Birgit Abels is a cultural musicologist with a primary specialization in the music of the Pacific and Southeast Asian islands. --

Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that explores the global impact of jazz, detailing the evolution of the African American musical tradition as it has been absorbed, transformed, and expanded across the world’s historical, political, and social landscapes. With more than 1,300 annotated entries, this vast compilation covers a broad range of subjects, people, and geographic regions as they relate to interdisciplinary research in jazz studies. The result is a vivid demonstration of how cultures from every corner of the globe have situated jazz—often regarded as America’s classical music—within and beyond their own musical traditions, creating new artistic forms in the process. Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide presents jazz as a common musical language in a global landscape of diverse artistic expression.

Who produces sound and music? And in what spaces, localities and contexts? As the production of sound and music in the 21st Century converges with multimedia, these questions are critically addressed in this new edited collection by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound features 16 brand new articles by leading thinkers from the fields of music, audio engineering, anthropology and media. Innovative and timely, this collection represents scholars from around the world, revisiting established themes such as record production and the construction of genre with new perspectives, as well as exploring issues in cultural and virtual production.

The popularization of radio, television, and the Internet radically transformed musical practice in the Asia Pacific. These technologies bequeathed media broadcasters with a profound authority over the ways we engage with musical culture. Broadcasters use this power to promote distinct cultural traditions, popularize new music, and engage diverse audiences. They also deploy mediated musics as a vehicle for disseminating ideologies, educating the masses, shaping national borders, and promoting political alliances. With original contributions by leading scholars in anthropology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media and cultural studies, the 12 essays this book investigate the processes of broadcasting musical culture in the Asia Pacific. We shift our gaze to the mechanisms of cultural industries in eastern Asia and the Pacific islands to understand how oft-invisible producers, musicians, and technologies facilitate, frame, reproduce, and magnify the reach of local culture.

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.

Unter dem Begriff „kulturelle Musikwissenschaft“ versammeln sich seit über einem halben Jahrhundert eine Reihe musikwissenschaftlicher Visionen, die alle ein gemeinsames Ziel verfolgen: die unermüdliche Suche nach neuen Wegen für ein besseres Musikverständnis. Jüngste Ansätze kultureller Musikwissenschaft begreifen musikalische Aktivitäten als kulturelle Praktiken und versuchen so über die systematische Analyse verbaler und musikalischer Diskurse hinaus zu gelangen. Das Interesse gilt vorrangig der Erforschung unserer intellektuellen Möglichkeiten, die es uns erlauben, uns in physischer, sozialer oder diskursiver Hinsicht die Welt mithilfe von Musik zu erschließen. Daraus ergeben sich aktuelle Untersuchungsschwerpunkte und kritische Denkansätze der kulturellen Musikwissenschaft, deren Geschichte, theoretischen Rahmen und zentrale Konzepte die Autoren des vorliegenden Bandes am Beispiel spezifischer musikalischer Praktiken diskutieren. Dabei wird deutlich, dass es der kulturellen Musikwissenschaft vielmehr darum geht, Fragen aufzuwerfen und Perspektiven zu eröffnen, als Antworten und Fakten festzulegen. Sie lehnt es ab, sich mit Erkenntnissen zufrieden zu geben, entscheidend ist ein fortgesetztes Streben nach neuen Wegen und Annäherungen an die Musik: eine produktive intellektuelle Rastlosigkeit. Der vorliegende Band enthält Beiträge von Birgit Abels, Charissa Granger, Lawrence Kramer, John Richardson und Eva-Maria van Straaten. The term “cultural musicology” has been around for more than half a century, and it has harbored a number of musicological visions which share one fundamental goal: broadly speaking, aspiring to better understand music and remaining eager to find ever-new ways to do so. Recent cultural musicology seeks to understand musical activities as cultural practices in a manner that aims to reach beyond the systematic analysis of verbal and musical – musicked – discourse and of the conditions in which it is enacted. Its primary interest is in exploring our primarily intellectual possibilities to comprise of musicking as epistemologies through which humans musically relate to, and make sense of, their surrounding world in a physical, social, and discursive sense. From this, a few key areas of inquiry emerge, and this edited volume presents a first-of-its-kind exploration of current critical thinking and research in and about cultural musicology. In exploring specific musical practices, the contributors discuss the (hi)stories, theoretical framework, and central concepts of current cultural musicology. In-between the lines, it becomes clear that cultural musicology is about looking for questions and perspectives rather than answers and presumed facts, about refusing to be content with anything that may be found along the way, and about remaining eager to discover new approaches and ways to think about music: about intellectual restlessness, and embracing it. This edited volume includes contributions from Birgit Abels, Charissa Granger, Lawrence Kramer, John Richardson, and Eva-Maria van Straaten.

An autobiography by Henry 'Seaman' Dan, which explores his working life as musician, pearl-shell diver, boat skipper, drover, prospector and taxi driver.