Music Immigration And The City

This volume brings together the work of social scientists and music scholars examining the role of migrant and migrant descended communities in the production and consumption of popular music in Europe and North America. The contributions to the collection include studies of language and local identity in hip hop in Liege and Montreal; the politics of Mexican folk music in Los Angeles; the remaking of ethnic boundaries in Naples; the changing meanings of Tango in the Argentine diaspora and of Alevi music among Turks in Germany; the history of Soca in Brooklyn; and the recreation of ‘American’ culture by the children of immigrants on the Broadway stage. Taken together, these works demonstrate how music affords us a window onto local culture, social relations and community politics in the diverse cities of immigrant receiving societies. Music is often one of the first arenas in which populations encounter newcomers, a place where ideas about identity can be reformulated and reimagined, and a field in which innovation and hybridity are often highly valued. This book highlights why it is a subject worthy of more attention from students of racial and ethnic relations in diverse societies. It was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

A history -- the first ever -- of the abundant traditions of German-American musical theater in New York, and a treasure trove of songs and information.

The Sounds of Latinidad explores the Latino music scene as a lens through which to understand changing ideas about latinidad in the New South. Focusing on Latino immigrant musicians and their fans in Charlotte, North Carolina, the volume shows how limited economic mobility, social marginalization, and restrictive immigration policies have stymied immigrants’ access to the American dream and musicians’ dreams of success. Instead, Latin music has become a way to form community, debate political questions, and claim cultural citizenship. The volume illuminates the complexity of Latina/o musicians’ lives. They find themselves at the intersection of culture and politics, often pushed to define a vision of what it means to be Latino in a globalizing city in the Nuevo South. At the same time, they often avoid overt political statements and do not participate in immigrants’ rights struggles, instead holding a cautious view of political engagement. Yet despite this politics of ambivalence, Latina/o musicians do assert intellectual agency and engage in a politics that is embedded in their musical community, debating aesthetics, forging collective solidarity with their audiences, and protesting poor working conditions. Challenging scholarship on popular music that focuses on famous artists or on one particular genre, this volume demonstrates how exploring the everyday lives of ordinary musicians can lead to a deeper understanding of musicians’ role in society. It argues that the often overlooked population of Latina/o musicians should be central to our understanding of what it means to live in a southern U.S. city today.

At a time of mass migration and growing xenophobia, what can we learn about the reception, incorporation, and alienation of immigrants in American society from listening to the ways they perform jazz, the ‘national music’ of their new host country? Ethnographies of contemporary migrations emphasize the palpable presence of national borders and social boundaries in the everyday life of immigrants. Ethnomusicological literature on migrant and border musics has focused primarily on the role of music in evoking a sense of home and expressing group identity and solidarity in the face of assimilation. In jazz scholarship, the articulation and crossing of genre boundaries has been tied to jazz as a symbol of national cultural identity, both in the U.S and in jazz scenes around the world. While these works cover important aspects of the relationship between nationalism, immigration and music, the role of jazz in facilitating the crossing of national borders and blurring social boundaries between immigrant and native-born musicians in the U.S. has received relatively little attention to date. This dissertation investigates these interrelated topics by considering the role of immigrant musicians in the New York Jazz scene from the 1910s to the present. It considers the practices that allow musicians to come to New York and sustain themselves as working musicians as they struggle to maintain legal status in the U.S. It examines the ways immigrant musicians express senses of home and national belonging through jazz but also challenge and critique musical and cultural nationalism. It investigates the ways immigrant musicians use jazz improvisation to navigate and cross social boundaries between themselves and native-born musicians, and analyzes musical interactions that defy simple identity and genre categories. Finally, it calls for research on immigrant music that addresses the fractures in and interconnections of national, ethno-racial and genre categories in immigrant musical life in America. Grounded in three years of ethnographic fieldwork as an Israeli jazz musician in New York City and based on conversations with fellow immigrants from around the world and native-born musicians, audience members, venue owners, and immigration specialists this project analyzes sound recordings, live performances, and archival material to understand the role of jazz music in facilitating interaction among immigrant musicians and across immigrant communities. Using contemporary theorizations of political borders and social boundaries suggested by Didier Fassin, Etienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra in conjunction with Benjamin Brinner’s theory of musical competence, I show that proficiency across several musical genres, particularly jazz and other musical markers of national and ethnic identity are essential to musicians' efforts to maintain legal immigrant status in the U.S. and support themselves and their families as working musicians. Observing the ways immigrant musicians use jazz to cross national borders, social boundaries and musical genres, as well as to critique received notions of tradition and national identity in music, I call for a move beyond the methodological framing of music as delineating an ethnic community and an uncomplicated symbol of identity. I argue for a conception of immigrant music that considers its role as a tool for interaction across immigrant communities and one that acknowledges the economic, social and political factors involved in maintaining “immigrant musics” as reflections of the home country in ethnic communities within the U.S.

The story behind how a Jewish refugee wrote the patriotic American classic, God Bless America.

How does popular music influence the culture and reputation of a city, and what does a city do to popular music? Interrogating Popular Music and the City examines the ways in which urban environments and music cultures intersect in various locales around the globe. Music and cities have been partners in an often clumsy, sometimes accidental but always exciting dance. Heritage and immigration, noise and art, policy and politics are some of the topics that are addressed in this critical examination of relationships between cities and music. The book draws upon an international array of researchers, encompassing hip hop in Beijing; the city favelas of Brazil; from Melbourne bars to European parliaments; to heritage and tourism debates in Salzburg and Manchester. In doing so, it interrogates the different agendas of audiences, musicians and policy-makers in distinct urban settings.

This book traces the particularities of music migration and tourism in different global settings, and provides current, even new perspectives for ethnomusicological research on globalizing musics in transit. The dual focus on tourism and migration is central to debates on globalization, and their examination—separately or combined—offers a useful lens on many key questions about where globalization is taking us: questions about identity and heritage, commoditization, historical and cultural representation, hybridity, authenticity and ownership, neoliberalism, inequality, diasporization, the relocation of allegiances, and more. Moreover, for the first time, these two key phenomena—tourism and migration—are studied conjointly, as well as interdisciplinary, in order to derive both parallels and contrasts. While taking diverse perspectives in embracing the contemporary musical landscape, the collection offers a range of research methods and theoretical approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural geography, sociology, popular music studies, and media and communication. In so doing, Musics in Transit provides a rich exemplification of the ways that all forms of musical culture are becoming transnational under post-global conditions, sustained by both global markets and musics in transit, and to which both tourists and diasporic cosmopolitans make an important contribution.

In Sounds of Crossing Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means, Chávez adds fresh and compelling insights into the ways transnational music-making is at the center of everyday Mexican migrant life.

New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London 1884–1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London’s Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the Yiddish texts are closely analyzed and quoted to draw out the complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas: politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants to English life is an important part of the development of their social culture, as well as to the history of London. In part one of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment, and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press, establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden social histories of the people writing and performing them. For example, how Morris Winchevsky’s London poetry shows various attempts to engage the Jewish immigrant worker in specific London activism and political debate. Lachs explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. On the theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and growing secularization was changing immigrants’ daily lives in the encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found in Whitechapel Noiseoffers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London, and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London, and migration studies.

A compilation of thirty-four songs of differing ethnicity from the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies folklore collections. The songs are presented in their original language with English translation.