Hmong Songs of Memory
Hmong Songs of Memory

Author: Victoria Vorreiter

Publisher:

Published: 2016-11-27

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780998123905

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The Hmong Songs of Memory: Traditional Secular and Sacred Hmong Music book and ethnographic film offer the reader, viewer, and listener an absorbing multi-sensory experience to explore the age-old music, ceremonies, and beliefs of the Hmong. Vivid accounts of Hmong shamans, healers, ritual specialists, headmen, musicians, and villagers are brought to life by over 350 color photographs and an enclosed 75-minute DVD in Hmong and English.The Hmong have developed an astonishingly rich culture over millennia as they migrated from their source in Mongolia and Siberia, moving from mountaintop to mountaintop along the great rivers of China to the foothills of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, and, presently, to the four corners of the world.An agrarian people keenly attuned to the cycles of seasons and the wheel of life, the Hmong have created a complex, all-encompassing belief system rooted in animism, where everything in nature possesses a soul and the universe is organized by supernatural powers. Frequent rituals, ceremonies, and festivals are performed throughout the year to maintain harmony between the world of man and realm of spirits, be they benevolent or malevolent.The medium propelling these rites is music, which springs from a vast repository of songs, chants, invocations, and instrumental pieces that chart the human experience. This soundscape pervades daily life as it does sacred enactments. For a culture that historically had no literary tradition, music also serves as the most powerful channel for transmitting everything the Hmong know about their inner and outer lives, linking the first ancestors with present generations and beyond.Hmong Songs of Memory: Traditional Secular and Sacred Hmong Music. Text, photographs, and film by Victoria Vorreiter. Summary: Hmong Songs of Memory: Traditional Secular and Sacred Hmong Music, a book of essays and photographs accompanied by an ethnographic film, explores the Hmong vocal and instrumental musical heritage and the Hmong beliefs, traditions, and rituals that music animates. The lyrics of all pieces are cited in both the Hmong and English languages. (281 pages)

The Song Poet
The Song Poet

Author: Kao Kalia Yang

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1627794956

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From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Author: Anne Fadiman

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2012-04-24

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0374533407

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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.

Music and Memory
Music and Memory

Author: Bob Snyder

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780262692373

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Divided into two parts, this book shows how human memory influences the organization of music. The first part presents ideas about memory and perception from cognitive psychology and the second part of the book shows how these concepts are exemplified in music.

World Music
World Music

Author: Terry E. Miller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-03

Total Pages: 617

ISBN-13: 113624171X

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Authors Terry E. Miller and Andrew Shahriari take students around the world to experience the diversity of musical expression. World Music: A Global Journey, now in its third edition, is known for its breadth in surveying the world’s major cultures in a systematic study of world music within a strong pedagogical framework. As one prepares for any travel, each chapter starts with background preparation, reviewing the historical, cultural, and musical overview of the region. Visits to multiple ‘sites’ within a region provide in-depth studies of varied musical traditions. Music analysis begins with an experimental "first impression" of the music, followed by an "aural analysis" of the sound and prominent musical elements. Finally, students are invited to consider the cultural connections that give the music its meaning and life. Features of the Third Edition Over 3 hours of diverse musical examples. with a third audio CD of new musical examples Listening Guides analyze the various pieces of music with some presented in an interactive format online Biographical highlights of performers and ethnomusicologists updated and new ones added Numerous pedagogical aids, including "On Your Own Time" and "Explore More" sidebars, and "Questions to Consider" Popular music incorporated with the traditional Dynamic companion web site hosts new Interactive Listening Guides, plus many resources for student and instructor. Built to serve online courses. The CD set is available separately (ISBN 978-0-415-89402-9) or with its Value Pack and book (ISBN 978 0415- 80823-1). For eBook users, MP3 files for the accompanying audio files are available only with the Value Pack of eBook & MP3 files (ISBN 978-0-203-15298-0). Please find instructions on how to obtain the audio files in the contents section of the eBook.

The Latehomecomer
The Latehomecomer

Author: Kao Kalia Yang

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Published: 2010-12-15

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1566892627

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In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice. Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.

Afterland
Afterland

Author: Mai Der Vang

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2017-04-04

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1555979645

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The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn Forché When I make the crossing, you must not be taken no matter what the current gives. When we reach the camp, there will be thousands like us. If I make it onto the plane, you must follow me to the roads and waiting pastures of America. We will not ride the water today on the shoulders of buffalo as we used to many years ago, nor will we forage for the sweetest mangoes. I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep. —from “Transmigration” Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture’s ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.

Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

Author: Colin Cotterill

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2011-07-05

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1616951222

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The seventh Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery When a Lao female security officer is discovered stabbed through the heart with a fencing sword, Dr. Siri, the reluctant national coroner for the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, is brought in to examine the body. Soon two other young women are found killed in the same unusual way. Siri learns that all three victims studied in Europe and that one of them was being pursued by a mysterious stalker. But before he can solve the case, he is whisked away to Cambodia on a diplomatic mission. Though on the surface the Khmer Rouge seem to be committed to the socialist cause, Siri soon learns the horrifying truth of the killing fields and finds himself thrown into prison. Can the seventy-four-year-old doctor escape with his life?

Art from a Fractured Past
Art from a Fractured Past

Author: Cynthia E. Milton

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2014-02-21

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0822377462

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Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission not only documented the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s but also gave Peruvians a unique opportunity to examine the causes and nature of that violence. In Art from a Fractured Past, scholars and artists expand on the commission's work, arguing for broadening the definition of the testimonial to include various forms of artistic production as documentary evidence. Their innovative focus on representation offers new and compelling perspectives on how Peruvians experienced those years and how they have attempted to come to terms with the memories and legacies of violence. Their findings about Peru offer insight into questions of art, memory, and truth that resonate throughout Latin America in the wake of "dirty wars" of the last half century. Exploring diverse works of art, including memorials, drawings, theater, film, songs, painted wooden retablos (three-dimensional boxes), and fiction, including an acclaimed graphic novel, the contributors show that art, not constrained by literal truth, can generate new opportunities for empathetic understanding and solidarity. Contributors. Ricardo Caro Cárdenas, Jesús Cossio, Ponciano del Pino, Cynthia M. Garza, Edilberto Jímenez Quispe, Cynthia E. Milton, Jonathan Ritter, Luis Rossell, Steve J. Stern, María Eugenia Ulfe, Víctor Vich, Alfredo Villar