Excursions in World Music, Seventh Edition is designed to draw you into a series of musical encounters that open onto the widest possible range of social, political, ethnic, religious, racial, historical, and economic concerns facing communities throughout the world today. But this book is also designed to achieve this broad scope while remaining very accessible to you. Without requiring a working knowledge of music theory or harmony, the chapters in this book invites you to consider many pressing questions: How does music function? What does it mean to (or accomplish for) the communities who produce it? How is it mediated and circulated and why do these flows of sound, bodies, and capital matter? How does music illuminate or complicate race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? What are the spiritual implications of performance? How do dance and theater participate in these musical contexts? In what ways do history and geography contribute to the conditions of possibility for musical creativity? What, moreover, can we learn about ourselves in the process of learning about the many musics of the world?
Your excursions will take you into the middle of Bira ceremonies in Zimbabwe; immerse you in a Japanese Kabuki theater production; allow you to get a working understanding of Javanese Gamelan performance; and challenge you to think with and listen to popular musicians hailing from Trinidad to Korea and from India to Colombia and that’s just a start. Excursions in World Music is:
• Organized along an area studies model, in which individual chapters work to represent the multiple musical cultures of a given region.
• Comprised of a set of essays—by nine different scholars describing, with conviction and a sense of devotion, cultures in which they have had substantial field experience and done personal research, providing information and in-depth syntheses of the musical cultures of the world.
• Dedicated to illustrating what Bruno Nettl has, in his Foreword, called the “bridges” that exist between these various regions and nation-states.
• Written for students with no formal musical training, and challenging them to engage with the musics of the world and become motivated listeners.
• A complete course with book and dedicated web site that hosts instructor and student resources.
The most significant new component of the seventh edition is the inclusion of five new chapters, which incorporate new musical developments in these regions, integrate new approaches within ethnomusicology, and open new ways of considering these musical communities in global perspective. Four replace existing chapters from the sixth edition, and one is entirely new to the seventh edition. These include:
• A new Introduction, written by Timothy Rommen, replacing the previous chapter by Bruno Nettl.
• South Asian music, written by Jim Sykes, replacing the previous chapter by Charles Capwell.
• Music of the Middle East and North Africa, contributed by Richard Jankowsky, replacing the previous chapter by Bruno Nettl.
• Music of Latin America, written by Timothy Rommen, replacing the previous chapter by Thomas Turino.
• Music of Korea, contributed by Joshua D. Pilzer and adding a new chapter with a much-needed additional perspective to the East Asian content of the sixth edition (China and Japan).
Further, the authors of Excursions in World Music continue in this edition their commitment to the approach, structure, and content with which they have always conceived this work. The seventh edition:
• Responds to many of the significant changes that the world of music continues to experience (and this especially with regard to popular musics)—Chapter 2, for instance, considers the importance of Coke Studio for the production of South Asian popular musics.
• Interprets the rapidly changing conditions, repertories, and styles of world music since the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on traditional, art, and popular musics throughout the world. Chapter 3, for instance, explores the music and politics of the Arab Spring.
• Explores the world as a collection of places in which globalization, the explosion of new technologies, media flows, and the often dramatically shifting landscapes of a postcolonial and neonationalist world dominate the musical scene. Chapter 10 for instance, presents champeta (Colombia) and nortec (Mexico) as examples of how music is shaped by all of these factors. Enhances the instructional resources for educators with a test bank, PowerPoint slides, and a thoroughly updated instructor’s manual written by Greg Robinson.
Each chapter has several features that will enable you to get the most out of your experience with Excursions in World Music. Each chapter includes:
• An Opening Vignette that introduces the musical ideas and social contexts you’ll be studying for the rest of the chapter.
• A Running Glossary that helps you keep track of key words and concepts, and familiarizes you with vocabulary you might not have encountered before.
• A series of Listening Guides that help you listen closely to examples of the musical genres and instruments under discussion throughout the chapter. These Listening Guides offer you the chance to follow along and come to a deeper understanding about the structure and technical aspects of the musical examples. Where appropriate, they also offer translations of the lyrics.
• Icons in margins alerting you to supplemental materials on the companion website. These icons come in three varieties:
LISTEN: These are placed above the Listening Guide and direct you to the website for streamed listening within an interactive Listening Guide that is posted online, for most tracks. Other musical examples are linked to YouTube or Spotify, where you will need to establish a (no charge) account to listen to certain tracks. See www.spotify.com.
REVIEW: These are placed at the end of each chapter and alert you to the set of resources available for studying. These include flashcards for key terms and ideas, interactive quizzes for your practice, and an instrument chart sorted by country or continent.
EXPLORE: These are placed at various points in the margins, illuminating topics for which we have sought out additional information on the internet.
• A bibliography and discography compiled in order to provide you with additional reading and listening possibilities.
• An audio CD-set with a compilation of the tracks assigned for listening and demonstrated in the Listening Guides is available (and encouraged) for separate purchase.
Note that tracks available on the CD-set will be marked with a CD-icon within the Listening Guide. The audio compilation is more complete than the hosted streamed tracks on the website, since some copyright holders would not permit their tracks to be licensed. While many copyright holders are contributors to the book, or fellow scholars who graciously permit use free of charge, several tracks are from publishing houses with firm conditions. You will have access to all audio examples if you access both the website and the CD-set.
The website for Excursions in World Music hosts two separate sites for Instructors and Students. Entrance is password protected, and instructions are given when you open the home page.
Instructors will find an Instructor’s Manual, Test Bank, a general essay on “Music Fundamentals” that presents some of the most common ways of talking about music and understanding concepts such as melody, harmony, and rhythm, and also available for students, and links to further resources for each chapter.
Students will have access to Learning Objectives for each chapter, Interactive quizzes, an Instrument Guide, aligned by country/continent, to the “Music Fundamentals” essay, and to “Explore” topics.
Both Instructors and Students have access to an audio compilation of tracks within an interactive Listening Guide, keyed to the textbook. These are organized by chapter. In addition to the streamed tracks, there are several which could not be streamed (as noted above, for copyright reasons), but are available on the CD-set and/or through YouTube or Spotify. URLs are on the website, but you must set up a (no-charge) Spotify account, www.spotify.com in order to access them.
You will find resources available both within each chapter and on the thoroughly redesigned companion website for the book. Within each chapter, you will be able to focus your learning with the help of integrated sidebar definitions of key terms; additional and, in many cases, updated photos; detailed Listening Guides; a word bank of key words and concepts, distilling the most salient ideas from each chapter; and updated bibliographies and discographies designed to point students toward further reading and listening. Callouts for additional material, housed on the companion website, are also common throughout each chapter. You can turn to the companion website for a range of additional resources including: videos and photos of instruments, ensembles, and genres discussed in various chapters; study guides and sample quizzes; flashcards; and audio Listening Guides keyed to those found in each chapter.
You should think of the audio examples, in particular, as a major component of your learning, paying close attention to the Listening Guides and working to understand the performances as growing out of and deeply connected to the issues and ideas each chapter’s author is presenting in the text. Ideally, you’ll find that the companion website gives you a wide range of material to take your inquiries further and ground your understanding in additional examples more deeply. Make sure you make use of both the book and the companion website in your studies, and you’ll find that you’ll gain a great deal more from your experience Excursions in World Music was written with a belief that knowledge of world music not only opens many doors to a better understanding of today’s most pressing social, political, and cultural problems, but also engenders respect for those who make and experience music everywhere.
You will find the seventh edition of Excursions in World Music more explicitly dedicated to providing teaching resources and pedagogical support than ever before. The photos and videos available to students are also made available to you in a secure portion of the companion website, where you can also find: a completely redesigned instructional guide; a generous set of sample test questions; a general essay on elements of music that you may use to supplement your lectures or simply assign to your students; PowerPoint slides to supplement your lectures; and links to further resources for each chapter. The goal is to provide a ready set of tools that can be deployed in the classroom, both during lectures and for testing purposes and I believe that you will find the textbook more user-friendly and easier to teach from than ever before.
The authors of Excursions in World Music know that there is never enough time to cover every chapter in a given semester or quarter. As such, we have designed the chapters to work as discreet units. Feel free to teach them out of order, and to select those chapters that help you craft the narrative and set of issues you are most interested in conveying to your students. The companion website is envisioned as a repository of resources to help you manage the course, and I hope you’ll make use of the PowerPoint slides, and the use guide in particular. You should feel free to modify the power point slides as you see fit, using them as templates for creating your own path through the material. They are, however, designed to provide you with the basics of what you’ll need for each chapter. The user guide, too, is designed to offer you some starting points for lecture notes and to offer support for the concepts and issues that emerge in the course of each chapter. We hope that you’ll also find the test bank and the essay on the elements of music helpful in managing the range of students and skill levels that you may encounter in the course of teaching this material.
