Music/Culture
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Series Editors: Deborah Wong, University of California; Sherrie Tucker, University of Kansas; Jeremy Wallach, Bowling Green State University, Ohio

The Wesleyan Music/Culture series has consistently reshaped and redirected music scholarship. Founded in 1993 by George Lipsitz, Susan McClary, and Robert Walser, the series features outstanding critical work on music. Unconstrained by disciplinary divides, the series addresses music and power through a range of times, places, and approaches. Music/Culture strives to integrate a variety of approaches to the study of music, linking analysis of musical significance to larger issues of power—what is permitted and forbidden, who is included and excluded, who speaks and who gets silenced. From ethnographic classics to cutting-edge studies, Music/Culture zeroes in on how musicians articulate social needs, conflicts, coalitions, and hope. Books in the series investigate the cultural work of music in urgent and sometimes experimental ways, from the radical fringe to the quotidian. Music/Culture asks deep and broad questions about music through the framework of the most restless and rigorous critical theory.

Parameters and Peripheries of Culture

Interpreting Maroon Music and Dance in Paramaribo, Suriname
Parameters and Peripheries of Culture Cover
Format: 
Pages: 250
ISBN: 9780819579546
Pub Date: 02 Jun 2020
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 25 images, 15 tables and graphs
Pages: 250
ISBN: 9780819579553
Pub Date: 02 Jun 2020
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 25 images, 15 tables and graphs
Description:
How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of Parameters and Peripheries of Culture, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain their communities within Paramaribo, the capital. Focusing on three collectives known locally as “cultural groups,” which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons, it marks a vital contribution to knowledge about the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Trad Nation Cover Trad Nation Cover
Format: 
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819579270
Pub Date: 05 May 2020
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 12 illus.
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819579287
Pub Date: 05 May 2020
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 12 illus.
Description:
Just how “Irish” is traditional Irish music? Trad Nation combines ethnography, oral history, and archival research to challenge the longstanding practice of using ethnic nationalism as a framework for understanding vernacular music traditions. Tess Slominski argues that ethnic nationalism hinders this music’s development today and in an increasingly multiethnic Ireland.
RRP: £19.95
Wild Music Cover Wild Music Cover
Format: 
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819579157
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2019
Series: Music/Culture
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819579164
Pub Date: 05 Nov 2019
Series: Music/Culture
Description:
What are the uses of musical exoticism? In Wild Music, Maria Sonevytsky tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture.
RRP: £20.50
Haunthenticity Cover Haunthenticity Cover
Format: 
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819578525
Pub Date: 11 Mar 2019
Series: Music/Culture
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780819578532
Pub Date: 11 Mar 2019
Series: Music/Culture
Description:
In this persuasive study, Tracy McMullen draws on philosophy, psychology, musicology, performance studies, and popular music studies in order to analyze the rise of obsessively precise live musical reenactments in the United States at the turn of the millennium. She investigates this practice, what she terms, Replay, in popular music, jazz, and performance art arguing that it is a symptom of deep-seated fears of the fleeting nature of identity. Musical Replay claims a type of authenticity that is grounded in the exact material details of the original (instruments, props, costumes, people, etc.
Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780819578631
Pub Date: 08 Feb 2019
Series: Music/Culture
Description:
Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America is a collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States. The contributors explore the intersections between music, modernity, and Indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip-hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music.
Citizen Azmari Cover Citizen Azmari Cover
Format: 
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780819578327
Pub Date: 06 Nov 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 10 illus., 2 tables
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780819578334
Pub Date: 06 Nov 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 10 illus., 2 tables
Description:
In the thirty years since their immigration from Ethiopia to the State of Israel, Ethiopian-Israelis have put music at the center of communal and public life, using it alternatingly as a mechanism of protest and as appeal for integration. Ethiopian music develops in quiet corners of urban Israel as the most prominent advocate for equality, and the Israeli-born generation is creating new musical styles that negotiate the terms of blackness outside of Africa. For the first time, this book examines in detail those new genres of Ethiopian-Israeli music, including Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop, Ethio-soul performed across Europe, and eskesta dance projects at the center of national festivals.
Roots in Reverse Cover Roots in Reverse Cover
Format: 
Pages: 214
ISBN: 9780819577085
Pub Date: 23 Oct 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 8 illus.
Pages: 214
ISBN: 9780819577092
Pub Date: 23 Oct 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 8 illus.
Description:
Roots in Reverse explores how Latin music contributed to the formation of the négritude movement in the 1930s. Taking Senegal and Cuba as its primary research areas, this work uses oral histories, participant observation, and archival research to examine the ways Afro-Cuban music has influenced Senegalese debates about cultural and political citizenship and modernity. Shain argues that the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in twentieth century Senegal illuminates many dimensions of that nation’s cultural history such as gender relations, generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture and diasporic identities.
Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form Cover Dynamic Korea and Rhythmic Form Cover
Format: 
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780819577054
Pub Date: 02 Oct 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 33 illus.
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780819577061
Pub Date: 02 Oct 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 33 illus.
Description:
The South Korean percussion genre, samul nori, is a world phenomenon whose rhythmic form is the key to its popularity and mobility. Based on both ethnographic research and close formal analysis, author Katherine In-Young Lee focuses on the kinetic experience of samul nori, drawing out the concept of dynamism to show its historical, philosophical, and pedagogical dimensions. Breaking with traditional approaches to the study of world music that privilege political, economic, institutional, or ideological analytical frameworks, Lee argues that because rhythmic forms are experienced on a somatic level, they swiftly move beyond national boundaries and provide sites for cross-cultural interaction.
Animal Musicalities Cover Animal Musicalities Cover
Format: 
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780819578068
Pub Date: 05 Jun 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 26 illus., (4 colour)
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780819500861
Pub Date: 02 Feb 2024
Series: Music/Culture
Description:
Over the past century and a half, the voices and bodies of animals have been used by scientists and music experts as a benchmark for measures of natural difference. Animal Musicalities traces music’s taxonomies from Darwin to digital bird guides to show how animal song has become the starting point for enduring evaluations of species, races, and cultures. By examining the influential efforts made by a small group of men and women to define human diversity in relation to animal voices, this book raises profound questions about the creation of modern human identity, and the foundations of modern humanism.
RRP: £18.50
Music & Camp Cover Music & Camp Cover
Format: 
Pages: 292
ISBN: 9780819577818
Pub Date: 01 May 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 9 illus. (4 colour)
Pages: 292
ISBN: 9780819577825
Pub Date: 01 May 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 9 illus. (4 colour)
Description:
This collection of essays provides the first in-depth examination of camp as it relates to a wide variety of twentieth and twenty-first century music and musical performances. Located at the convergence of popular and queer musicology, the book provides new research into camp’s presence, techniques, discourses, and potential meanings across a broad spectrum of musical genres, including: musical theatre, classical music, film music, opera, instrumental music, the Broadway musical, rock, pop, hip-hop, and Christmas carols. This significant contribution to the field of camp studies investigates why and how music has served as an expressive and political vehicle for both the aesthetic characteristics and the receptive modes that have been associated with camp throughout twentieth and twenty-first-century culture.
Resonances of Chindon-ya Cover Resonances of Chindon-ya Cover
Format: 
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819577788
Pub Date: 06 Feb 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 36 illus. (12 colour)
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819577795
Pub Date: 06 Feb 2018
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 36 illus. (12 colour)
Description:
In this first book-length study of chindon-ya, Marié Abe investigates the intersection of sound, public space, and sociality in contemporary Japan. Chindon-ya, dating back to the 1840s, are ostentatiously costumed street musicians who publicize a business by parading through neighborhood streets. Historically not considered music, but part of the everyday soundscape, this vernacular performing art provides a window into shifting notions of musical labor, the politics of everyday listening and sounding, and street music at social protest in Japan.
Lineage of Loss Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780819577597
Pub Date: 07 Nov 2017
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 16 illus.
Description:
In the middle of the nineteenth century a new family of hereditary musicians emerged in the royal court of Lucknow and subsequently rose to the heights of renown throughout North India. Today this musical lineage, or ghar n , lives on in the music and memories of only a small handful of descendants and players of the family instrument, the sarod. Drawing on six years of ethnographic and archival research, and fifteen years of musical apprenticeship, Max Katz explores the oral history and written record of the Lucknow ghar n , tracing its displacement, loss of prestige, and erasure from the collective memory.
The Kind of Man I Am Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 230
ISBN: 9780819577566
Pub Date: 03 Oct 2017
Series: Music/Culture
Description:
Nearly four decades after his death, Charles Mingus Jr. remains one of the least understood and most recognized jazz composers and musicians of our time. Mingus’s ideas about music, racial identity, and masculinity—as well as those of other individuals in his circle, like Celia Mingus, Hazel Scott, and Joni Mitchell—challenged jazz itself as a model of freedom, inclusion, creativity, and emotional expressivity.
Theorizing Sound Writing Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780819576651
Pub Date: 04 Apr 2017
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 23 illus.
Description:
The study of listening—aurality—and its relation to writing is the subject of this eclectic edited volume. Theorizing Sound Writing explores the relationship between sound, theory, language, and inscription. This volume contains an impressive lineup of scholars from anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, performance, and sound studies.
Punk Ethnography Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 440
ISBN: 9780819576538
Pub Date: 18 Oct 2016
Series: Music/Culture
Illustrations: 13 illus. (1 map, 4 tables)
Description:
This ground-breaking case study examines record production as ethnographic work. Since its founding in 2003, Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies has produced world music recordings that have been received as radical, sometimes problematic critiques of the practices of sound ethnography. Founded by punk rocker brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, the label’s releases encompass collagist sound travelogues; individual artist compilations; national, regional and genre surveys, and DVDs—all designed in a distinctive graphic style recalling the DIY aesthetic of punk and indie rock.
Popular Music in Theory Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 249
ISBN: 9780819563101
Pub Date: 30 Mar 1997
Series: Music/Culture
Description:
Winner of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Book Award (1998)Popular Music in Theory is an original introduction to the key theoretical issues which arise in the study of contemporary popular music. It is organized in a way that shows how popular music is created across a series of relationships that link together industry and audiences, producers and consumers. Starting from the dichotomy between production and consumption which characterizes much work on popular culture, Keith Negus explores the equally significant social processes that intervene between and across the production-consumption divide, and examines how popular music is mediated by technological, cultural, historical, geographical, and political factors.