Ethnomusicologizing

Essays on Music in the New Paradigms

Bill Banfield

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216223047
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

In Ethnomusicologizing: Essays on Music in the New Paradigms, composer and musicologist brings together a series of essays on music making in contemporary culture. More specifically, it focuses on the myriad ways we engage with music—as makers, as listeners, as consumers, as producers. Banfield labels this fully engaged process as "ethnomusicologizing," as he explores the ways we create, share, teach, and discuss music. Throughout he argues that music is more than the experience of structured sound. It is rather a way of being more critically present as musicians and as citizens of sharing in the world itself.

Ethnomusicologizing contains writings on contemporary music and culture studies, offering glimpses on more than just music history through reflective essays, interviews with contemporary artists, and exercises in the analysis and criticism of popular culture. In this work, Banfield instructs readers in the ways by which we may better appreciate and understand creative artistry and process, and their relation to history and its meaning. The essays comprise a choir of voices and perspectives that provide insight into contemporary music culture that provide readers a text that uses his own experiences as a musician—and in particular his travels through the musical world of Cuba—as well as his takes on contemporary popular recording artists, American music traditions, and music education to explore every aspect of creating, performing, and being in music.

Offering many points of entry into the idea that musical experience, global citizenship and community-mindedness are all parts of a greater whole, Ethnomusicologizing encourages artists and readers to talk about the meaning of music—and art more generally—in entirely new ways.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• A NOTE OF DEFINITION
• PRELUDE: Keeping the Core Creative Spirit-Soul
• Part I. THEORY: Aesthetic Theories, Teaching, and Approaches
• CHAPTER ONE. ETHNOMUSICOLOGIZING AND CULTURAL RELEVANCY
• CHAPTER TWO. ETHNOMUSICOLOGY STUDIES IN MUSIC CULTURE
• CHAPTER THREE. POPULAR MUSIC CULTURE: How to Teach and Reach within Popular Music
• CHAPTER FOUR. (BLACK) MUSIC MATTERS
• CHAPTER FIVE. NOTES FROM CUBA: November 2012–February 2013
• CHAPTER SIX. THE “I” THEORY
• Part II. HISTORY: Backbones and Songs
• CHAPTER SEVEN. A PROGRESSIVE VIEW OF AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC HISTORY, 1948–2014
• CHAPTER EIGHT. AMERICAN MAVERICKS: Interview
• CHAPTER NINE. HARLEM RENAISSANCE, 1920–1935: Artistry, Aesthetics, Politics, and Popular Culture
• INTERLUDES
• Photospread 3
• CHAPTER TEN. LETTERS
• CHAPTER ELEVEN. “YOU REALLY SHOULD GIVE ME SOME MONEY”
• Part III. CULTURE: New Standards, Cultural Critique
• CHAPTER TWELVE. WAKE UP! WHAT TIME IS IT REALLY? WHO TURNS IT UP, DOWN, AND BACK?: Values on the Cultural Dial
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN. DOES OUR MUSIC STILL BRING THE GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY?
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN. ON THE CRISIS IN THE POPULAR ARTS AND SOCIETY: Steps Ahead
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN. GEORGE LEWIS REVIEW
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN. DON’T USE THE “J-WORD”: Jazz and Its Connections to Culture and Meaning
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. CULTURE REFLECTIONS OF A CITIZEN: Can Somebody Wake Me Up?
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. HEALING AND ESCAPE FROM ZOMBIELAND
• CHAPTER NINETEEN. CRITICAL CULTURAL CONCERNS TODAY
• CHAPTER TWENTY. THE SONGS WE NEED TO BE HEARING AGAIN: Music Culture and a Musician’s Credo to Citizenry
• Photospread 4
• POSTLUDE: Afterthought on Ethnomusicologizing
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR