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 Author
Jeff Todd Titon received the Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan and musicology with Johannes Riedel. The author or editor of seven books, including Early Downhome Blues, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and Powerhouse for God, he is also a documentary photographer and filmmaker. Smithsonian Folkways recently published two CDs from his field recordings of Old Regular Baptists in eastern Kentucky, and he is coeditor of the five-volume American Musical Traditions, a production of Schirmer Books with the Smithsonian Institution, listed by Library Journal among the outstanding reference books of 2002. He developed the ethnomusicology program at Tufts University, where he taught from 1971-1986. From 1990-1995 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.
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