This volume explores various kinds of love and the way music reflects them. It is about romantic love, ethnic pride and love, love and the media, and various other loves we have, especially love for popular culture. Throughout, special focus is given to the role jazz plays, as well as other forms of African and African American music, including hip hop, and, especially, the blues.

A Chicago Tribune Book of 2019, Notable Chicago Reads A Booklist Top 10 Arts Book of 2019 A No Depression Top Music Book of 2019 Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil.

For several centuries Cape Town has accommodated a great variety of musical genres which have usually been associated with specific population groups living in and around the city. Musical styles and genres produced in Cape Town have therefore been assigned an "identity" which is first and foremost social. This volume tries to question the relationship established between musical styles and genres, and social - in this case pseudo-racial - identities. In Sounding the Cape, Denis-Constant Martin recomposes and examines through the theoretical prism of creolisation the history of music in Cape Town, deploying analytical tools borrowed from the most recent studies of identity configurations. He demonstrates that musical creation in the Mother City, and in South Africa, has always been nurtured by contacts, exchanges and innovations whatever the efforts made by racist powers to separate and divide people according to their origin. Musicians interviewed at the dawn of the 21st century confirm that mixture and blending characterise all Cape Town's musics. They also emphasise the importance of a rhythmic pattern particular to Cape Town, the ghoema beat, whose origins are obviously mixed. The study of music demonstrates that the history of Cape Town, and of South Africa as a whole, undeniably fostered creole societies. Yet, twenty years after the collapse of apartheid, these societies are still divided along lines that combine economic factors and "racial" categorisations. Martin concludes that, were music given a greater importance in educational and cultural policies, it could contribute to fighting these divisions and promote the notion of a nation that, in spite of the violence of racism and apartheid, has managed to invent a unique common culture.

This book provides a multifaceted view on the relation between the old and the new in music, between tradition and innovation. This is a much-debated issue, generating various ideas and theories, which rarely come to unanimous conclusions. Therefore, the book offers diverse perspectives on topics such as national identities, narrative strategies, the question of musical performance and musical meaning. Alongside themes of general interest, such as classical repertoire, the music of well-established composers and musical topics, the chapters of the book also touch on specific, but equally interesting subjects, like Brazilian traditions, Serbian and Romanian composers and the lullaby. While the book is mostly addressed to researchers, it can also be recommended to students in musicology, ethnomusicology, musical performance, and musical semiotics.

Ethnic and Cultural Identity in Music and Song Lyrics looks at a variety of popular and folk music from around the world, with examples of British, Slovene, Chinese and American songs, poems and musicals. Charles Taylor says that “it is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time”; one can make the same claim for music. Inexorably tied to time, to the measure of the beat, but freed from time by the polysemous potential of the words, song rapidly becomes “our” song, helping to cement memory and community, to make the past comprehensible and the present bearable. The authors of the fifteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how lyrics set to music can reflect, express and construct collective identities, both traditional and contemporary.

In Music as Cultural Practice, Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society. In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.

The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory is the first comprehensive history of Western music theory to be published in the English language. A collaborative project by leading music theorists and historians, the volume traces the rich panorama of music-theoretical thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Recognizing the variety and complexity of music theory as an historical subject, the volume has been organized within a flexible framework. Some chapters are defined chronologically within a restricted historical domain, whilst others are defined conceptually and span longer historical periods. Together the thirty-one chapters present a synthetic overview of the fascinating and complex subject that is historical music theory. Richly enhanced with illustrations, graphics, examples and cross-citations as well as being thoroughly indexed and supplemented by comprehensive bibliographies of the most important primary and secondary literature, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

The idea of a global history of music may be traced back to the Enlightenment, and today, the question of a conceptual framework for a history of music that pays due attention to global relationships in music is often raised. But how might a historical interpretation of those relationships proceed? How should it position, or justify, itself? What would 'Western music' look like in an account of music history that aspires to be truly global? The studies presented in this volume aim to promote post-European historical thinking. They are based on the idea that a global history of music cannot be one single, hegemonic history. They rather explore the paradigms and terminologies that might describe a history of many different voices. The chapters address historical practices and interpretations of music in different parts of the world, from Japan to Argentina and from Mexico to India. Many of these narratives are about relations between these cultures and the Western tradition; several also consider socio-political and historical circumstances that have affected music in the various regions. The book addresses aspects that Western musical historiography has tended to neglect even when looking at its own culture: performance, dance, nostalgia, topicality, enlightenment, the relationships between traditional, classical, and pop musics, and the regards croisés between European, Asian, or Latin American interpretations of each other’s musical traditions. These studies have been derived from the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a Global History of Music (2013–2016), which was funded by the International Balzan Foundation through the award of the Balzan Prize in Musicology to the editor, and designed by music historians and ethnomusicologists together. A global history of music may never be written in its entirety, but will rather be realised through interaction, practice, and discussion, in all parts of the world.

The last time you whistled a tune or hummed a song-why did you choose that one? You may not consider yourself a musical person, but your little act of unintended music may be the key to unlocking within you a wealth of unsuspected creativity-a kind of creativity that goes way beyond music, too. Lane Arye, PhD, a musician himself, focuses on the music that people do not intend to make. Using the highly regarded psychological model called Process Work, developed by Arnold Mindell, PhD, Arye has been teaching students around the world how to awaken their creativity, using music as the starting point, but including all art forms and ways of expression. The unintentional appears at moments when some hidden part of us, something beyond our usual awareness, suddenly tries to express itself. If we start paying attention to what is trying to happen rather than to what we think should happen, we open the door to self-discovery and creativity. Sometimes what we regard as "mistakes" in self-expression are in fact treasures. The book is rich with real-life stories, ideas, and practical techniques for unlocking creativity, which Arye dispenses with humor, insight, and enthusiasm.

"This book reconstructs the transnational history of the category "Latin American music" during the first half of the 20th century, from a longer perspective that begins in the 19th century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural idea of Latin America in the 1930s. It studies multiple music-related actors, such as intellectuals, musicologists, policy-makers, popular artists, radio operators, and diplomats in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and different parts of Europe. It proposes a regionalist approach to Latin American and global history, by showing individual nations as both agents and result of transnational forces-imperial, economic, and ideological. It argues that Latin America is the sedimentation of over two centuries of regionalist projects, and studies the place of music regionalism in that history"--