Gila Flam offers a penetrating insider's look at a musical culture previously unexplored---the song repertoire created and performed in the Lodz ghetto of Poland. Drawing on interviews with survivors and on library and archival materials, the author illustrates the general themes of the Lodz repertoire and explores the nature of Holocaust song. Most of the songs are presented here for the first time. "An extremely accurate and valuable work. There is nothing like it in either the extensive holocaust literature or the ethnomusicology literature." -- Mark Slobin, author of Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate

An exemplary investigation into music and sustainability, Singing and Survival tells the story of how music helped the Rapanui people of Easter Island to preserve their unique cultural heritage. Easter Island (or Rapanui), known for the iconic headstones (moai) that dot the island landscape, has a remarkable and enduring presence in global popular culture where it has been portrayed as a place of mystery and fascination, and as a case study in societal collapse. These portrayals often overlook the remarkable survival of the Rapanui people who rebounded from a critically diminished population of just 110 people in the late nineteenth century to what is now a vibrant community where indigenous language and cultural practices have been preserved for future generations. This cultural revival has drawn on a diversity of historical and contemporary influences: indigenous heritage, colonial and missionary influences from South America, and cultural imports from other Polynesian islands, as well as from tourism and global popular culture. The impact of these influences can be perceived in the island's contemporary music culture. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Easter Island music, with individual chapters devoted to the various streams of cultural influence from which the Rapanui people have drawn to rebuild and reinforce their music, their performances, their language and their presence in the world. In doing so, it provides a counterpoint to deficit discourses of collapse, destruction and disappearance to which the Rapanui people have historically been subjected.

This is a thorough presentation of the basic elements of singing, including vocal production, training, breathing, posture and diet. It offers help for the aspiring rock singer, who cannot, or will not, take lessons.

First published in the US in 1995. This is an account of the author's three years imprisonment in a Japanese camp on Sumatra during WWII, her childhood before the war on the island of Tarakan and her escape from Tarakan with her fathers and sisters. It tells of the uplifting influence of a singing group in the camp comprised of Dutch Australian and English women prisoners. A television documentary entitled 'Song of Survival' was based on events recorded in this book. Includes an index.

This “novel of extraordinary humanity” (Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing) from New York Times bestselling author Vaddey Ratner reveals “the endless ways that families can be forged and broken hearts held” (Chicago Tribune) as a young woman begins an odyssey to discover the truth about her missing father. Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as “the Old Musician” and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving to mend their still beloved country. She meets a young doctor who begins to open her heart, confronts her long-buried memories, and prepares to learn her father’s fate. Meanwhile, the Old Musician, who earns his modest keep playing ceremonial music at a temple, awaits Teera’s visit. He will have to confess the bonds he shared with her parents, the passion with which they all embraced the Khmer Rouge’s illusory promise of a democratic society, and the truth about her father’s end. A love story for things lost and restored, a lyrical hymn to the power of forgiveness, Music of the Ghosts is a “sensitive portrait of the inheritance of survival” (USA TODAY) and a journey through the embattled geography of the heart where love can be reborn.