The Music of Multicultural America
The Music of Multicultural America
Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States
The Music of Multicultural America explores the intersection of performance, identity, and community in a wide range of musical expressions. Fifteen essays explore traditions that range from the Klezmer revival in New York, to Arab music in Detroit, to West Indian steel bands in Brooklyn, to Kathak music and dance in California, to Irish music in Boston, to powwows in the midwestern plains, to Hispanic and Native musics of the Southwest borderlands. Many chapters demonstrate the processes involved in supporting, promoting, and reviving community music. Others highlight the ways in which such American institutions as city festivals or state and national folklife agencies come into play.
Thirteen themes and processes outlined in the introduction unify the collection’s fifteen case studies and suggest organizing frameworks for student projects. Due to the diversity of music profiled in the book—Mexican mariachi, African American gospel, Asian West Coast jazz, women’s punk, French-American Cajun, and Anglo-American sacred harp—and to the methodology of fieldwork, ethnography, and academic activism described by the authors, the book is perfect for courses in ethnomusicology, world music, anthropology, folklore, and American studies.
Audio and visual materials that support each chapter are freely available on the ATMuse website, supported by the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.
From Irish music in Boston pubs to North Indian dance in San Francisco, this volume provides a rich sampling of the musical lives of communities across the United States. With its new and expanded introduction along with additional case studies, this is a welcome return of an American classic.
This book contains a treasure-trove of fifteen musical jewels, each presenting a rich and multifaceted portrait of a unique musical community within the multicultural mix that is America today. Presenting new ethnographic research on diasporic and indigenous musical cultures, each essay explores how and why communities come together to play, listen, and experience their musics together. Perfect as a text for an ‘Introduction to American Music' course!
Kip Lornell teaches at George Washington University. He is author of Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States; coauthor of The Beat! Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C.; and coeditor of Shreveport Sounds in Black and White, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Anne K. Rasmussen is professor of music and ethnomusicology and the Bickers Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the College of William and Mary. She is author of Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia and coauthor of Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia.
