since World War II worked towards Sámi political self-determination across the Nordic states and helped forge a global indigenous community. Accompanying this process was the emergence of a Sámi music scene, in which the revival of the distinct and formerly suppressed unaccompanied vocal tradition of joik was central. Through joiking with instrumental accompaniment, incorporating joik into forms of popular music, performing on stage and releasing recordings, Sámi musicians have played a key role in articulating a Sámi identity, strengthening Sámi languages, and reviving a nature-based cosmology. Thomas Hilder offers the first book-length study of this diverse and dynamic music scene and its intersection with the politics of indigeneity. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Hilder provides portraits of numerous Sámi musicians, studies the significance of Sámi festivals, analyzes the emergence of a Sámi recording industry, and examines musical projects and cultural institutions that have sought to strengthen the transmission of Sámi music. Through his engaging narrative, Hilder discusses a wide range of issues—revival, sovereignty, time, environment, repatriation and cosmopolitanism—to highlight the myriad ways in which Sámi musical performance helps shape notions of national belonging, transnational activism, and processes of democracy in the Nordic peninsula. Sámi Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe will not only appeal to enthusiasts of Nordic music, but, by drawing on current interdisciplinary debates, will also speak to a wider audience interested in the interplay of music and politics. Unearthing the challenges, contradictions and potentials presented by international indigenous politics, Hilder demonstrates the significance of this unique musical scene for the wider cultural and political transformations in twenty-first-century Europe and global modernity.

Teaching Electronic Music: Cultural, Creative, and Analytical Perspectives offers innovative and practical techniques for teaching electronic music in a wide range of classroom settings. Across a dozen essays, an array of contributors—including practitioners in musicology, art history, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance, and composition—reflect on the challenges of teaching electronic music, highlighting pedagogical strategies while addressing questions such as: What can instructors do to expand and diversify musical knowledge? Can the study of electronic music foster critical reflection on technology? What are the implications of a digital culture that allows so many to be producers of music? How can instructors engage students in creative experimentation with sound? Electronic music presents unique possibilities and challenges to instructors of music history courses, calling for careful attention to creative curricula, historiographies, repertoires, and practices. Teaching Electronic Music features practical models of instruction as well as paths for further inquiry, identifying untapped methodological directions with broad interest and wide applicability.

Papers from the conference "Contested Frequencies," held at the University of Richmond (Va.) in 2019.

What does sovereignty sound like? Sonic Sovereignty considers how contemporary Indigenous musicians champion self-determination through musical expression in Canada and the United States. The framework of “sonic sovereignty” connects self-definition, collective determination, and Indigenous land rematriation to the immediate and long-lasting effects of expressive culture. Liz Przybylski covers online and offline media spaces, following musicians and producers as they, and their music, circulate across broadcast and online networks. Przybylski documents and reflects on shifts in both the music industry and political landscape over the course of a decade: as the ways in which people listen to, consume, and interact with popular music have radically changed, extensive public conversations have flourished around contemporary Indigenous culture, settler responsibility, Indigenous leadership, and decolonial futures. Sonic Sovereignty encourages us to experiment with temporal possibilities of listening by detailing moments when a sample, lyric, or musical reference moves a listener out of normative time. Nonlinear storytelling practices from hip hop music and other North American Indigenous sonic practices inform these generative listenings. The musical readings presented in this book thus explore how musicians use tools to help listeners embrace rupture, and how out-of-time listening creates decolonial possibilities.

Cultural preservation, linguistic revitalization, intellectual heritage, and environmental sustainability became central to Indigenous movements in Mexico and Central America after 1992. While the emergence of these issues triggered important conversations, none to date have examined the role that new media has played in accomplishing their objectives. Indigenous Interfaces provides the first thorough examination of indigeneity at the interface of cyberspace. Correspondingly, it examines the impact of new media on the struggles for self-determination that Indigenous peoples undergo in Mexico and Central America. The volume’s contributors highlight the fresh approaches that Mesoamerica’s Indigenous peoples have given to new media—from YouTubing Maya rock music to hashtagging in Zapotec. Together, they argue that these cyberspatial activities both maintain tradition and ensure its continuity. Without considering the implications of new technologies, Indigenous Interfaces argues, twenty-first-century indigeneity in Mexico and Central America cannot be successfully documented, evaluated, and comprehended. Indigenous Interfaces rejects the myth that indigeneity and information technology are incompatible through its compelling analysis of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and new media. The volume illustrates how Indigenous peoples are selectively and strategically choosing to interface with cybertechnology, highlights Indigenous interpretations of new media, and brings to center Indigenous communities who are resetting modes of communication and redirecting the flow of information. It convincingly argues that interfacing with traditional technologies simultaneously with new media gives Indigenous peoples an edge on the claim to autonomous and sovereign ways of being Indigenous in the twenty-first century. Contributors Arturo Arias Debra A. Castillo Gloria Elizabeth Chacón Adam W. Coon Emiliana Cruz Tajëëw Díaz Robles Mauricio Espinoza Alicia Ivonne Estrada Jennifer Gómez Menjívar Sue P. Haglund Brook Danielle Lillehaugen Paul Joseph López Oro Rita M. Palacios Gabriela Spears-Rico Paul Worley

For decades, ethnomusicologists across the world have considered how to effect positive change for the communities they work with when faced with challenging social, political, and environmental issues and institutional structures. The two-volume collection Transforming Ethnomusicology aims to deepen and broaden dialogues about social engagement within the discipline of ethnomusicology. Its many voices, from scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds and working in a variety of cultural situations, explore how ethnomusicology can transform the world by contributing to social change. Through their illuminating case studies and reflections, they at the same time transform how we understand ethnomusicology as a discipline. The second volume of Transforming Ethnomusicology provides much-needed new examinations of social and ecological concerns and centers around the recognition that colonial and environmental damages are intertwined and grounded in the failure to respect the land and its peoples. Featuring Indigenous perspectives from America, Australia, and South Africa, this volume critically engages with the question how ethnomusicologists can support marginalized communities in sustaining their musical knowledges and threatened geographies within institutional and historically-grown structures that have long worked toward their destruction. The volume ends with a radical model for change that is based on a profound rethinking of established structures of knowledge.