This book provides a practical introduction to researching and performing early Anglo-American secular music and dance with attention to their place in society. Supporting growing interest among scholars and performers spanning numerous disciplines, this book contributes quality new scholarship to spur further research on this overshadowed period of American music and dance. Organized in three parts, the chapters offer methodological and interpretative guidance and model varied approaches to contemporary scholarship. The first part introduces important bibliographic tools and models their use in focused examinations of individual objects of material musical culture. The second part illustrates methods of situating dance and its music in early American society as relevant to scholars working in multiple disciplines. The third part examines contemporary performance of early American music and dance from three distinct perspectives ranging from ethnomusicological fieldwork and phenomenology to the theatrical stage. Dedicated to scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller, this volume builds on her legacy of foundational contributions to the study of early American secular music, dance, and society. It provides an essential resource for all those researching and performing music and dance from the revolutionary era through the early nineteenth century.

Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 2, Transnational Discourses of Global Popular Music Studies, covers the geographical areas of North America: United States and Canada; Central America, Caribbean, and South America/Latin America; Europe; Africa and Middle East; Asia; and areas of Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Islands. It provides over twenty-four hundred annotated bibliographic entries covering discourses of extensive research that extend beyond the borders of the United States and includes annotated entries to books, book series, book chapters, edited volumes, special documentaries and programming, scholarly journal essays, and other resources that focus on the creative and artistic flows of global popular music.

This book brings together a trail blazing collection of music scholars to explore the intersections, frictions, and resonances between nineteenth-century American music and history. In the nineteenth-century United States, music was everywhere: from places of worship to the workplace, the parlor, the stage, and the street. Music accompanied paths of reform, supported both radical and conservative agendas, and helped Americans of all kinds to express patriotism, identity and resistance. The chapters in this volume unsettle longstanding assumptions about the types of music that were important to nineteenth-century Americans, where that music was performed, why, and for whom. And they underline the ability of music and musical practices to shed new light on questions of race, class, gender, and memorialization in the United States across the long nineteenth century. The volume offers insights for how and why to integrate nineteenth-century American music into history classrooms and highlights the need to embrace the challenge of interdisciplinary work to realize its greatest benefits. This book will be relevant for students and researchers of American music history, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary historical analysis. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History.

"The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing shows in abundant detail that singing with others is thriving. Using an array of interdisciplinary methods, chapter authors prioritize participation rather than performance and provide finely grained accounts of group singing in community, music therapy, religious, and music education settings. Themes associated with protest, incarceration, nation, hymnody, group bonding, identity, and inclusivity infuse the 47 chapters. Written almost wholly during the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic, the Handbook features a section dedicated to collective singing facilitated by audiovisual or communications media (mediated singing), some of it quarantine-mandated. The last of eight substantial sections is a repository of new theories about how group singing practices work. Throughout, the authors problematize the limitations inherited from the western European choral music tradition and report on workable new remedies to counter those constraints"--

This book develops an innovative approach for understanding the relationship between music and words in the works of five major composers of the English Renaissance: John Taverner, Christopher Tye, John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis, and William Byrd. Focusing on these composers’ settings of the Latin Credo, the author shows how musical and linguistic emphasis can be used to understand the composers’ theological interpretations of the text. By combining markedness theory with style analysis, this study demonstrates that the composers used their musical skills to not only create beautiful music but also raise certain elements of the text to the foreground of perception and relegate others to supporting roles, inviting listeners to experience the familiar words of the liturgy in unique ways. Providing new insights into the changing musical and religious world of the sixteenth century, this book is relevant to anyone researching music or religion in early modern England, while offering a flexible and widely adaptable tool for the analysis of musical-textual relationships.

This study uncovers the musical foundations and performance suggestions of books of hours, guides to prayer that were the most popular and widespread books of the late Middle Ages. Exploring a variety of musical genres and sections of books of hours with musical implications, this book presents a richly textured sound world gleaned from dozens of extant manuscript sources from fifteenth-century France. It offers the first overview of the musical content of these handbooks to liturgy and devotional prayer, together with cues that show scribal awareness for the articulation of sacred plainchants. Although books of hours lack musical notation, this survey elucidates the full range of musical genres and styles suggested both within and beyond the liturgical offices prescribed in books of hours. Privileging sound and ritual enactment in the experience of the hours, the survey complements studies of visual imagery that have dominated the category. The book’s interdisciplinary approach within a musical context, and beautiful full-color illustrations, will attract not only specialists in musicology, liturgy, and late medieval studies, but also those more broadly interested in the history of the book, memory, performance studies, and art history.

What does a one hour contemporary orchestral piece by Georg Friedrich Haas have in common with a series of glitch-noise electronic tracks by Pan Sonic? This book proposes that, despite their differences, they share a particular understanding of sound that is found across several quite distinct genres of contemporary art music: the ecstatic-materialist perspective. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is considered as a material mass or element, unfolding in time, encountered by a listener, for whom the experience of that sound exceeds the purely sonic without becoming entirely divorced from its materiality. It is "material" by virtue of the focus on the texture, consistency, and density of sound; it is "ecstatic" in the etymological sense, that is to say that the experience of this sound involves an instability; an inclination to depart from material appearance, an ephemeral and transitory impulse in the very perception of sound to something beyond – but still related to – it. By examining musical pieces from spectralism to electroacoustic domains, from minimalism to glitch electronica and dubstep, this book identifies the key intrinsic characteristics of this musical perspective. To fully account for this perspective on sonic experience, listener feedback and interviews with composers and performers are also incorporated. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is the common territory where composers, sound artists, performers, and listeners converge.