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.
Performing Russia Olson, Laura
2004, 20040731, 2004-07-31, 20030101, Letnik:
7
eBook
This book examines folk music and dance revival movements in Russia, exploring why this folk culture has come to represent Russia, how it has been approached and produced, and why memory and ...tradition, in these particular forms, have taken on particular significance in different periods. Above all it shows how folk "tradition" in Russia is an artificial cultural construct, which is periodically reinvented, and it demonstrates in particular how the "folk revival" has played a key role in strengthening Russian national consciousness in the post-Soviet period.
Laura J. Olson is Assistant Professor of Russian at the University of Colarado, Boulder. She has been researching and performing Slavic folk music since 1987.
'This book offers valuable insights into post-Soviet Russian society, culture, and grass-roots political developments.' - MLR, 102.1, 2007
'Olsen has a talent for clear exposition and cogent summary, as she shows in her survey of the appropriation of folk song in the eighteenth century by the literate cl asses and the main trends in folk-song performance in the nineteenth.'
- MLR, 102.1, 2007
Reds, whites, and blues Roy, William G; Roy, William G
2010., 20100701, 2010, 20100101, Letnik:
45
eBook
Music, and folk music in particular, is often embraced as a form of political expression, a vehicle for bridging or reinforcing social boundaries, and a valuable tool for movements reconfiguring the ...social landscape. Reds, Whites, and Blues examines the political force of folk music, not through the meaning of its lyrics, but through the concrete social activities that make up movements. Drawing from rich archival material, William Roy shows that the People's Songs movement of the 1930s and 40s, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s implemented folk music's social relationships--specifically between those who sang and those who listened--in different ways, achieving different outcomes.
City Folk Walkowitz, Daniel
04/2010, Letnik:
3
eBook
This is the story of English Country Dance, from its 18th century roots in the English cities and countryside, to its transatlantic leap to the U.S. in the 20th century, told by not only a renowned ...historian but also a folk dancer, who has both immersed himself in the rich history of the folk tradition and rehearsed its steps.In City Folk, Daniel J. Walkowitz argues that the history of country and folk dancing in America is deeply intermeshed with that of political liberalism and the 'old left.' He situates folk dancing within surprisingly diverse contexts, from progressive era reform, and playground and school movements, to the changes in consumer culture, and the project of a modernizing, cosmopolitan middle class society.Tracing the spread of folk dancing, with particular emphases on English Country Dance, International Folk Dance, and Contra, Walkowitz connects the history of folk dance to social and international political influences in America. Through archival research, oral histories, and ethnography of dance communities, City Folk allows dancers and dancing bodies to speak. From the norms of the first half of the century, marked strongly by Anglo-Saxon traditions, to the Cold War nationalism of the post-war era, and finally on to the counterculture movements of the 1970s, City Folk injects the riveting history of folk dance in the middle of the story of modern America.
This book gathers international voices from the field of ethnomusicology discussing the socio-political relevance of the discipline. The articles draw from contemporary discourses that take into ...account the role of music and dance in shaping social and political realities. An important field connected to political relevance is heritage, either in connection with the UNESCO or with archives. Ontologies of indigenous groups and their relevance in knowledge production is discussed in ethnomusicology nowadays as well as the possibilities of decolonising the discipline. Two articles from ethno-choreology explore dance from the gender perspective and in the post-socialist political structures. Different approaches from applied ethnomusicology deal with social justice, participatory dialogical practice, and the socio-political relevance of performance. Forced migration is seen as comprehensive topic for future ethnomusicology. The contents of the book mirror influential discourses of ethnomusicology today that will definitely shape the future development of the discipline.
Dance and Authenticity is a fascinating parallel ethnography, showing how the ethnography of dance forms contributes to evolving notions of collective national and political identity in a context of ...unequal power.
Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts starts
from the proposition that folklore-usually thought of in its
historical social context as "oral tradition"-is easily
appropriated and recycled ...into other contexts. That is, writers may
use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an
example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on
depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony.
Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its
traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual
conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote
symbolic unity. Folklore Recycled discusses the larger
issue of folklore being recycled into nonfolk contexts and proceeds
to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead's
novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles
folklore but does so in a manner that examines a number of other
uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century
members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society
and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African
American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of
the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The
writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his
insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana
leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote
government programs and industry. Promoters of "unorthodox"
theories about history have used folklore as historical document.
Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation,
for tourism promotion, for interior decoration, and for political
ends. All of the examples throughout the book demonstrate the
durability and continued relevance of folklore in every context it
appears.
Ruth Finneganâ s Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study ...traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finneganâ s ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. Oral Literature in Africa has been accessed by hundreds of readers in over 60 different countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and numerous other African countries. The digital editions of this book are free to download thanks to the generous support of interested readers and organisations, who made donations using the crowd-funding website Unglue.it. Oral Literature in Africa is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.
Sounding the Color Lineexplores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized ...contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South.
Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners' racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull-between segregationist cultural logics and music's disrespect of racially defined boundaries-is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.
PDF
