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<P>How does a Middle Eastern community create a modern image through its expression of heritage and authenticity? In Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, Jonathan H. Shannon investigates expressions of authenticity in Syria's musical culture, which is particularly known for embracing and preserving the Arab musical tradition, and which has seldom been researched in depth by Western scholars. Music plays a key role in the process of self-imaging by virtue of its ability to convey feeling and emotion, and Shannon explores a variety of performance genres, Sufi rituals, song lyrics, melodic modes, and aesthetic criteria. Shannon shows that although the music may evoke the old, the traditional, and the local, these are re-envisioned as signifiers of the modern national profile. A valuable contribution to the study of music and identity and to the ethnomusicology of the modern Middle East, Among the Jasmine Trees details this music and its reception for the first time, offering an original theoretical framework for understanding contemporary Arab culture, music, and society.</P>

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<P>Britain is widely considered the cradle of independent music culture. Bands like Radiohead and Belle and Sebastian, which epitomize indie music's sounds and attitudes, have spawned worldwide fanbases. This in-depth study of the British independent music scene explores how the behavior of fans, artists, and music industry professionals produce a community with a specific aesthetic based on moral values. Author Wendy Fonarow, a scholar with years of experience in the various sectors of the indie music scene, examines the indie music «gig» as a ritual in which all participants are actively involved. This ritual allows participants to play with cultural norms regarding appropriate behavior, especially in the domains of sex and creativity. Her investigation uncovers the motivations of audience members when they first enter the community and how their positions change over time so that the gig functions for most members as a rite of passage. Empire of Dirt sheds new light on music, gender roles, emotion, subjectivity, embodiment, and authenticity.</P>

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<P>Chambers is a virtually complete collection of composer Alvin Lucier's major works from 1965 to 1977, interspersed with twelve interviews with the composer by Douglas Simon. Each score is written in prose and may be read by musicians as instructions for performance or by general readers as descriptions of imaginary musical activities. In response to Simon's searching questions, Lucier expands on each composition, not only explaining its genesis and development but also revealing its importance to the vigorously experimental American tradition to which Alvin Lucier belongs.</P><P>Many of his compositions jolt conventional notions of the role of composer, performer, and listener, and the spaces in which they play and listen. His works are scored for an astonishing range of instruments: seashells, subway stations, toy crickets, sonar guns, violins, synthesizers, bird calls, and Bunsen burners. All are unique explorations of acoustic phenomena –; echoes, brain waves, room resonances –; and radically transform the idea of music as metaphor into that of music as physical fact.</P>

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<P>Through a series of imaginative approaches to movement and performance, choreographer Deborah Hay presents a profound reflection on the ephemeral nature of the self and the body as the locus of artistic consciousness. Using the same uniquely playful poetics of her revolutionary choreography, she delivers one of the most revealing accounts of what art creation entails and the ways in which the body, the center of our aesthetic knowledge of the world, can be regarded as our most informed teacher. </P><P>My Body, The Buddhist becomes a way into Hay's choreographic techniques, a gloss on her philosophy of the body (which shares much with Buddhism), and an extraordinary artist's primer. The book is composed of nineteen short chapters («my body likes to rest,» «my body finds energy in surrender,» «my body is bored by answers»), each an example of what Susan Foster calls Hay's «daily attentiveness to the body's articulateness.»</P>

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<P>Antonia Mercé, stage-named La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Her intensive musical and theatrical collaborations with members of the Spanish vanguard – Manuel de Falla, Frederico García Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and with renowned Andalusian Gypsy dancers – reflect her importance as an artistic symbol for contemporary Spain and its cultural history. When she died in 1936, newspapers around the world mourned the passing of the «Flamenco Pavlova.»</P>

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О советском рок-подполье 70-80-х, о том, как появились Цой, Майк, БГ, расскажет Артемий Троицкий – как всегда скандально и сентиментально. «Все круто изменилось на стыке семидесятых и восьмидесятых, когда я открыл – сначала для себя, а потом и для многих других – ленинградскую новую волну. Гребенщикова, Майка, Цоя. Моя журналистская история приобрела новое измерение – личное, живое, общенческое. А моя жизнь, как гласит известное клише, наполнилась новым смыслом. Этим новым смыслом стало служение талантливым людям. Я вдруг понял, что нет для меня занятия более кайфового, чем поиск и помощь неизвестным талантам», – говорит Артемий Троицкий. Первый диджей в СССР, легенда российской музыкальной журналистики, человек, открывший советскому слушателю западную музыку и лучшее, что есть в русском роке, – все это Артемий Троицкий. От первого лица узнаем в подробностях о Викторе Цое, Майке Науменко, Борисе Гребенщикове и рок-клубном Ленинграде под соответствующий звуковой ряд.

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