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Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists. Extracts from the albums are also embedded into the text to enhance learning and understanding. Each rāg is accompanied by a description of its chief characteristics and technical features, a notation of the song (bandiś) on which the performance is based, and a transliteration and translation of the song text. Distinctively, Rāg samay cakra also includes spoken renditions of each of the texts, helping non-Hindavi speakers to achieve the correct pronunciation. Sharing insights from both theory and practice, this collection draws on recent scholarship while also showcasing the vocal idiom – the gāyakī – of Vijay Rajput, a disciple of the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. It offers invaluable reading for students and researchers of Indian classical music, world music and ethnomusicology, and a rich repository for teacher and student practitioners of the khayāl vocal style. The combination of an aural and written exploration of rāg will appeal to anyone drawn to this form of music – whether newcomer, student (śiṣyā) or aficionado (rasika).

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians—Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw—Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice—in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers—in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.

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.

A radically new reading of the origins of recorded music Noise Uprising brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the globe: among them Havana's son, Rio's samba, New Orleans'jazz, Buenos Aires'tango, Seville's flamenco, Cairo's tarab, Johannesburg's marabi, Jakarta's kroncong, and Honolulu's hula. They triggered the first great battle over popular music and became the soundtrack to decolonization.

Noise Uprising brings to life the moment and sounds of a cultural revolution. Between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern times unfolded in a series of obscure recording sessions, as hundreds of unknown musicians entered makeshift studios to record the melodies and rhythms of urban streets and dancehalls. The musical styles and idioms etched onto shellac disks reverberated around the globe: among them Havana's son, Rio's samba, New Orleans'jazz, Buenos Aires'tango, Seville's flamenco, Cairo's tarab, Johannesburg's marabi, Jakarta's kroncong, and Honolulu's hula. They triggered the first great battle over popular music and became the soundtrack to decolonization.

Recognized as the patriarch of the minimalist movement-Brian Eno once called him'the daddy of us all'--La Monte Young remains an enigma within the music world, one of the most important and yet most elusive composers of the late twentieth century. Early in his career Young almost completely eschewed the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions completely unfettered by commercial concerns. Yet at the same time he exercised profound influence on such varied figures as Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, David Lang, The Velvet Underground, and entire branches of electronica and drone music. For half a century, he and his partner and collaborator, Marian Zazeela, have worked in near-seclusion in their Tribeca loft, creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality. Draw A Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young stands as the first narrative study to examine Young's life and work in detail. The book is a culmination of a decade of research, during which author Jeremy Grimshaw gained rare access to the composer and his archives. Loosely structured upon the chronology of the composer's career, the book takes a multi-disciplinary approach that combines biography, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music analysis, and illuminates such seemingly disparate aspects of Young's work as integral serialism and indeterminacy, Mormon esoterica and Vedic mysticism, and psychedelia and psychoacoustics. Draw A Straight Line and Follow It is a long-awaited, in-depth look at one of America's most fascinating musical figures.

A provocative account of the development of modern national culture in India using classical music as a case study. Janaki Bakhle demonstrates how the emergence of an'Indian'cultural tradition reflected colonial and exclusionary practices, particularly the exclusion of Muslims by the Brahmanic elite, which occurred despite the fact that Muslims were the major practiti oners of the Indian music that was installed as a'Hindu'national tradition. This book lays bare how a nation's imaginings--from politics to culture--reflect rather than transform societal divisions.

Dhrupad is believed to be the oldest style of classical vocal music performed today in North India. This detailed study of the genre considers the relationship between the oral tradition, its transmission from generation to generation, and its re-creation in performance. There is an overview of the historical development of the dhrupad tradition and its performance style from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and of the musical lineages that carried it forward into the twentieth century, followed by analyses of performance techniques, processes and styles. The authors examine the relationship between the structures provided by tradition and their realization by the performer to throw light on the nature of tradition and creativity in Indian music; and the book ends with an account of the ‘revival'movement of the late twentieth century that re-established the genre in new contexts. Augmented with an analytical transcription of a complete dhrupad performance, this is the first book-length study of an Indian vocal genre to be co-authored by an Indian practitioner and a Western musicologist.