Soundscapes from the Americas: Ethnomusicological Essays on the Power, Poetics, and Ontology of Performance

by Donna A. Buchanan

Overview

Dedicated to the late Gerard Béhague, this anthology offers perspectives on the evolving legacy of performance ethnography in socio-musical analysis and reflects the heritage but also contemporary trajectories of Béhague’s scholarly concerns. Prefaced by an essay outlining key developments in the ethnography of performance paradigm, the volume’s seven case studies portray snapshots of musical life in representative communities of the Americas, including the southwestern and Pacific United States, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, and Ecuador. These studies pose anthropological inquiries into the ontology of performance practice, the social power of poetic performativity, and the experience and embodiment of sound in place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472415882
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	11/28/2014
Series:	SOAS Musicology Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Donna A. Buchanan is associate professor of music and anthropology and director of the music ensemble 'Balkanalia' at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses in ethnomusicology and the musical cultures of the Balkans, Russia, and Eurasia. Her scholarly interests include the implication of music in cosmology, sound ecologies, and relations of social power and identity.

Table of Contents

Contents: Foreword, Richard Bauman; Introduction: doing ethnomusicology ‘Texas style’: a musical (re)turn to performance, Donna A. Buchanan. Part I Genres, Histories, and Discourses of Power Performed: The Teatro Buffo: Cuban Blackface theater of the 19th century, Robin Moore; La Música Nacional: a metaphor for contrasting views of Ecuadorian national identity, Ketty Wong; Conserve, adapt, and reconverge: rationalizing a template in Hawai’i Puerto Rican musical performance, Ted Solis. Part II Performing Practice: Style and the Politics of Subjectivity: Transformation in communion: toward an aesthetic of improvisation, Tim Brace; Feminine flowers among the thistles: gendered boundaries of performance in Chilean Canto a lo poeta, Emily Pinkerton. Part III Situated Events and Performance Politics: Fiesta, Festival, Stage, and Street: The way of sorrows: performance, experience, and the moral society in northern Ecuador, Michelle Wibbelsman; Performing indigeneity: poetics and politics of music festivals in highland Bolivia, Thomas Solomon. References; Index.

Editorial Reviews

’The ethnography of musical performance is so fundamental to contemporary ethnomusicology that it is like the air we breathe. Buchanan’s introduction offers a new window to the genesis of this approach and its broad reach, and then points us to the next steps forward. The articles that follow explore the politics of performance and the power of performativity in relation to history, subjectivity, and specific events through a series of vibrant case studies from across the Americas. Of special interest to Latin Americanists, Americanists, and ethnomusicologists in general, this book both explains and exemplifies why the ethnography of performance has become foundational to the ethnomusicological project.’ Thomas Turino, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

From the Publisher