We Shall Not Be Moved: The Trail Blazed by a Song from the U.S. South to Spain and South America details the history of "We Shall Not Be Moved" from its birth as a slave spiritual in the U.S. South ...and its subsequent adoption as a standard hymn by the U.S. labor, civil rights, and farmworker movements, to its singing in the student movement opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain in the 1960s, and finally to its arrival in the South American country of Chile during its experiment with democratic socialism in the early 1970s. The book outlines the role the song has played in each of the movements in which it has been sung and analyzes its dissemination, function, and meaning through a number of different sociological and anthropological lenses.
Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk
and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival
of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A "lean,
...straggly-haired New Yorker," as Time magazine called him,
Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal
training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of
institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white
audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been
denied and overlooked by prior white collectors. By the folk and
blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem
apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his
collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous
absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a
fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a
fabrication-an example of left-wing propaganda and white
interference. A Sound History is the story of an
individual life, an excavation of African American musical
resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural
history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle
decades of the U.S. twentieth century.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1, 100 titles from Penn Press's ...distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This 2004 book traces the changing interpretation of troubadour and trouvere music, a repertoire of songs which have successfully maintained public interest for eight centuries, from the medieval ...chansonniers to contemporary rap renditions. A study of their reception therefore serves to illustrate the development of the modern concept of 'medieval music'. Important stages include sixteenth-century antiquarianism, the Enlightenment synthesis of scholarly and popular traditions and the infusion of archaeology and philology in the nineteenth century, leading to more recent theories on medieval rhythm. More often than now, writers and performers have negotiated a compromise between historical research and a more imaginative approach to envisioning the music of troubadours and trouveres. This book points not so much to a resurrection of medieval music in modern times as to a continuous tradition of interpreting these songs over eight centuries.
In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to ...become so significant for such a wide range of individuals and communities around the world. This engaging study traces different stages in the journey of Auld Lang Syne, from the precursors to the song made famous by Robert Burns to the traditions and rituals that emerged around the song in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including its use as a song of parting, and as a song of New Year. Grant’s painstaking study investigates the origins of these varied traditions, and their impact on the transmission of the song right up to the present day. Grant uses Auld Lang Syne to explore the importance of songs and singing for group identity, arguing that it is the active practice of singing the song in group contexts that has made it so significant for so many. The book offers fascinating insights into the ways that Auld Lang Syne has been received, reused and remixed around the world, concluding with a chapter on more recent versions of the song back in Scotland. This highly original and accessible work will be of great interest to non-expert readers as well as scholars and students of musicology, cultural and social history, social anthropology and Scottish studies. The book contains a wealth of illustrations and includes links to many more, including manuscript sources. Audio examples are included for many of the musical examples. Grant’s extensive bibliography will moreover ease future referencing of the many sources consulted.
This paper surveys the issues, aims and main ideas proposed by M. V. Fox's The Song of Song and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985) summarizing its approach and findings. It considers what we can ...know about the relationship between the Egyptian Songs and the Song of Songs. Six samples of different kinds of songs from both corpora are studied to show how they can be treated as literature and fruitfully compared to each other.
Black Lives Matter and Music Fernando Orejuela, Stephanie Shonekan / Fernando Orejuela, Stephanie Shonekan
2018, 2018-08-10
eBook
Music has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar's "Alright, " J. Cole's "Be Free, " D'Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade, ..." The Game's "Don't Shoot, " Janelle Monae's "Hell You Talmbout, " Usher's "Chains, " and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In this collection of critical studies, contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities we study. From nuanced snapshots of how African American musical genres have flourished in different cities and the role of these genres in local activism, to explorations of musical pedagogy on the American college campus, readers will be challenged to think of how activism and social justice work might appear in American higher education and in academic research. Black Lives Matter and Music provokes us to examine how we teach, how we conduct research, and ultimately, how we should think about the ways that black struggle, liberation, and identity have evolved in the United States and around the world.
The relationship between language and music has much in common - rhythm, structure, sound, metaphor. Exploring the phenomena of song and performance, this book presents a sociolinguistic model for ...analysing them. Based on ethnomusicologist John Blacking's contention that any song performed communally is a 'folk song' regardless of its generic origins, it argues that folk song to a far greater extent than other song genres displays 'communal' or 'inclusive' types of performance. The defining feature of folk song as a multi-modal instantiation of music and language is its participatory nature, making it ideal for sociolinguistic analysis. In this sense, a folk song is the product of specific types of developing social interaction whose major purpose is the construction of a temporally and locally based community. Through repeated instantiations, this can lead to disparate communities of practice, which, over time, develop sociocultural registers and a communal stance towards aspects of meaningful events in everyday lives that become typical of a discourse community.
Nowhere in the art song repertoire dowes one find a more felicitous union than in the 200 or so mélodies of Fauré, Chausson, Duparc, and Debussy. These four composers brought to the magnificent world ...of their contemporaries—Verlaine, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Leconte de Lisle, and others—the delicacy, sensitivity, and voluptuousness that characterize French music from 1865 to 1914. Song by song, this comprehensive study addresses each composer's complete works for solo, voice, and piano. Errors in popular published editions are pointed out and corrected. The full French text is given, followed by Barbara Meister's translation—in many cases, the first English version ever published. These exquisite renderings (not intended to substitute for the French lyrics in performance) vividly convey the sense and mood of the originals. Here the singer will find guidance on interpretation and pronunciation; the accompanist will profit from harmonic analyses intended to further genuine partnership with the vocalist; and the listener will gain a fuller satisfaction from learing how various works fit into their historical and aesthetic context, and in the lives of the poets and composers.
PDF
