Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer's imagination and every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light environment that gives voice to the cycles of sunlight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic rhythms of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis. Adams describes this work as "a place for hearing the unheard music of the world around us." The book includes two seminal essays, the composer's journal telling the story of the day-to-day emergence of The Place, as well as musical notations, graphs and illustrations of geophysical phenomena.

This stimulating collection of essays analyzes the music of films ranging from mainstream and subcultural American films through case studies of those from China, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, Latin American, and the Caribbean, and includes a variety of key films, periods, and studio practices. The focus of the essays is the social and cultural meanings of film music, not just composers' careers and the musical support of storyline and psychology that are the center of most film music studies. Global Soundtracks is the first anthology to suggest methods for understanding how the conventions of standard film music became localized and expanded around the world in many different periods and cinema systems, and to suggest comparative approaches of analysis. Contributors include: ABDALLA UBA ADAMU, B. BALASUBRAHMANIYAN, BRENDA BERRIAN, GREG BOOTH, ERIC A. GALM, JOSEPH GETTER, MARILYN MILLER, MARTIN STOKES, SUMARSAM, and SUE M.C. TUOHY.

"Listening to the Beat of the Bomb" UPK author Charles Wolfe discusses his work and his new book Country Music Goes to War in the NEW YORK TIMES. While Toby Keith suggests that Americans should unite in support of the president, the Dixie Chicks assert their right to criticize the current administration and its military pursuits. Country songs about war are nearly as old as the genre itself, and the first gold record in country music went to the 1942 war song "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere" by Elton Britt. The essays in Country Music Goes to War demonstrate that country musicians' engagement with significant political and military issues is not strictly a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The contributors examine the output of country musicians responding to America's large-scale confrontation in recent history: World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the cold war, September 11, and both conflicts in the Persian Gulf. They address the ways in which country songs and artists have energized public discourse, captured hearts, and inspired millions of minds. Charles K. Wolfe, professor of English and folklore at Middle Tennessee State University, is the author of numerous books and articles on music. James E. Akenson, professor of curriculum and instruction at Tennessee Technological University, is the founder of the International Country Music Conference. Together they have edited the collections The Women of Country Music, Country Music Annual 2000, Country Music Annual 2001, and Country Music Annual 2002.

Founder and long-time director of the Opera Company of Boston and the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, Sarah Caldwell was one of America's best known and most adventurous conductors and opera directors. Her career spanned her wildly successful and innovative productions of classical operas such as Offenbach's Voyage to the Moon, Don Quixote, and Madama Butterfly to projects like "Making Music Together," which in 1988 brought together musicians and composers from the Soviet Union and the United States. Caldwell's work earned her many honorary degrees and she received the National Medal for the Arts from President Clinton in 1997. Challenges is based on a series of interviews Rebecca Matlock conducted over a period of three years before Caldwell's death in 2006. This intimate memoir gives us Caldwell's perceptions in her own unique, indomitable voice.

MTV Networks is the undisputed international music video gatekeeper, with stations from Australia to India, Russia to Brazil. Canada is one of the few countries to resist its global reach. Although the network has launched "MTV Canada" with an affiliate, that station limits its offerings primarily to talk shows and lifestyle programming. Many Canadians regard the Toronto-based MuchMusic as the nation's important domestic source of music videos-substantially different from, and superior to, American-based MTV. In her new study of the two music channels and their different cultures, Kip Pegley compares the musical and extra-musical content of MuchMusic and MTV, and examines how the stations construct their two distinct identities. Moving beyond analysis of individual videos, Pegley looks at the overall programming of each station, uncovers the well-hidden matrixes of power that dictate both which performers appear and what genres get the most airtime, and delves into how ideas of gender and race serve to "naturalize" distinct and complex nationalist ideologies. In so doing, she discovers why Canadians feel so protective of their music video station, and why they successfully have withstood the MTV invasion.

Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition. Born in the years leading up to Grenada's 1979 Socialist Revolution, the Parang Festival today offers a vehicle for Carriacouans to articulate and assert a progressive understanding of local cultural identity as well as a regional, pan-Caribbean belonging. Rebecca S. Miller examines the varying impact that factors such as cultural ambivalence, globalization, and technology have had on the performance of Carriacou's folk and traditional music and dance forms. Using historical sources and current ethnography, she illuminates the enduring significance of the Parang Festival to illustrate the social and political history of Carriacou as well as this culture's contemporary process of modernization. The book includes a web link allowing the reader to listen to a variety of musical examples.

In the late 1950s to 1970s, an Afro-Peruvian revival brought the forgotten music and dances of Peru's African musical heritage to Lima's theatrical stages. The revival conjured newly imagined links to the past in order to celebrate-and to some extent recreate-Black culture in Peru. In this groundbreaking study of the Afro-Peruvian revival and its aftermath, Heidi Carolyn Feldman reveals how Afro-Peruvian artists remapped blackness from the perspective of the "Black Pacific," a marginalized group of African diasporic communities along Latin America's Pacific coast. Feldman's "ethnography of remembering" traces the memory projects of charismatic Afro-Peruvian revival artists and companies, including José Durand, Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz, and Perú Negro, culminating with Susana Baca's entry onto the global world music stage in the 1990s. Readers will learn how Afro-Peruvian music and dance genres, although recreated in the revival to symbolize the ancient and forgotten past, express competing modern beliefs regarding what constitutes "Black Rhythms of Peru."

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance-and indeed all sacred music-is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

A landmark in the study of music and culture, this acclaimed volume documents the remarkable scope of amateur music-making in the English town of Milton Keynes. It presents in vivid detail the contrasting yet overlapping worlds of classical orchestras, church choirs, brass bands, amateur operatic societies, and amateur bands playing jazz, rock, folk, and country. Notable for its contribution to wider theoretical debates and its influential challenge to long-held assumptions about music and how to study it, the book focuses on the practices rather than the texts or theory of music, rejecting the idea that only selected musical traditions, "great names," or professional musicians are worth studying. This opens the door to the invisible work put in by thousands of local people of diverse backgrounds, and how the pathways creatively trodden by amateur musicians have something to tell us about both urban living and what it is to be human. Now with a new preface by the author, this long-awaited reissue of The Hidden Musicians will bring its insights and innovations to a new generation of students and scholars.

How do music and dance reveal the ways in which a community interacts with the world? How are the senses used in communicating cultural knowledge? In Sensational Knowledge, ethnomusicologist and dancer Tomie Hahn uncovers the process and nuances of learning nihon buyo, a traditional Japanese dance form. She uses case studies of dancers at all levels, as well as her own firsthand experiences, to investigate the complex language of bodies, especially across cultural divides. Paying particular attention to the effect of body-to-body transmission, and how culturally constructed processes of transmission influence our sense of self, Hahn argues that the senses facilitate the construction of "boundaries of existence" that define our physical and social worlds. In this flowing and personal text, Hahn reveals the ways in which culture shapes our attendance to various sensoria, and how our interpretation of sensory information shapes our individual realities. An included DVD provides visual examples.

When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee "Scratch" Perry began crafting "dub" music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae's "golden age" of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings-electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks-to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub's development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub's social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the "dub revolution" that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe.

In this exploration of the funk groove and its unique sounds, author Anne Danielsen takes an in-depth look at this under-explored genre. Danielsen concentrates on the golden age of funk in the late 1960s and the 1970s, focusing on two of the era's artists who made a substantial impact on the landscape of popular music: James Brown and George Clinton/Parliament. Aiming to understand funk not only as objectified musical meaning but also as lived experience, she begins with the musical events themselves and draws on her experiences as both a fan and a scholar to capture how their particular organization creates the funk listener's pleasure. Danielsen further examines issues surrounding race in the construction and consumption of this music, focusing her study with how white listeners responded to funk in the 1970s, and arguing that African American music has remained a means of catharsis and of dealing with pleasures of the body. Funk's crossover to international success among listeners of pop and rock music affected both the music itself and audiences' understanding of it. Presence and Pleasure shows us how.

Britain is widely considered the cradle of independent music culture. Bands like Radiohead and Belle and Sebastian, which epitomize indie music's sounds and attitudes, have spawned worldwide fanbases. This in-depth study of the British independent music scene explores how the behavior of fans, artists, and music industry professionals produce a community with a specific aesthetic based on moral values. Author Wendy Fonarow, a scholar with years of experience in the various sectors of the indie music scene, examines the indie music "gig" as a ritual in which all participants are actively involved. This ritual allows participants to play with cultural norms regarding appropriate behavior, especially in the domains of sex and creativity. Her investigation uncovers the motivations of audience members when they first enter the community and how their positions change over time so that the gig functions for most members as a rite of passage. Empire of Dirt sheds new light on music, gender roles, emotion, subjectivity, embodiment, and authenticity.

Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth is an immensely rich contribution to childhood studies and shows how children are socialized into the musical life of their communities. Children have rarely been central to musicological or anthropological studies, and childhood was once dismissed as too early in the human developmental process to be of significant interest. In a variety of historical, social, and cultural frameworks, these 10 essays address subjects as diverse as choirboys in early modern Seville, the griot culture of West Africa, and Jewish youth at summer camp. The essays reveal childhood as a time all its own, a time when individual identities are forged through music, and when voices emerge in ways that are as personal as they are communally bound and musically varied. This is an important book for music scholars, educators, cultural and social historians, and for scholars across the social sciences, as well as anyone interested in childhood. It sheds new light on children and youth cultures as alternately dependent upon and independent from the "grown-up" musical worlds that surround them.

Echo and Reverb is the first history of acoustically imagined space in popular music recording. The book documents how acoustic effects-reverberation, room ambience, and echo-have been used in recordings since the 1920s to create virtual sonic architectures and landscapes. Author Peter Doyle traces the development of these acoustically-created worlds from the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to the dramatic acoustic architectures of the medieval cathedral, the grand concert halls of the 19th century, and those created by the humble parlor phonograph of the early 20th century, and finally, the revolutionary age of rock 'n' roll. Citing recordings ranging from Gene Austin's 'My Blue Heaven' to Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train,' Doyle illustrates how non-musical sound constructs, with all their rich and contradictory baggage, became a central feature of recorded music. The book traces various imagined worlds created with synthetic echo and reverb-the heroic landscapes of the cowboy west, the twilight shores of south sea islands, the uncanny alleys of dark cityscapes, the weird mindspaces of horror movies, the private and collective spaces of teen experience, and the funky juke-joints of the mind.

Drawing on his background as an ethnomusicologist as well as years of experience as an accomplished jazz musician, Paul Austerlitz argues that jazz-and the world-view or consciousness that surrounds it-embodies an aesthetic of inclusiveness, reaching out from its African American base to embrace all of humanity. Fans and musicians have made this claim before, but Austerlitz is the first to provide a scholarly basis for it. He examines jazz in relation to race and national identity in the U. S. and then broadens his scope to consider jazz within the African diaspora and in very different transnational scenes, from the Dominican Republic to Finland. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book explores jazz in an extraordinary range of contexts. One of the central chapters is devoted to the history of the groundbreaking Latin jazz band of Machito and his Afro-Cubans, who were inspired by the dancing of both Harlemites and Jewish mamboniks, while the final chapter includes an extensive interview with the seminal drummer Milford Graves, one of Austerlitz's mentors, who holds that music profoundly influences our biorhythms and indeed shapes our thoughts.