Sterns Guide To Contemporary African Music

The Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music is the first ever comprehensive guide to recorded African music.

No

A companion volume to Stern's "Guide to Contemporary African Music Volume I". Since then the World Music phenomenon of the last few years has created multiple new demands for African music - through recordings, live performances and for information and analysis. This new book digs deeper into the African musical past highlighting new areas of interest and bringing the story up to date. The World of African Music is a guide which gives the flavour and excitement of music from a continent with a richly diverse musical heritage. From Francophone West Africa through the Indian Ocean Islands to South Africa, Ronnie Graham introduces the reader to the roots, rhythms and mutations of African music.

Summary: A concise introduction to the varied landscape of contemporary African music. Features leading artists and bands, musical styles, traditional/acoustic music, cross-cultural sounds as well as a selected discography and a glossary of musical terms.

This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has long been admired for its wide range as well as its reliability. This treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect today’s beat, including popular music, jazz, and rock. Throughout this Fourth Edition, existing articles have been fine-tuned and new entries added so that the dictionary fully reflects current music scholarship and recent developments in musical culture. Encyclopedia-length articles by notable experts alternate with short entries for quick reference, including definitions and identifications of works and instruments. More than 220 drawings and 250 musical examples enhance the text. This is an invaluable book that no music lover can afford to be without.

An important feature of Ghanaian tertiary education is the foundational African Studies Programme which was initiated in the early 1960s. Unfortunately hardly any readers exist which bring together a body of knowledge on the themes, issues and debates which inform and animate research and teaching in African Studies particularly on the African continent. This becomes even more important when we consider the need for knowledge on Africa that is not Eurocentric or sensationalised, but driven from internal understandings of life and prospects in Africa. Dominant representations and perceptions of Africa usually depict a continent in crisis. Rather than buying into external representations of Africa, with its 'lacks' and aspirations for Western modernities, we insist that African scholars in particular should be in the forefront of promoting understanding of the pluri-lingual, overlapping, and dense reality of life and developments on the continent, to produce relevant and usable knowledge. Continuing and renewed interest in Africa's resources, including the land mass, economy, minerals, visual arts and performance cultures, as well as bio-medical knowledge and products, by old and new geopolitical players, obliges African scholars to transcend disciplinary boundaries and to work with each other to advance knowledge and uses of those resources in the interests of Africa's people.

The musics of Africa play a particularly important role in expressing and forming identities. This book brings together African and Nordic scholars from both musicology and other disciplines in an attempt to analyse various aspects of the complex playing with volatile identities in music in Africa today. Taken together the papers put new light on the assumed or real dichotomies between countryside and city, collective and individual, tradition and modernity, authentic and alien. The papers are based on contributions for a conference organized by the research project “Cultural Images in and of Africa†of the Nordic Africa Institute together with the Sibelius Museum/Department of Musicology and the Centre for Continuing Education at Ã...bo Akademi University in Ã...bo (Turku), Finland in October 2000. The book includes a keynote speech by Christopher Waterman (UCLA), and an introduction by Annemette Kirkegaard, Copenhagen University. Southern, West and East Africa are represented in the studies, which cover a great variety of musics.

The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African music" suggests there is an agreed-upon meaning, but African music signifies differently to different people. This book also poses the question then, "What is African music?" Agawu offers a new and provocative look at the history of African music scholarship that will resonate with students of ethnomusicology and post-colonial studies. He offers an alternative "Afro-centric" means of understanding African music, and in doing so, illuminates a different mode of creativity beyond the usual provenance of Western criticism. This book will undoubtedly inspire heated debate--and new thinking--among musicologists, cultural theorists, and post-colonial thinkers. Also includes 15 musical examples.