Subject Area: Ethnomusicology

An Analysis of the Southern Rock and Roll Band Black Oak Arkansas
 Hutson, Cecil Kirk
1996 0-7734-8800-6 172 pages
This volume traces the band's humble beginnings as penniless boys with a penchant for crime, to successful businessmen who gave millions back to their community. It explores an aspect of southern culture that has been ignored: how music changed, modified, or swayed southern intellectual thought and social views, and reinforced the messages, opinions, and ideas of southern society. Through an extensive analysis of traditional and nontraditional primary and secondary sources, this study determines how Black Oak Arkansas reflected and/or influenced southern culture. The result is an original contribution to the cultural, musical, and social history of the American South.

Price: $159.95


Biography of the Turkish Composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun and a Discussion of His Violin Works
 Giray, Selim
2003 0-7734-6879-X 132 pages
Adnan Saygun, one of the leading composers of the Turkish Five, was a serious ethnomusicologist who led the fieldwork in gathering folk material, and collaborated with the prominent musicological researcher and composer Béla Bartók. Saygun's music is published and recorded and performed internationally. After a biography, this study uses Saygun's violin music to discuss his practice of utilizing Turkish folk elements in Turkish classical music. It thus provides the non-Turkish performer with an understanding of the performance practice of the authentic Turkish folk idiom in Saygun's original compositions and Turkish classical music. A list of Saygun's works (revised by the composer) and a discography follow.

Price: $139.95


Call to Dance: An Experience of the Socio-Cultural World of Traditional Breton Music and Dance
 Wilkinson, Desi
2023 1-4955-1121-9 164 pages
"This book charts the recent historical development of a valued and respected Breton popular cultural identity--both at home and abroad--through the invention and diffusion of an event, the fest noz. This [is a] unique, structured platform for the performance of one of Europe's most vibrant forms of traditional dance music. Informed by the techniques of ethnography, the discipline of ethnomusicology, as well as my own participation as a musician, learner, performer, and researcher, I ...situate the development of the fest noz to highlight its social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and economic significance. I also...convey something of what it looks, sounds, and feels like to circulate as a musician, dancer, and participant in the world of traditional music in Brittany, through forty years around the turn of the twenty-first century." -Desi Wilkinson (Introduction) This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2016.

Price: $159.95


The French Jesuits, the Wendat, and Christian Music: A Translation of Cantiques in the Wendat Language
 Steckley, John
2024 1-4955-1214-2 224 pages
This is an 8 x 10-inch, softcover book. "Cantiques are hymns with a long-held tradition behind them. They were already long-established in the Catholic church before the cantiques studied here were translated into Wendat. The Jesuits who did missionary work with the Wendat and the Wyandot from the 1630s to the late 1700s set a high standard for learning an indigenous language and writing in that language. This is true both in terms of dictionaries and grammars, as well as religious works. Their linguistic work with an indigenous language can be considered to be unmatched in North America during this period." -Dr. John Steckley

Price: $99.95


Vocal Settings of gitanjali ( Song Offerings): Fusing Western Art Song with Indian Mystical Poetry
 Rayapati, Sangeetha
2010 0-7734-1405-3 148 pages
This book examines the contributions of John Alden Carpenter, Arthur Sheperd, and Jean Cras to the dissemination of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjal (Song Offerings) through the medium of art song, in settings designated for a soprano voice.

Price: $139.95


Women, Music and Faith in Central Appalachia
 Bean, Heather Ann Ackley
2001 0-7734-7508-7 256 pages
Both urban Appalachian evangelical Christianity, as embodied in Appalachian women’s folk art and music, and process theology as articulated by John B. Cobb, Jr, and those he has mentored share an existentialist eschatology that emphasizes the salvific quality of individual life in the present rather than hope in the future. Process theodicy lacks a rich aesthetic, symbolic or ritual tradition through which to express these beliefs and thus is often criticized for its seeming lack of applicability to Christian life and nurture. Urban Appalachian women’s folk art and music, however, is widely celebrated for its powerful emotional impact, but its multivalent symbolism is seldom explored for theological insight. This project explores the ways in which these two marginal Christian existential theological traditions share common beliefs, articulate them in radically different ways with radically different results, and thus might learn from one another.

Price: $199.95