Music & Musicology: Starting out

In this audacious book, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging.

Basics of Vocal Pedagogy is a comprehensive introductory text for vocal pedagogy classes at the college and university level. Though written primarily for prospective teachers of singing, vocal music educators, choir directors, voice coaches and intermediate to advanced level singers will also find the text useful as a textbook, training manual, and general reference book.

This account of Prespa weddings combines photographs, song texts and recordings of the wedding music. Jane Sugarman focuses her account on notions of gender identity, demonstrating the capacity of singing to generate and transform relations of power within Prespa society. The study offers a considerable contribution to the analysis of music and gender, music in diaspora cultures, and the social constitution of self and subjectivity.

The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavour. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immedi--ate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible.

Why do we sing and what first drove early humans to sing? How might they have sung and how might those styles have survived to the present day? This history addresses these questions and many more, examining singing as a historical and cross-cultural phenomenon.

These ambitious volumes are made by and for practical-minded educators. Rooted in on-the-ground classroom experience, chapter after chapter covers a unique cultural territory, introducing values, aesthetic principles, and structures that generate and shape musical expression.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is a compendium of perspectives on children and their musical engagements as singers, dancers, players, and avid listeners. Over the course of 35 chapters, contributors from around the world provide an interdisciplinary enquiry into the musical lives of children in a variety of cultures, and their role as both preservers and innovators of music.