Island Songs

A Global Repertoire

Godfrey Baldacchino

• Publisher: Scarecrow Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780810881785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Islands are concentrated "instances" of place, in every sense of the term. As such, there are no better candidates for observing and critiquing the dynamics of globalization. Through the close analysis of musical performance and traditions, the scholarly contributors to Island Songs provide a global review of how island songs, their lyrics, and their singers engage with the challenges of modernity, migration, and social change, uncovering common patterns notwithstanding the diversity and local specificity of their subjects. In this musical exploration of the world of islands, a shared and deep "sense of place" is celebrated in song. This collection of essays is no less than a sonic narrative, an attempt to sing the inherent contradictions and paradoxical modalities of island lives today.

Song lyrics, along with their accompanying music, can serve as a barometer of life and major cultural markers of change. Island Songs is a work of sonic anthropology that does more than probe song as a part of the sociocultural life on islands. It illuminates how song performs island life. Gathered here are 15 case study chapters on islands in the Caribbean, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Baltic, and the South Pacific, all framed by four eclectic, conceptual essay contributions. In Island Songs, islands are presented as distinct vantage points for observing the merger of the local and the global, as poignantly expressed through song.

This book brings together the perspectives and experiences of sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, cultural studies specialists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, singers, and musicians. Island Songs will interest not only ethnomusicologists but any and all scholars interested in the effects of globalization on traditional cultures.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface We Are All Islanders Now
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Singing, Islands, and Island Songs
• 1 English Caribbean When People Cannot Talk, They Sing
• 2 Spanish Caribbean Liquid Identities
• 3 French Caribbean Adieu Foulard, Adieu Madras: A Sonic Study in (Post)colonialism
• 4 Cape Breton Island: Living in the Past? Gaelic Language, Song, and Competition
• 5 Newfoundland From Ron Hynes to Hey Rosetta!
• 6 Scotland’s Hebrides Song and Culture, Transmission, and Transformation
• 7 Jersey Jèrriais, Song, and Language Revitalization
• 8 Papua New Guinea Popular Music and the Continuity of Tradition—An Ethnographic Study of Songs by the Band Paramana Strangers
• 9 Fiji Islands A Sustainable Future for Sigidrigi?
• 10 Chiloé An Offshore Song Culture
• 11 Crete—Souls of Soil Island Identity through Song
• 12 Sicily Navigating Responses to Global Cultural Patterns
• 13 Aeolian Islands Three Singers, Their Folk Songs, and the Interpretation of Tradition
• 14 Ibiza and Formentera Worlds of Singers and Songs
• 15 Gotland Where “Folk Culture” and “Island” Overlap
• Epilogue Memories and Island Music
• About the Contributors