"Through the close analysis of musical performance and tradition, the scholarly contributiors to Island Songs provide a global review of how island songs, their lyrics, and their singers engage with the challenges of modernity, migration, and social change uncovering common patterns despite the diversity and local character of their subjects"--Page 4 of cover.

'Alex Wheatle writes from a place of honesty and passion with the full knowledge and understanding that change can only happen through words and actions.’ Steve McQueen. Alex Wheatle's life is the basis for an episode of McQueen's Small Axe airing November 2020. 'Grabs your heart, not with pity but wonder that such beauty can come from such a life' The Independent ‘She wondered what kind of world she had brought her two daughters into – the tedious cycle of rural Jamaican life. No chance for them to set off upon adventures and see the outside world.’ But sisters Jenny and Hortense Rodney, descendants of the fierce Maroon people, do get to see the outside world, and Island Songs is their story. Growing up in rural Claremont, working amid the hustle and bustle, lawn parties and ‘houses of joy’ in Trenchtown, the two sisters take a chance and move to England with their husbands, that far-off land of riches, where they settle down to motherhood among the jazz cafés and bleak streets of Brixton. A hauntingly beautifully written evocation of twentieth-century Jamaica, its history and traditions, Island Songs is an epic of love, laughter and sorely tested family loyalties. Many stories are told, but many more secrets are never revealed.

"Larry W. Jones has written over 3,500 song lyrics with island based themes. Most are in the sytle of the "hapa haole" return-to-paradise tradition of the golden years of Territorial Hawaii"--Volume 7, title page verso

Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a framework to fully contextualize and understand this process of music curation.

Small Musical Worlds in the Mediterranean is a pioneering book-length study of the complex topics of identity, ethnicity and global processes in children’s musical lives in the Republic of Cyprus - a Mediterranean country during its post-colonial era. What is it about this country’s musical enculturation that made musical identity such a potent element in Greek Cypriot children’s worlds? How is history, tradition, modernity, ethnic fluidity, syncretism and diversification in the Mediterranean negotiated in the construction of musical ’self’ and ’other’ in children’s daily lives? This book, through a journey of ’fieldwork at home’, discusses how children select, reject, reproduce and transform meanings and create new ones at the micro-level of their lives through which individuals and groups define themselves and others. Towards this exploration, musical identity in childhood is discussed in terms of cultural production and reproduction, human expression, inter-relating and learning. Ethnographic vignettes of children’s musical practices and direct words add depth and humour to the flow of the book. This study is a synthesis of ethnomusicology, musical anthropology, education and folklore in which the author effectively weaves together theories of musical enculturation and identity, sociocultural learning and human agency. The book will be invaluable to scholars interested in musical enculturation, musical identities, children’s contextual musical practices, ethnicity, globalization studies, music education and Mediterranean studies.

The study moves from tradition to modernity, explores a range of topics such as: song life in the traditional village; rural–urban tensions; local min’yo ‘preservation societies’; the effects of national and local min’yo contests; the ‘new folk song’ phenomenon; min’yo and tourism; folk song bars; recruitment of professionals; min’yo’s interaction with enka popular songs and with Western-derived foku songu; the impact of mass mediation; and min’yo’s role in maintaining or creating local identity. The book contains a plate section, musical examples, and a compact disc.

Written from the perspective of a scholar and performer, Traditional Music and Irish Society investigates the relation of traditional music to Irish modernity. The opening chapter integrates a thorough survey of the early sources of Irish music with recent work on Irish social history in the eighteenth century to explore the question of the antiquity of the tradition and the class locations of its origins. Dowling argues in the second chapter that the formation of what is today called Irish traditional music occurred alongside the economic and political modernization of European society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dowling goes on to illustrate the public discourse on music during the Irish revival in newspapers and journals from the 1880s to the First World War, also drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan to place the field of music within the public sphere of nationalist politics and cultural revival in these decades. The situation of music and song in the Irish literary revival is then reflected and interpreted in the life and work of James Joyce, and Dowling includes treatment of Joyce’s short stories A Mother and The Dead and the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses. Dowling conducted field work with Northern Irish musicians during 2004 and 2005, and also reflects directly on his own experience performing and working with musicians and arts organizations in order to conclude with an assessment of the current state of traditional music and cultural negotiation in Northern Ireland in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

This textbook prepares Music Education and Choral Conducting majors to be effective middle school and high school choral music teachers. It fully integrates the choral field experience for hands-on learning and reflection and allows the student to observe and teach the book’s principles. It covers the essentials of vocal development, auditions, literature, rehearsals, classroom management, and practical matters.