One of the earliest documented Scottish song collectors actually to go 'into the field' to gather his specimens, was the Highlander Joseph Macdonald. Macdonald emigrated in 1760 - contemporaneously ...with the start of James Macpherson's famous but much disputed Ossian project - and it fell to the Revd. Patrick Macdonald to finish and subsequently publish his younger brother's collection. Karen McAulay traces the complex history of Scottish song collecting, and the publication of major Highland and Lowland collections, over the ensuing 130 years. Looking at sources, authenticity, collecting methodology and format, McAulay places these collections in their cultural context and traces links with contemporary attitudes towards such wide-ranging topics as the embryonic tourism and travel industry; cultural nationalism; fakery and forgery; literary and musical creativity; and the move from antiquarianism and dilettantism towards an increasingly scholarly and didactic tone in the mid-to-late Victorian collections. Attention is given to some of the performance issues raised, either in correspondence or in the paratexts of published collections; and the narrative is interlaced with references to contemporary literary, social and even political history as it affected the collectors themselves. Most significantly, this study demonstrates a resurgence of cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century.
This volume is an interpretive analysis of a collection of 335 song texts treated as primary historical sources. The collection highlights the cultural practices that link music with labor in Sukuma ...communities in northwestern Tanzania.
Bob Dylan's iconic 1962 song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" stands at
the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. A visionary
warning of impending apocalypse, it sets symbolist imagery within a
...structure that recalls a centuries-old form. Written at the height
of the 1960s folk music revival amid the ferment of political
activism, the song strongly resembles-and at the same time
reimagines-a traditional European ballad sung from Scotland to
Italy, known in the English-speaking world as "Lord Randal."
Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of "A Hard
Rain's A-Gonna Fall," considering the meanings of history and
memory in folk cultures and in Dylan's work. He examines how the
ballad tradition to which "Lord Randal" belongs shaped Dylan's song
and how Dylan drew on oral culture to depict the fears and crises
of his own era. Portelli recasts the song as an encounter between
Dylan's despairing vision, which questions the meaning and
direction of history, and the message of resilience and hope for
survival despite history's nightmares found in oral traditions. A
wide-ranging work of oral history, Hard Rain weaves
together interviews from places as varied as Italy, England, and
India with Portelli's autobiographical reflections and critical
analysis, speaking to the enduring appeal of Dylan's music. By
exploring the motley traditions that shaped Dylan's work, this book
casts the distinctiveness and depth of his songwriting in a new
light.
This book documents cross-cultural collaboration between manikay singers from south-east Arnhem Land and the Australian Art Orchestra. The interwoven voices of the project are explored as an example ...of creative intercultural collaboration and a continuation of the manikay tradition.
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.
Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling.
He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center
of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral
performances of ...two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings,
Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters,
while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be
initiated as yogis-a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one
that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world
renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic
traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers
the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village
bard's performance. Three introductory chapters and an interpretive
afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by
linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a
full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds.
Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath
and her work with him. The tales are most profoundly concerned,
Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a
compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on
politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of
Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as
inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates
human existence as a "carnival of parting."
Explores how a folk ballad in southern India transforms the landscape and embeds the deities that are its subject within the social worlds of their devotees.
In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the “American Negro” in several southern African American prisons. Listening to the ...Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes’ field recordings—including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton—contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element—a sonic rhetoric—for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power of folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes’ archive and other repositories of historicized sound. Throughout Listening to the Lomax Archive, there are a number of audio resources for readers to listen to, including songs, oral histories, and radio program excerpts. Each resource is marked with a ? in the text. Visit https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9871097#resources to access this audio content.
