Synopsis
This shorter version of the best-selling WORLDS OF MUSIC is based on the 4th edition and provides much of the authoritative coverage of the comprehensive version in a format that's accessible to students without any background or training in music. Using the case-study approach, the text presents in-depth explorations of music of several cultures from around the world. The authors all ethnomusicologists working in their fields of expertise base their discussions of music-cultures on their own fieldwork and give students a true sense of both the music and culture that created it. General editor, Jeff Todd Titon, has written the text's opening chapter, that introduces students to ethnomusicology and relates each chapter's music heard on the accompanying CDs to the fundamentals of music in a worldwide context. The text concludes with a chapter that invites students to participate by undertaking a fieldwork research project that increases a student's understanding of music in daily life. Two CDs accompany every copy of the book on the inside back cover. The selected recordings cover a wide range of music-cultures and include authentic recordings from the authors' fieldwork. Leading off is the long-standing jewel in the Worlds of Music crown - James Koetting's magnificent recording of postal workers canceling stamps at the University of Ghana post office. A Western-sounding hymn tune performed against African rhythms, this piece, more that any other, lets the student hear contrasting music-cultures. Packaged with the text, the CDs make this book the best value available for the course.
About the Authors
Jeff Todd Titon received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan and musicology with Johannes Riedel. He has completed fieldwork in North America on religious folk music, blues music and old-time fiddling with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For two years he was the guitarist in the Lazy Bill Lucas Blues Band, a group that appeared in the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. The author or editor of seven books, including EARLY DOWNHOME BLUES (which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award) and the five-volume AMERICAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS (named by Library Journal as one of the outstanding reference works of 2003), Titon is also a documentary photographer and filmmaker. In 1991, he wrote a hypertext multimedia computer program about old-time fiddler Clyde Davenport that is regarded as a model for interactive representations of people making music. He founded the ethnomusicology program at Tufts University, where he taught from 1971 to 1986. From 1990 to 1995, he served as the editor of ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society since 1986, he has been Professor of Music and the director of the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology at Brown University.
Linda Fujie received the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University, where she was a student of Dieter Christensen and Adelaida Schramm. She conducted field research in Japan, mainly concerning urban festival and popular music, under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Columbia University, and Colby College. Her interest in overseas Japanese culture also resulted in research on Japanese-American and Japanese-Brazilian communities, the latter funded by the German Music Council. Her research has been published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, in publications on popular music, and in Japanese journals. She taught at Colby College as Assistant Professor, at the East Asian Institute of the Free University of Berlin and lectured on ethnomusicology at the University of Bamberg.
David Locke received the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 1978, where he studied with David McAllester, Mark Slobin, and Gen'ichi Tsuge. At Wesleyan his teachers of traditional African music included Abraham Adzinyah and Freeman Donkor. From 1975 to 1977, he conducted doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Ghana under the supervision of Professor J.H.K. Nketia. In Ghana his teachers and research associates included Godwin Agbeli, Midawo Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, and Abubakari Lunna. He has published numerous books and articles on African music and regularly performs the repertories of music and dance about which he writes. He teaches at Tufts University, where he currently serves as the director of the master's degree program in ethnomusicology and as a faculty advisor in the Tufts-in-Ghana Foreign Study Program. His current projects include an oral history and musical documentation of dance-drumming of the Dagbamba people and an in-depth musical documentation of Agbadza, an idiom of Ewe music, in collaboration with Professor Gideon Foli Alorwoyie. He is active in the Society for Ethnomusicology and has served as the president of its Northeast Chapter.
David P. McAllester received the Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, where he studied with George Herzog. A student of American Indian music since 1938, he undertook fieldwork among the Comanches, Hopis, Apaches, Navajos, Penobscots, and Passamaquoddies. He was the author of such classic works in ethnomusicology as Peyote Music, Enemy Way Music, Myth of the Great Star Chant, and Navajo Blessingway Singer (with coauthor Charlotte Frisbie). He was one of the founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and he served as its president and the editor of its journal, Ethnomusicology. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Music at Wesleyan University, he passed away in 2006.
David B. Reck received the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, where he studied under Mark Slobin and David P. McAllester. With grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Arts Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and others, he traveled extensively in India, Mexico, and Southeast and East Asia. AA senior disciple of the legendary master musician, Mme. Ranganayaki Rajagopalan, he is an accomplished veena player and has performed widely in India, Europe, and the Americas. As a composer in the 1960s and 1970s, his works were performed at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, Tanglewood, and at numerous international new music festivals. His publications include MUSIC OF THE WHOLE EARTH, chapters in IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY and articles in THE GARLAND ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD MUSIC. He also has published articles on aspects of India's music, the Beatles, J.S. Bach, and cross-influences between the West and the Orient. He and his wife, photographer Carol Reck, live in Chennai. Currently he is Professor Emeritus of Asian Languages and Civilizations, and of Music, at Amherst College.
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