The complex legacy of Mexico's ethnic past and geographic location have shaped the country and its culture. In Music in Mexico, Alejandro L. Madrid uses extensive fieldwork, interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations to guide students through modern-day music practices. Applying three themes-ethnic identity, migration, and media influences-the text explores the music that Mexicans grow up listening to and shows how these traditions are the result of long-standing transnational dialogues. Packaged with a 40-minute audio CD containing musical examples, the text features numerous listening activities that engage students with the music. Music in Mexico is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional material to accompany each study.

Mexico, with its elements of European and Indian cultures and diverse regional styles, has a vigorous musical tradition that influences popular music far beyond the country's borders. Since the 1920s, films and records have disseminated Mexican music throughout Latin America and the United States. This book examines the development of Mexico's popular and commercial music from the colonial period to the present. Through interviews with leading composers, promoters, and musicologists the author demonstrates how the mass entertainment media--radio, records, television, and films--influence and largely determine popular tastes in music. He shows how governmental actions and nationalism have affected Mexican music, before and since the Revolution of 1910. The author traces the complex international influences that shaped such major Mexican types of music as corridos and ranchera and norteña songs; mariachi, marimba, and norteño ensembles; and dances like the jarabe and the huapango. He finds the roots of Mexican music in Spanish folk songs and dances and European drawing-room dances, transformed by Indian traditions and African rhythms into a distinctive national style that emerged in the twentieth century. He discusses several foreign styles of music--such as the tango, the fox-trot, and the cha-cha--that have been popular in Mexico. An appendix written by Elizabeth H. Heist examines the recent emergence of Chicano music in the border area of the southwestern United States.

This volume covers the development of modern music from World War I to the present. Specific musical responses can be identified from the prevailing social, economic and political circumstances. Since World War II musical languages have tended to converge, with developments in technology and communications. Robert P. Morgan is the author of Twentieth Century Music, and co-editor of Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives.