CD-ROM contains: musical examples from the text.

What happens to “local” sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s chaotic and momentous transition to democracy, Wallach takes us to recording studios, music stores, concert venues, university campuses, video shoots, and urban neighborhoods. Integrating ground-level ethnographic research with insights drawn from contemporary cultural theory, he shows that access to globally circulating music and technologies has neither extinguished nor homogenized local music-making in Indonesia. Instead, it has provided young Indonesians with creative possibilities for exploring their identity in a diverse nation undergoing dramatic changes in an increasingly interconnected world. Ultimately, he finds, the unofficial, multicultural nationalism of Indonesian popular music provides a viable alternative to the religious, ethnic, regional, and class-based extremism that continues to threaten unity and democracy in that country.

This book originates from the 2017 edition of the multidisciplinary Modern Heavy Metal Conference, organised in Helsinki, Finland. This collection of seven scholarly essays explores local scenes and identities within heavy metal music from multiple angles, covering a variety of different countries and metal sub-genres from Finland to Indonesia, and from black metal to metalcore. The essays here lay various theoretical perspectives and incorporate vivid examples with metal bands and scenes from all over the world. By exploring themes and discourses that are central to both research and practice, this book appeals to a versatile global readership. It serves the wide academic communities of metal music and popular music studies as well as of many other streams within cultural and social studies. This book also provides the large and active global community of heavy metal fans with a highly interesting package of genre information and country perspectives.

This volume examines how African indigenous popular music is deployed in democracy, politics and for social crusades by African artists. Exploring the role of indigenous African popular music in environmental health communication and gender empowerment, it subsequently focuses on how the music portrays the African future, its use by African youths, and how it is affected by advanced broadcast technologies and the digital media. Indigenous African popular music has long been under-appreciated in communication scholarship. However, understanding the nature and philosophies of indigenous African popular music reveals an untapped diversity which can only be unraveled by the knowledge of myriad cultural backgrounds from which its genres originate. With a particular focus on scholarship from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa, this volume explores how, during the colonial period and post-independence dispensation, indigenous African music genres and their artists were mainstreamed in order to tackle emerging issues, to sensitise Africans about the affairs of their respective nations and to warn African leaders who have failed and are failing African citizenry about the plight of the people. At the same time, indigenous African popular music genres have served as a beacon to the teeming African youths to express their dreams, frustrations about their environments and to represent themselves. This volume explores how, through the advent of new media technologies, indigenous African popular musicians have been working relentlessly for indigenous production, becoming champions of good governance, marginalised population, and repositories of indigenous cultural traditions and cosmologies.

Popular Music in East and Southeast Asia: Sonic (under)Currents and Currencies presents contemporary perspectives of the music discipline in East and Southeast Asia. It considers global influences, national industries, and regional genres with examples from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. This book contains local perspectives on the conceptualisation of music genres, scenes, and industries, offering a comprehensive inter-Asia matrix for popular music studies. This book is suitable for educators and music enthusiasts.

The complex notion of "rasa," as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding. This leaves us with a number of questions: how is rasa expressed musically? Who or what has rasa, and what sorts of musical, psychological, perceptual, and sociological distinctions enter into this determination? How is the vocabulary of rasa structured, and what does this tell us about traditional Javanese music and aesthetics? In this first book on the subject, Rasa provides an entry into Javanese music as it is conceived by the people who know the tradition best: the musicians themselves. In one of the most thorough explorations of local aesthetics to date, author Marc Benamou argues that musical meaning is above all connotative - hence, not only learned, but learnable. Following several years performing and researching Javanese music in the regional and national cultural center of Solo, Indonesia, Benamou untangles the many meanings of rasa as an aesthetic criterion in Javanese music, particularly in court and court-derived gamelan traditions. While acknowledging that certain universal psychological tendencies may inspire parallel interpretations of musical meaning, Rasa demonstrates just how culturally specific such accrued, shared meanings can be.

A wide-flung archipelago lying between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Indonesia is the world's most populous Islamic country. For over two thousand years it was a crossroads on the major trading route between China and India, but it was not brought together into a single entity until the Dutch extended their rule throughout the Netherlands East Indies in the early part of the 20th century. Declaring its independence from the Dutch in 1945, the Republic of Indonesia was ruled by only two regimes over the next half century Throughout the years the country has continued to be dogged by an inefficient bureaucracy and by perpetual problems of corruption. However, since 2004 Indonesia has successfully carried out four direct elections for president, together with an equal number of elections for legislative bodies at all levels of government, and has finally in 2014 elected a president with no ties to either the military or to the previous authoritarian power structure. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Indonesia contains a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Indonesia.