World Vocal Ensemble: Home

Taking readers on a tour of the country's musical landscape, it explores ways in which Bulgaria's rural traditions affect the expression and interpretation of its music and examines how Bulgaria's history has influenced its music over many decades. The book also shows how musical traditions have been preserved and have flourished despite the social changes brought about by the post-WWII era of industrialization, modernization, and urbanization.

Entry from Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2015.

The author examines the influence of black music on the Caribbean music scene. Topics include the African beat, cross-rhythmic virtuosity and polyrhythmic structure.

Presents an analysis of the music of composer and ethnographer Werner Anton Jaegerhuber, which focused on the political and economic relationships between rural peasant majority and urban elite minority in Haiti. Attempts of Jaegerhuber to distance himself from the sensationalist accounts of Vodou music in foreign media and to universalize Haitian traditional music; Personal background of Jaegerhuber; Development of an idiosyncratic ethnographic method by Jaegerhuber to process Haitian folksongs into concert pieces; Theory on the relationship of art to folklore.

Excellent and detailed encyclopedia article on the music of Georgia. Written by Joseph Jordania; edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter and Chris Goertzen (Routledge, 2000)

Drawing on the linguistic-anthropological literature on language-in-music and the ethnomusicological and cultural studies literature on communication in world music, in this article I explore the dialectics of sameness and difference as they play out at the interstices of the Georgian language and transnationally oriented Georgian “world music.” My study draws on seven years of ethnographic engagement with musicians and audiences in Georgia proper and among Georgian migrants in New York City.

This paper investigates the relationship between the social transformation of southern African Basotho agro-pastoralists into migrant workers and the musical–literary forms (‘auriture’) they created to express this transformation. Far from declining, such forms have undergone considerable innovation and elaboration in response to Basotho experience of rural dispossession and urban and mine labour migrancy. For the Basotho, the performance of existing aural literary forms was evidently inadequate to express the dramatic change in their social position and work–life experience.

The use of music as a social and political symbol in South Africa did not end with the fall of apartheid. In fact, some of the music in post-apartheid South Africa encountered a significant change — from protest music to reconciliatory music. For example, several white South African composers have intentionally juxtaposed, borrowed, imitated and quoted indigenous African music to bring attention to the issues of race relations within their country. In addition, these composers have made use of African musical styles to show appreciation for the indigenous culture of South Africa and have been rewarded with a fascinating palette of rhythms, harmonies, timbres, and texts.

Harold Scheub has conducted many investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling. In this work, he searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical centre that Scheub calls the poem in the story.

Article from Ethnomusicology : journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology 1998

written by Ankica Petrovic; edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter and Chris Goertzen.

A chapter from "Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective"

See chapter on Bosnia and Central/Southeast Europe : musics and musicians in transition / Mark Slobin