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<P>This exploration of rock 'n' roll music and culture in Birmingham, Alabama, is based on the oral histories of musicians, their fans and professionals in the popular music industry. Collected over a twenty-year period, their stories describe the coming of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, the rise of the garage bands in the 1960s, of southern rock in the 1970s, and of alternative music in the 1980s and 1990s. Told in the words of the musicians themselves, Magic City Nights provides an insider's view of the dramatic changes in the business and status of popular music from the era of the vacuum tube to twenty-first-century digital technology. These collective memories offer a unique perspective on the impact of a subversive and racially integrated music culture in one of the most conservative and racially divided cities in the country.</P>

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<P>In the thirty years since their immigration from Ethiopia to the State of Israel, Ethiopian-Israelis have put music at the center of communal and public life, using it alternatingly as a mechanism of protest and as appeal for integration. Ethiopian music develops in quiet corners of urban Israel as the most prominent advocate for equality, and the Israeli-born generation is creating new musical styles that negotiate the terms of blackness outside of Africa. For the first time, this book examines in detail those new genres of Ethiopian-Israeli music, including Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop, Ethio-soul performed across Europe, and eskesta dance projects at the center of national festivals. This book argues that in a climate where Ethiopian-Israelis fight for recognition of their contribution to society, musical style often takes the place of political speech, and musicians take on outsize roles as cultural critics. From their perch in Tel Aviv, Ethiopian-Israeli musicians use musical style to critique a social hierarchy that affects life for everyone in Israel/Palestine.</P>

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<P>Roots in Reverse explores how Latin music contributed to the formation of the négritude movement in the 1930s. Taking Senegal and Cuba as its primary research areas, this work uses oral histories, participant observation, and archival research to examine the ways Afro-Cuban music has influenced Senegalese debates about cultural and political citizenship and modernity. Shain argues that the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in twentieth century Senegal illuminates many dimensions of that nation's cultural history such as gender relations, generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture and diasporic identities. More than just a new form of musical enjoyment, Afro-Cuban music provided listeners with a tool for creating a public sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony.</P>

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<P>Anna Halprin, vanguard postmodern dancer turned community artist and healer, has created ground-breaking dances with communities all over the world. Here, she presents her philosophy and experience, as well as step-by-step processes for bringing people together to create dances that foster individual and group well-being. At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed throughout the world, and Circle the Earth. The Circle the Earth workshop for people living with AIDS has generated dozens of «scores» for others to adapt. In addition, the book provides a concrete guide to Halprin's celebrated Planetary Dance. Now more than 35 years old, Planetary Dance promotes peace among people and peace with the Earth. Open to everyone, it has been performed in more than 50 countries. In 1995 more than 400 participants joined her in a Planetary Dance in Berlin commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Potsdam Agreements, at the end of World War II. More recently, she took the Planetary Dance to Israel, bringing together Israelis and Palestinians as well as other nationalities. Throughout this book Halprin shows how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning and mobilizing change, and she offers insight and advice on facilitating groups. If we are to survive, Halprin argues, we must learn, experientially, how our individual stories weave together and strengthen the fabric of our collective body. Generously illustrated with photographs, charts and scores, this book will be a boon to dance therapists, educators and community artists of all types.</P>

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In a series of 20 candid interviews with radical women musicians and performance artists, author Zora von Burden probes the depths of how and why they broke through society's limitations to create works of outstanding measure.

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<P>This small, striking book commemorates the career of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier, and features an interview with Lucier and curator Andrea Miller-Keller, essays by Nicolas Collins, Ronald Kuivila, Michael Roth and Pamela Tatge, and details of a symposium, exhibit and special performances of Lucier's work held at Wesleyan University, November 4-6, 2011. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. From 1970 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. Lucier performs, lectures and exhibits his sound installations extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia.</P>

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There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording&#39;s profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in file-sharing, and includes an expanded conclusion and bibliography.<BR /><BR /> Find illustrative sound and film clips on the new companion website at www.ucpress.edu/go/capturingsound

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&lt;P&gt;In this engaging hybrid work—a blend of oral history and graphic novel—Stephen Farina finds «Juma Sultan» in a local phonebook. After an initial meeting at a roadside diner, Juma takes Steve and a fellow researcher to a decrepit barn, which, amazingly, contains a treasure trove of reel-to-reel audio tapes and 16mm films of jam sessions and jazz performances from the 1960s and 1970s. As the men go through the boxes and begin the painstaking process of preservation, Juma recalls the players, places, and time period when free jazz exploded then fused with the political momentum of the Civil Rights era. This true story documents «The Aboriginal Music Society» Archival Project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Available exclusively as an e-publication, Reel History's expressive and glowing black-and-white illustrations are augmented by audio clips and haunting silent video from Juma Sultan's unique archive. This is an invaluable history for jazz historians and readers in the digital age.&lt;/P&gt;

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&lt;P&gt;Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane became a swami, directing an alternative spiritual community in Southern California. Exploring her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper, to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Monument Eternal illuminates her music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional, boundary-crossing African-American artist.&lt;/P&gt;

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&lt;P&gt;This innovative book, assembled by the editors of the renowned periodical Terra Nova, is the first anthology published on the subject of music and nature. Lush and evocative, yoking together the simplicities and complexities of the world of natural sound and the music inspired by it, this collection includes essays, illustrations, and plenty of sounds and music. The Book of Music and Nature celebrates our relationship with natural soundscapes while posing stimulating questions about that very relationship. The book ranges widely, with the interplay of the texts and sounds creating a conversation that readers from all walks of life will find provocative and accessible.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The anthology includes classic texts on music and nature by 20th century masters including John Cage, Hazrat Inrayat Khan, Pierre Schaeffer, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Toru Takemitsu. Innovative essays by Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, David Toop, Hildegard Westerkamp and Evan Eisenberg also appear. Interspersed throughout are short fictional excerpts by authors Rafi Zabor, Alejo Carpentier, and Junichiro Tanazaki.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The audio material for the book, available online at http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/musicandnaturecd/, includes fifteen tracks of music made out of, or reflective of, natural sounds, ranging from Babenzele Pygmy music to Australian butcherbirds, and from Pauline Oliveros to Brian Eno.&lt;/P&gt;

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