The sustainability of music and other intangible expressions of culture has been high on the agenda of scholars, governments and NGOs in recent years. However, there is a striking lack of systematic research into what exactly affects sustainability across music cultures. By analyzing case studies of nine highly diverse music cultures against a single framework that identifies key factors in music sustainability, Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures offers an understanding of both the challenges and the dynamics of music sustainability in the contemporary global environment, and breathes new life into the previously discredited realm of comparative musicology, from an emphatically non-Eurocentric perspective. Situated within the expanding field of applied ethnomusicology, this book confirms some commonly held beliefs, challenges others, and reveals sometimes surprising insights into the dynamics of music cultures. By examining, comparing and contrasting highly diverse contexts from thriving to 'in urgent need of safeguarding,' Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures analyzes sustainability across five carefully defined domains. The book identifies pathways to strategies and tools that may empower communities to sustain and revitalize their music heritage on their terms. In this way, this book contributes to greater scholarly insight, new (sub)disciplinary approaches, and pathways to improved practical outcomes for the long-term sustainability of music cultures. As such it will be an essential resource for ethnomusicologists, as well as scholars and activists outside of music, with an interest in the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

Environmental sustainability and human cultural sustainability are inextricably linked. Reversing damaging human impact on the global environment is ultimately a cultural question, and as with politics, the answers are often profoundly local. Cultural Sustainabilities presents twenty-three essays by musicologists and ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, ethnographers, documentary filmmakers, musicians, artists, and activists, each asking a particular question or presenting a specific local case study about cultural and environmental sustainability. Contributing to the environmental humanities, the authors embrace and even celebrate human engagement with ecosystems, though with a profound sense of collective responsibility created by the emergence of the Anthropocene. Contributors: Aaron S. Allen, Michael B. Bakan, Robert Baron, Daniel Cavicchi, Timothy J. Cooley, Mark F. DeWitt, Barry Dornfeld, Thomas Faux, Burt Feintuch, Nancy Guy, Mary Hufford, Susan Hurley-Glowa, Patrick Hutchinson, Michelle Kisliuk, Pauleena M. MacDougall, Margarita Mazo, Dotan Nitzberg, Jennifer C. Post, Tom Rankin, Roshan Samtani, Jeffrey A. Summit, Jeff Todd Titon, Joshua Tucker, Rory Turner, Denise Von Glahn, and Thomas Walker

This two-volume collection transforms our understanding of the discipline of ethnomusicology by exploring how ethnomusicologists can contribute to positive social and environmental change within institutional frameworks. The first volume focuses on ethical practice and collaboration and offers strategies for promoting institutional and methodological change.

Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better. Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras

For decades, ethnomusicologists across the world have considered how to effect positive change for the communities they work with when faced with challenging social, political, and environmental issues and institutional structures. The two-volume collection Transforming Ethnomusicology aims to deepen and broaden dialogues about social engagement within the discipline of ethnomusicology. Its many voices, from scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds and working in a variety of cultural situations, explore how ethnomusicology can transform the world by contributing to social change. Through their illuminating case studies and reflections, they at the same time transform how we understand ethnomusicology as a discipline. The second volume of Transforming Ethnomusicology provides much-needed new examinations of social and ecological concerns and centers around the recognition that colonial and environmental damages are intertwined and grounded in the failure to respect the land and its peoples. Featuring Indigenous perspectives from America, Australia, and South Africa, this volume critically engages with the question how ethnomusicologists can support marginalized communities in sustaining their musical knowledges and threatened geographies within institutional and historically-grown structures that have long worked toward their destruction. The volume ends with a radical model for change that is based on a profound rethinking of established structures of knowledge.

The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights is a collection of case studies spanning a wide range of concerns about music and human rights in response to intensifying challenges to the well-being of individuals, peoples, and the planet. It brings forward the expertise of academic researchers, lawyers, human rights practitioners, and performing musicians who offer critical reflection on how their work might identify, inform, or advance mutual interests in their respective fields. The book is comprised of 28 chapters, interspersed with 23 ‘voices’ – portraits that focus on individuals’ intimate experiences with music in the defence or advancement of human rights – and explores the following four themes: 1) Fundamentals on music and human rights; 2) Music in pursuit of human rights; 3) Music as a means of violating human rights; 4) Human rights and music: intrinsic resonances.

Whose Book is it Anyway? is a provocative collection of essays that opens out the copyright debate to questions of open access, ethics, and creativity. It includes views – such as artist’s perspectives, writer’s perspectives, feminist, and international perspectives – that are too often marginalized or elided altogether. The diverse range of contributors take various approaches, from the scholarly and the essayistic to the graphic, to explore the future of publishing based on their experiences as publishers, artists, writers and academics. Considering issues such as intellectual property, copyright and comics, digital publishing and remixing, and what it means (not) to say one is an author, these vibrant essays urge us to view central aspects of writing and publishing in a new light. Whose Book is it Anyway? is a timely and varied collection of essays. It asks us to reconceive our understanding of publishing, copyright and open access, and it is essential reading for anyone invested in the future of publishing.

The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization is the first comprehensive overview of the language revitalization movement, from the Arctic to the Amazon and across continents. Featuring 47 contributions from a global range of top scholars in the field, the handbook is divided into two parts, the first of which expands on language revitalization issues of theory and practice while the second covers regional perspectives in an effort to globalize and decolonize the field. The collection examines critical issues in language revitalization, including: language rights, language and well-being, and language policy; language in educational institutions and in the home; new methodologies and venues for language learning; and the roles of documentation, literacies, and the internet. The volume also contains chapters on the kinds of language that are less often researched such as the revitalization of music, of whistled languages and sign languages, and how languages change when they are being revitalized. The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization is the ideal resource for graduate students and researchers working in linguistic anthropology and language revitalization and endangerment.

Over the past three decades, applied ethnomusicology has emerged as a major force in working with music, culture and communities worldwide, generating a wealth of new approaches and practices. Explicitly or implicitly, these often question the traditional role of the music researcher as merely an objective observer; they invite taking greater responsibility and deeper engagement with the people we work with. Highlighting an exciting diversity of local practices with global implications, this volume illustrates how to work of contemporary ethnomusicologists intersects with major issues such as social justice, education, representation, and intangible cultural heritage. With contributions from six different continents, the fourteen chapters in this volume constitute an important step in the international dialogue in scope, methods and goals of ethnomusicology in the 21st century.

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that in order to make sense of music we need descriptive language; that to open up the new in music we need to revisit the old; that to arrive at a figuration of music itself we need to posit its starting point in noise; that in order to justify our creative compositional works as research, we need to find critical languages and theoretical frameworks with which to discuss them; or that despite being an auditory system, we are compelled to resort to the visual metaphor as a way of thinking about musical sounds. Drawn to musical sound as a powerful form of non-verbal communication, the authors include musicologists, philosophers, music theorists, ethnomusicologists and composers. The chapters in this volume investigate and ask fundamental questions about how we think, converse, write about, compose, listen to and analyse music. The work is informed by the philosophy primarily of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and secondarily of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy. The chapters cover a wide range of topics focused on twentieth and twenty-first century musics, covering popular musics, art music, acousmatic music and electro-acoustic musics, and including music analysis, music's ontology, the noise/music dichotomy, intertextuality and music, listening, ethnography and the current state of music studies. The authors discuss their philosophical perspectives and methodologies of practice-led research, including their own creative work as a form of research. Music's Immanent Future brings together empirical, cultural, philosophical and creative approaches that will be of interest to musicologists, composers, music analysts and music philosophers.