Music in the Balkans
Music in the Balkans

Author: Jim Samson

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-06-15

Total Pages: 749

ISBN-13: 9004250387

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This book asks how a study of many different musics in South East Europe can help us understand the construction of cultural traditions, East and West. It crosses boundaries of many kinds, political, cultural, repertorial and disciplinary. Above all, it seeks to elucidate the relationship between politics and musical practice in a region whose art music has been all but written out of the European story and whose traditional music has been subject to appropriation by one ideology after another. South East Europe, with its mix of ethnicities and religions, presents an exceptionally rich field of study in this respect. The book will be of value to anyone interested in intersections between pre-modern and modern cultures, between empires and nations and between culture and politics.

Romani Routes
Romani Routes

Author: Carol Silverman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-05-24

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0195300947

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Now that the political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity of their music are objects of international attention, Romani Routes provides a timely and insightful view into Romani communities both in their home countries and in the diaspora. Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos, feature films, festivals, and concerts has presented the music of Balkan Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman notes, Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people. In this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis of how Romani musicians address the challenges of discrimination. Focusing on southeastern Europe then moving to the diaspora, her book examines the music within Romani communities, the lives and careers of outstanding musicians, and the marketing of music in the electronic media and "world music" concert circuit. Silverman touches on the way that the Roma exemplify many qualities -- adaptability, cultural hybridity, transnationalism--that are taken to characterize late modern experience. And rather than just celebrating these qualities, she presents the musicians as complicated, pragmatic individuals who work creatively within the many constraints that inform their lives.

Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene
Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene

Author: Donna A. Buchanan

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2007-10-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0810866773

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Since the early twentieth century, 'balkanization' has signified the often militant fracturing of territories, states, or groups along ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides. Yet the remarkable similarities found among contemporary Balkan popular music reveal the region as the site of a thriving creative dialogue and interchange. The eclectic interweaving of stylistic features evidenced by Albanian commercial folk music, Anatolian pop, Bosnian sevdah-rock, Bulgarian pop-folk, Greek ethniki mousike, Romanian muzica orientala, Serbian turbo folk, and Turkish arabesk, to name a few, points to an emergent regional popular culture circuit extending from southeastern Europe through Greece and Turkey. While this circuit is predicated upon older cultural confluences from a shared Ottoman heritage, it also has taken shape in active counterpoint with a variety of regional political discourses. Containing eleven ethnographic case studies, Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse examines the interplay between the musicians and popular music styles of the Balkan states during the late 1990s. These case studies, each written by an established regional expert, encompass a geographical scope that includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, and Montenegro. The book is accompanied by a VCD that contains a photo gallery, sound files, and music video excerpts.

Bright Balkan Morning
Bright Balkan Morning

Author: Charles Keil

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2002-12-09

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0819564885

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CD contains: Market Day in Jumaya -- Afternoon at Mahala Café -- At home in Mahala -- At church, Sunday, December 31 -- Pre-New Year's parties in Serres -- Parties for the new year in Sohos -- Taverna party at Nikisiani -- The road home.

Manele in Romania
Manele in Romania

Author: Margaret Beissinger

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-08-08

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1442267089

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This edited volume examines manele (sing. manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. But manele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even “alien” to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the “manea phenomenon” as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.

The Tamburitza Tradition
The Tamburitza Tradition

Author: Richard March

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2013-11-14

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0299296032

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The Tamburitza Tradition is a lively and well-illustrated comprehensive introduction to a Balkan folk music that now also thrives in communities throughout Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Tamburitza features acoustic stringed instruments, ranging in size from tamburas as small as a ukulele to ones as large as a bass viol. Folklorist Richard March documents the centuries-old origins and development of the tradition, including its intertwining with nationalist and ethnic symbolism. The music survived the complex politics of nineteenth-century Europe but remains a point of contention today. In Croatia, tamburitza is strongly associated with national identity and supported by an artistic and educational infrastructure. Serbia is proud of its outstanding performers and composers who have influenced tamburitza bands on four continents. In the United States, tamburitza was brought by Balkan immigrants in the nineteenth century and has become a flourishing American ethnic music with its own set of representational politics. Combining historical research with in-depth interviews and extensive participant-observer description, The Tamburitza Tradition reveals a dynamic and expressive music tradition on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, illuminating the cultures and societies from which it has emerged.

Balkan Fascination
Balkan Fascination

Author: Mirjana Laušević

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-10

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0190269421

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In Balkan Fascination, ethnomusicologist Mirjana Lausevic, a native of the Balkans, investigates this remarkable phenomenon to explore why so many Americans actively participate in specific Balkan cultural practices to which they have no familial or ethnic connection.

Tuba Skinny and Shaye Cohn
Tuba Skinny and Shaye Cohn

Author: Pops Coffee

Publisher:

Published: 2017-11-10

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9781973270836

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Now updated to 2020, this is an account of the development and output of the great young traditional jazz band Tuba Skinny, which is based in New Orleans. Many recommendations are included of videos to watch and recordings available for purchase.

Islam in the Balkans
Islam in the Balkans

Author: H. T. Norris

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780872499775

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From the earliest times, also, many Balkan Muslim soldiers and bureaucrats, as well as scholars and poets, made an impact on the wider Islamic world, the most prominent being Mohammed Ali, the founder of modern Egypt.

May It Fill Your Soul
May It Fill Your Soul

Author: Timothy Rice

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1994-07-13

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780226711218

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In this vivid musical ethnography, Timothy Rice documents and interprets the history of folk music, song, and dance in Bulgaria over a seventy-year period of dramatic change. From 1920 to 1989, Bulgaria changed from a nearly medieval village society to a Stalinist planned industrial economy to a chaotic mix of capitalist and socialist markets and cultures. In the context of this history, Rice brings Bulgarian folk music to life by focusing on the biography of the Varimezov family, including the musician Kostadin and his wife Todora, a singer. Combining interviews with his own experiences of learning how to play, sing and dance Bulgarian folk music, Rice presents one of the most detailed accounts of traditional, aural learning processes in the ethnomusicological literature. Using a combination of traditionally dichotomous musicological and ethnographic approaches, Rice tells the story of how individual musicians learned their tradition, how they lived it during the pre-Communist era of family farming, how the tradition changed with industrialization brought under Communism, and finally, how it flourished and evolved in the recent, unstable political climate. This work—complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples—contributes not only to ethnomusicological theory and method, but also to our understanding of Slavic folklore, Eastern European anthropology, and cultural processes in Socialist states.