Wind bands are common around the world, and the small Mediterranean island of Malta is no exception. Their abundance in Malta testifies to the popularity of the wind band tradition among the locals. It is central to everyday life, particularly during the village feast, which is synonymous with Maltese bands. These ensembles are not made up merely of performers and musical instruments but encapsulate a rich and intricate tradition embedded in the local community. This book describes the history and development of Maltese wind bands, social and political values, the Maltese march, entertainment, and the recording industry. Chapters demonstrate how local communality, partisan political division and rivalry, foreign influences, continuation of past practices as well as the introduction of new ones, and other interests have coalesced to shape the contemporary Maltese wind band tradition.

This book examines the diverse facets of popular music in Malta, paying special attention to għana (Malta’s folk song), the wind band tradition, and modern popular music. Ciantar provides intriguing discussions and examples of how popular music on this small Mediterranean island country interacts with other aspects of the island’s life and culture such as language, religion, history, customs, and politics. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, the book explores the music as it takes place in bars, at festivals, and during village celebrations, and considers how it is talked about in the local press, at group gatherings, and on social media. The ethnography adopted here is that of a native musician and ethnomusicologist and therefore marries the author’s memories with ongoing observations and their evaluation.

Performance in the digital age has undergone a radical shift in which a once ephemeral art form can now be relived, replayed and repeated. Until now, much scholarship has been devoted to the nature of live performance in the digital age; Documenting Performance is the first book to provide a collection of key writings about the process of documenting performance, focused not on questions of liveness or the artistic qualities of documents, but rather on the professional approaches to recovering, preserving and disseminating knowledge of live performance. Through its four-part structure, the volume introduces readers to important writings by international practitioners and scholars on: * the contemporary context for documenting performance * processes of documenting performance * documenting bodies in motion * documenting to create In each, chapters examine the ways performance is documented and the issues arising out of the process of documenting performance. While theorists have argued that performance becomes something else whenever it is documented, the writings reveal how the documents themselves cannot be regarded simply as incomplete remains from live events. The methods for preserving and managing them over time, ensuring easy access of such materials in systematic archives and collections, requires professional attention in its own right. Through the process of documenting performance, artists acquire a different perspective on their own work, audiences can recall specific images and sounds for works they have witnessed in person, and others who did not see the original work can trace the memories of particular events, or use them to gain an understanding of something that would otherwise remain unknown to them and their peers.

The history of broadcasting in Malta through the relics of Rediffusion memories. Rediffusion started operating in Malta in 1935 and came to end in 1975.