Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People

by Jim Samson

Overview

Black Sea Sketches is a portrait of some of the diverse musical cultures surrounding the Black Sea and in its hinterlands. Its six separate chapters follow a very broad trajectory from close-ups of traditional music (chapters 1-4) towards wide-angle studies of art music (chapters 5-6), and each of them opens windows to big, border-crossing themes about music and place. A wide variety of repertoires is discussed: ancient layers of polyphonic music, bardic songs, traditional music from the coasts and mountains, the sacred music of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the art music of Europe and West Asia, and present-day popular music ‘scenes’. The usual practice is for each chapter to begin with a Black Sea coastal location before reaching out into the hinterlands. The result is a collection of six relatively discrete essays on different locations and topics, but with underlying thematic continuities, and offering a wide-ranging commentary on cultural difference. Firmly grounded in ethnographic and documentary research, this is an important study for scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, as also of Caucasian and Russian/East European Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367700294
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/29/2022
Series:	Slavonic and East European Music Studies
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jim Samson has published widely on the music of Chopin and Liszt, on analytical and aesthetic topics in 19th and 20th century music, and on the cultural histories of East Central and South Eastern Europe.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Betwixt and between 1

1 Homo Polyphonicus 7

Song masters 7

The sacred muse 19

Polyphony and the nation 28

2 Giants, Heroes and Circassians 40

Looking for Narts 40

Home sweet home 53

Sharing stories 60

3 Not only Greeks 70

The Towers of Trebizond 70

Echoes of diversity 81

Instruments in the world 94

4 Across the sea 105

Epics and origins 105

Peoples and their borders 115

Points west 127

5 Building houses 140

The pearl of the sea: opera and more 140

Cities east and west 151

Opera and the Sultan 166

6 Placing composers 179

An orient within 179

Transitioning north 187

Transitioning south 199

Afterword: From maps to apps 216

Index 228