The complex legacy of Mexico's ethnic past and geographic location have shaped the country and its culture. In Music in Mexico, Alejandro L. Madrid uses extensive fieldwork, interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations to guide students through modern-day music practices. Applying three themes-ethnic identity, migration, and media influences-the text explores the music that Mexicans grow up listening to and shows how these traditions are the result of long-standing transnational dialogues. Packaged with a 40-minute audio CD containing musical examples, the text features numerous listening activities that engage students with the music. Music in Mexico is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional material to accompany each study.

Mexico, with its elements of European and Indian cultures and diverse regional styles, has a vigorous musical tradition that influences popular music far beyond the country's borders. Since the 1920s, films and records have disseminated Mexican music throughout Latin America and the United States. This book examines the development of Mexico's popular and commercial music from the colonial period to the present. Through interviews with leading composers, promoters, and musicologists the author demonstrates how the mass entertainment media--radio, records, television, and films--influence and largely determine popular tastes in music. He shows how governmental actions and nationalism have affected Mexican music, before and since the Revolution of 1910. The author traces the complex international influences that shaped such major Mexican types of music as corridos and ranchera and norteña songs; mariachi, marimba, and norteño ensembles; and dances like the jarabe and the huapango. He finds the roots of Mexican music in Spanish folk songs and dances and European drawing-room dances, transformed by Indian traditions and African rhythms into a distinctive national style that emerged in the twentieth century. He discusses several foreign styles of music--such as the tango, the fox-trot, and the cha-cha--that have been popular in Mexico. An appendix written by Elizabeth H. Heist examines the recent emergence of Chicano music in the border area of the southwestern United States.

Between Norteño and Tejano Conjunto analyzes the origin, evolution, and dissemination of the norteño and tejano conjunto. This group represents a marginalized local identity that was transformed primarily into an identity of the northeast. It then gave way to the whole of northern México and the American Southwest, and was later assimilated internationally as a mainstream genre. This book provides a long-term historic vision of conjunto and the various musical forms it uses, such as polka, corrido, or canción (song), and, more recently, bolero and cumbia, as well as its transformations and contributions to other musical cultures.

The history of Mexico is spoken in the voice of ordinary people. In rhymed verse and mariachi song, in letters of romance and whispered words in the cantina, the heart and soul of a nation is revealed in all its intimacy and authenticity. Mexico in Verse, edited by Stephen Neufeld and Michael Matthews, examines Mexican history through its poetry and music, the spoken and the written word. Focusing on modern Mexico, from 1840 to the 1980s, this volume examines the cultural venues in which people articulated their understanding of the social, political, and economic change they witnessed taking place during times of tremendous upheaval, such as the Mexican-American War, the Porfiriato, and the Mexican Revolution. The words of diverse peoples—people of the street, of the field, of the cantinas—reveal the development of the modern nation. Neufeld and Matthews have chosen sources so far unexplored by Mexicanist scholars in order to investigate the ways that individuals interpreted—whether resisting or reinforcing—official narratives about formative historical moments. The contributors offer new research that reveals how different social groups interpreted and understood the Mexican experience. The collected essays cover a wide range of topics: military life, railroad accidents, religious upheaval, children’s literature, alcohol consumption, and the 1985 earthquake. Each chapter provides a translated song or poem that encourages readers to participate in the interpretive practice of historical research and cultural scholarship. In this regard, Mexico in Verse serves both as a volume of collected essays and as a classroom-ready primary document reader.

The Course of Mexican Music provides students with a cohesive introductory understanding of the scope and influence of Mexican music. The textbook highlights individual musical examples as a means of exploring the processes of selection that led to specific musical styles in different times and places, with a supporting companion website with audio and video tracks helping to reinforce readers' understanding of key concepts. The aim is for students to learn an exemplary body of music as a window for understanding Mexican music, history and culture in a manner that reveals its importance well beyond the borders of that nation.

We swim in turquoise water and build castles on the beach. We climb up rocks or watch from docks, To see the gray whales breach.

Books in Mel Bay's Acoustic Guitar category are written to be played fingerstyle on either nylon or steel string guitars. the titles in this category are extremely eclectic. Subjects range from Latin American music to Renaissance classics. Music of Mexico for Acoustic Guitar is a superb solo collection. Ruben Delgado has penned wonderful solos based on 11 favorite Mexican songs. Contents include such standards as Maria Elena; Donde Estas, Corazon?; and Noche de Ronda. All arrangements are written in notation and tablature.

"In the 1990s Tejano basked in the media spotlight as one of the fastest-growing subgenres in American music." "This sourcebook recounts the fascinating, never-before-told history of this innovative and influential musical genre - as well as of norteno, conjunto, grupo, mariachi, trio, tropical/cumbia, vallenato, and banda. Organized in an easy-to-use A-Z format, The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music features succinct but revealing biographies as well as discographies of 300 of these genres' most innovative and successful artists."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved