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.

This book provides a broad introduction to the scientific and psychological study of music, exploring how music is processed by our brains, affects us emotionally, shapes our personal and cultural identities, and can be used in therapeutic and educational contexts. Why are some people tone deaf and others musical savants? What do our musical preferences say about our personality and the culture in which we were raised? Why do certain songs remind us so strongly of particular people, places, or events? How can music be therapeutically used to help those with autism, Parkinson's, and other medical conditions? The Science and Psychology of Music: From Beethoven at the Office to Beyoncé at the Gym answers these and other questions. This book provides a broad and accessible introduction to the fascinating field of music psychology. Despite its name, music psychology includes a number of fields, including neuroscience, psychology, social psychology, sociology, and health. Through a collection of thematically organized chapters, readers will discover how our brains recognize elements of music, how music can affect us and shape our identities, and the many real-world applications for such information.

Musicians, teachers and those who love music will find in this volume some answers to the question of how gender affects its practice, performance and reception. What was performing like for female rock singers in the 20th century? How did Bowie change our concept of performer identity? Just how sexist are the lyrics in glam metal songs? Is rap as homophobic as has been thought? Can female metal singers growl as well as men? Are LGBTQ+ issues reflected in 21st century music? Did Canadian New Wave groups tackle major social issues? How do Shakespeare and Joyce use musical puns and allusions? From Indian thumri, through French opera, Irish folk songs, and pop, all the way to metal and rap, the 17 contributions gathered here will challenge and inform, while confirming that our music shapes our habits, language, ideas and gendered selves.

How are national identities constructed and articulated through music? Popular music has long been associated with political dissent, and the nation state has consistently demonstrated a determination to seek out and procure for itself a stake in the management of 'its' popular musics. Similarly, popular musics have been used 'from the ground up' as sites for both populist and popular critiques of nationalist sentiment, from the position of both a globalizing and a 'local' vernacular culture. The contributions in this book arrive at a critical moment in the development of the study of national cultures and musicology. The book ranges from considerations of the ideological focus of cultural nationalism through to analyses of musical hybridity and musical articulations of other kinds of identities at odds with national identity. The processes of global homogenization are thereby shown to have brought about a transitional crisis for national cultural identities: the evolution of these identities, particularly with reference to the concept of 'authenticity' in music, is situated within broader debates on power, political economy and constructions of the self. Theorizations of practice are employed after the manner of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Goffman, Gadamer, Habermas, Bhabha, Lacan and Žižek. Each contribution acts as a case study to characterize the strategies through which differing modes of musical discourse engage, critique or obscure discourses on national identity. The studies include discussions of: musical representations of Irishness; the relationship between Afropop and World Music; Norwegian club music; the revival of traditional music in Serbia; resistance to cultural homogeneity in Brazil; contemporary Uyghur song in Northwest China; rap and race in French society; technobanda from the barrios of Los Angeles, and Spanish/Moroccan raï. In this way, the book seeks to characterize the ideological configurations that help to activate and sustain hegemonic, ambivalent and dissident articulations of national identity and musical practices.

Music is used to sell everything from cars to political candidates. How can words and melody so successfully manipulate us? This volume provides answers by examining the ways in which music of various genres, including folk, popular music, rock, and rap, is used to protest and to promote structures of political, commercial, and religious authority. Students, teachers, musicians, historians, policy makers, and fans of music and popular culture will find answers to questions such as: How does music help to build national identity, foster a sense of patriotism, and reflect changes in society? What role did music play in building socialism in Czechoslovakia and in Belarus’ 2020 democratic movement? What are the most important features of Ukrainian songs of resistance? The book highlights the role of music in the feminist movement by analysing the Riot Grrrl movement and the history of Olivia Records, as well as the use of music as propaganda in the education system and as “purity propaganda” in religion. Two chapters focus on famous American protest singers, Woody Gurthie and Phil Ochs, and one highlights an ex-socialist society’s response to David Bowie’s music.

Symphony and Song takes its title from Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” and explores the relation between words and music from a variety of critical and practical perspectives. The contributors to this volume apply recent theoretical approaches ranging from the “Mozart Effect” in cognitive psychology, through stylistics and conceptual metaphor, to transtextuality in the analysis of a range of songs, song lyrics, poetry, ekphrastic prose, and instrumental music. Topics explored here include opera and pop music from around the world, Australian Aboriginal oral poetry, political instrumentalization and censorship of song lyrics, and teaching foreign language using songs.

Applied studies scholarship has triggered a not-so-quiet revolution in the discipline of ethnomusicology. The current generation of applied ethnomusicologists has moved toward participatory action research, involving themselves in musical communities and working directly on their behalf. The essays in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, edited by Svanibor Pettan and Jeff Todd Titon, theorize applied ethnomusicology, offer histories, and detail practical examples with the goal of stimulating further development in the field. The essays in the book, all newly commissioned for the volume, reflect scholarship and data gleaned from eleven countries by over twenty contributors. Themes and locations of the research discussed encompass all world continents. The authors present case studies encompassing multiple places; other that discuss circumstances within a geopolitical unit, either near or far. Many of the authors consider marginalized peoples and communities; others argue for participatory action research. All are united in their interest in overarching themes such as conflict, education, archives, and the status of indigenous peoples and immigrants. A volume that at once defines its field, advances it, and even acts as a large-scale applied ethnomusicology project in the way it connects ideas and methodology, The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology is a seminal contribution to the study of ethnomusicology, theoretical and applied.

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

Children are inherently musical. They respond to music and learn through music. Music expresses children's identity and heritage, teaches them to belong to a culture, and develops their cognitive well-being and inner self worth. As professional instructors, childcare workers, or students looking forward to a career working with children, we should continuously search for ways to tap into children's natural reservoir of enthusiasm for singing, moving and experimenting with instruments. But how, you might ask? What music is appropriate for the children I'm working with? How can music help inspire a well-rounded child? How do I reach and teach children musically? Most importantly perhaps, how can I incorporate music into a curriculum that marginalizes the arts?This book explores a holistic, artistic, and integrated approach to understanding the developmental connections between music and children. This book guides professionals to work through music, harnessing the processes that underlie music learning, and outlining developmentally appropriate methods to understand the role of music in children's lives through play, games, creativity, and movement. Additionally, the book explores ways of applying music-making to benefit the whole child, i.e., socially, emotionally, physically, cognitively, and linguistically.

From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefines transgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic. Pointing the way forward in Gothic Studies, this original and nuanced combination of gendered, Ecogothic, queer, and media critical approaches addresses established and new scholars of the Gothic alike.