Digital Commons Network^™

Flamenco Guitar: History, Style, And Context, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

From Scarlatti To "Guantanamera": Dual Tonicity In Spanish And Latin American Musics, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Indo-Caribbean 'Local-Classical Music': A Unique Variant Of Hindustani Music, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

As cosmopolitan South Asians are well aware, several Indian performing arts, from Bharatanatyam to Bhangra, have come to flourish outside of India, especially as cultivated by non-resident Indians and Pakistanis. Most of these art forms, like Bharatanatyam, either adhere closely to models thriving in India itself, or else - like the British-based Bhangra - although differing from counterparts in India, are nevertheless familiar to interested urbanites in South Asia, who can buy recordings and cultivate an interest in them if they desire. Among the ethnic Indian populations of the Caribbean, a unique sort of Indian music has come to evolve …

Modernity And Musical Structure: Neo-Marxist Perspectives On Song Form And Its Successors, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Construction Of A Diasporic Tradition: Indo-Caribbean "Local Classical Music", Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

A historical and stylistic survey of Indo-Caribbean local-classical music, an idiosyncratic form of North Indian song created by indentured immigrants and their descendants, primarily in Trinidad and Guyana.

Ethnic Identity, National Identity, And Music In Indo-Trinidadian Culture, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Directory Of Dominicanists, Norberto P. James

Publications and Research

This Directory of Dominicanists, compiled by the Wellesley-based Dominican poet and educator Norberto P. James, constitutes the CuNY Dominican Studies Institute's first step in a long-term effort to identify a critical mass of U.S.-based scholars working on Dominican topics. The Directory intends to serve as a vehicle for Dominicanists to connect and to give the scholarly community a clearer sense of the growing cadre of academics dedicated to the study of the Dominican experience.

Improvisation In Latin Dance Music: History And Style, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Latin dance music constitutes one of the most dynamic and sophisticated urban popular music traditions in the Americas. Improvisation plays an important role in this set of genres, and its styles are sufficiently distinctive, complex, and internally significant as to merit book-length treatment along the lines of Paul Berliner's volume Thinking in Jazz (1994). To date, however, the subject of Latin improvisation has received only marginal and cursory analytical treatment, primarily in recent pedagogical guidebooks and videos. While a single chapter such as this can hardly do justice to the subject, an attempt will be made here to sketch some …

Chutney And Indo-Trinidadian Cultural Identity, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Since the early 1980s Indian diasporic communities have attained sufficient size, affluence, self-awareness and generational distance from South Asia to have created a set of popular music styles that are autonomous and distinctive rather than strictly derivative of Indian models. While the bhangra music of British Punjabis has attracted some scholarly and journalistic attention, chutney, a syncretic IndoCaribbean popular music and dance idiom, is little known outside its own milieu. This article constitutes a preliminary socio-musical study of chutney.

Gender Politics In Caribbean Popular Music: Consumer Perspectives And Academic Interpretation, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Representations Of New York City In Latin Music, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Music, Identity, And Images Of India In The Indo-Caribbean Diaspora, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Examines the role of one set of fragments in the identities of a diasporic population which is at once unique, and uniquely representative.

Music, The Media, And Communal Relations In North India, Past And Present, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Invention Of "African Rhythm", Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing …

Syncretism And Adaptation In Rasiya, A Braj Folksong Genre, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Under the impact of the mass media, capitalist socio-economic relations, and other aspects of modernity, many Indian folk music genres have declined visibly and even disappeared, and it may be tempting to conclude that folk music as a whole has suffered in the twentieth century. However, a number of significant folk music genres have not only survived but flourished in the twentieth century, in some cases by virtue of their ability to syncretize elements of other traditions. One such genre is rasiya, which, in its various substyles, is the most popular and widespread folk music genre of the Braj region. …

Puerto Rican Music And Cultural Identity: Creative Appropriation Of Cuban Sources From Danza To Salsa, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Representing African Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Of all the currents of change that have swept the humanities during the last half-century, the most far-reaching revolve around language. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism, among other language-based disciplines, have developed what is often presented as a largely unprecedented self-consciousness about representation. The message to scholars in nonlanguage-based disciplines is clear: to be taken seriously, one can no longer view language as a transparent window to an objective reality but must confront the foundational political and ideological baggage of the medium itself, as well as its constant slippage in the hands of the producer.

The Cassette Industry And Popular Music In North India, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries.

While the cassette boom started later in India than in areas such as the Middle East and Indonesia, its influence since the early 1980s has been …

Legitimate And Illegitimate Variation In Raga Interpretations, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Variation Procedures In Northern Ewe Song, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The major organizational principle of Northern Ewe song is one shared by numerous African, Oriental, and European musical traditions: a small number of models (variously described as "basic shapes," "archetypes," "background structures," "basic designs," "core patterns," "deep structures") is transformed in a wide variety of ways during performance. Variation takes place on different hierarchic levels both within and between songs and includes practically all of a song's dimensions (rhythm, interval, register, contour, harmony, and so on). This principle, although widely demonstrated in the literature on African song (see, among others, Jones 1976; Kauffman 1984; Schmidt 1984; and Erlmann 1985), is …

Andalusian, Gypsy, And Class Identity In The Contemporary Flamenco Complex, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This article endeavors to illustrate the important role played by flamenco and related subgenres in expressing and, to a considerable extent, helping to shape modern Andalusian identity. In this way we will attempt to demonstrate how musical style as well as text content can function not merely as passive reflections of broader sociocultural phenomena that shape them, but also as active contributors to the processes of cultural change.

Modal Harmony In Andalusian, Eastern European, And Turkish Syncretic Musics, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This article examined, in a cursory form, the standardized ways of harmonizing predominantly modal melodies in the contexts of a set of interrelated urban folk and popular musics of the Mediterranean area. Insofar as these music employ a harmonic-melodic system qualitatively distinct from that of Western common practice, they are worthy of scholarly attention in themselves. This article further seeks to revive the spirit of "Comparative Musicology" and to suggest ways in which cross-cultural comparison of selected musical parameters may reveal new sorts of pan-regional music areas.

The Concept Of Tāla In Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Tone And Tune: The Evidence For Northern Ewe Music, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Abstract:

One of the most intriguing features of most African languages is that of tone, by which variations in speech tone generate different meanings (Pike, 1948, offers a valuable introduction to this subject and includes an extensive bibliography; Fromkin, 1972, is a comprehensive evaluation of specialised studies). In the Ewe language, for example, the word to [H] pronounced with a high tone means ‘ear’, as in To le venye (HLMM), ‘I have an earache.’ To can also mean ‘through’, Meto akɔnta me [MHLHML], ‘I have gone through the accounts.’ But as soon as the high tone is replaced by a …

Music In The Funeral Traditions Of The Akpafu, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"Nna lo senu kuwe, fie oresire somoloo?" ("Who laid a mat for him, so that he slept so deeply?") With this rhetorical question, the Akpafu of Southeastern Ghana initiate a period of public mourning occasioned by the death of one of their number.1 The philosophic significance of death in Akpafu culture is twofold. First, it marks the completion of the earthly cycle of existence, birth-circumcision-puberty-marriage-death. Second, it opens the door to a higher, spiritual realm in which the deceased, as an ancestor, takes his place alongside the lesser gods and the Supreme Being in the higher reaches of the hierarchy …

The Rhythmic Structure Of West African Music, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The music of Africa has long intrigued many Westerners. From scattered comments in the accounts of explorers of the so-called Afrique Noire to the full-fledged ethnomusicological studies of the last fifty years, the constant theme has been the fundamental role of music-making in African life and society. And of all the elements of that music, rhythm has received the most attention.

There is something to be gained from looking closely at the early writings on African music, for although they represent the work of non-specialists, and for all their ethnocentricism and anthropocentricism, these accounts touch on the fundamental questions regarding …

Jaipongan: Indigenous Popular Music Of West Java, Peter L. Manuel, Randall Baier

Publications and Research

The advent of mass media - particularly cassettes and films - in Indonesia has led to the flowering of two mass popular music forms, namely, dangdut and jaipongan. Kroncong, an older urban popular form, presents a mixture of Portuguese folksong style and Indonesian features; dangdut style, while in some respects an extension of the orkes melayu tradition, is heavily influenced by Hindi film songs and Western pop; only jaipongan is purely Indonesian - or more properly speaking, Sundanese - in origin and style. While kroncong and dangdut have received some scholarly attention (Becker 1975, Heins 1975, Frederick 1982), jaipongan has …

"'Gi Dunu,' 'Nyekpadudo,' And The Study Of West African Rhythm", V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Rhythm has remained the focus of much study of West African music since the pioneering studies of Ward (1927), Hornbostel (1928), Waterman (1948), Brandel (1951), Cudjoe (1953), Merriam (1959), and Jones (1959).

Formal Structure In Popular Music As A Reflection Of Socio-Economic Change, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Language On Musical Composition In Ghana: An Introduction To The Musical Style Of Ephraim Amu, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

In most cultures of the world, the creative act of composition may be defined simply as the transformation of pre-existing material into new, individualized structures. The precompositional resource may be a system such as the hierarchical arrangement of triads that forms the basis of Western tonality, a set of formulas that generates such genres as Gregorian chant and West African storytelling, or even a rigidly defined set of relationships such as those inherent in a twelve-tone row. In each case, the precompositional elements provide a framework for the analysis and interpretation of the composition.