This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile ten-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mobilization of musical, economic, and social values as a component of branding discourses in neoliberal India, as a justification for new regimes of legitimate use and intellectual property, as a scene for the performance of cosmopolitanism by shopping, and as a site of anxiety about transformations in the marketplace. It relies upon ethnographic observation and interviews from a variety of sources within the Indian music industry, including perspectives of executives at music labels, family-run and corporate music stores, and hawkers in street markets selling counterfeit recordings. This ethnography of the practices, spaces, and anxieties of selling music in urban India will be an important resource for scholars in a wide range of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and South Asian studies.

What values should form the foundation of music education? And once we decide on those values, how do we ensure we are acting on them? In Values and Music Education, esteemed author Estelle R. Jorgensen explores how values apply to the practice of music education. We may declare values, but they can be hard to see in action. Jorgensen examines nine quartets of related values and offers readers a roadmap for thinking constructively and critically about the values they hold. In doing so, she takes a broad view of both music and education while drawing on a wide sweep of multidisciplinary literature. Not only does Jorgensen demonstrate an analytical and dialectical philosophical approach to examining values, but she also seeks to show how theoretical and practical issues are interconnected. An important addition to the field of music education, Values and Music Education highlights values that have been forgotten or marginalized, underscores those that seem perennial, and illustrates how values can be double-edged swords.

Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity provides a rich and detailed look into the unique dimensions of music in Indian film. Music is at the center of Indian cinema, and India’s film music industry has a far-reaching impact on popular, folk, and classical music across the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora. In twelve essays written by an international array of scholars, this book explores the social, cultural, and musical aspects of the industry, including both the traditional center of "Bollywood" and regional film-making. Concentrating on films and songs created in contemporary, post-liberalization India, this book will appeal to classes in film studies, media studies, and world music, as well as all fans of Indian films.

The Musical Gift tells Sri Lanka's music history as a story of giving between humans and nonhumans, and between populations defined by difference. Author Jim Sykes argues that in the recent past, the genres we recognize today as Sri Lanka's esteemed traditional musics were not originally about ethnic or religious identity, but were gifts to gods and people intended to foster protection and/or healing. Noting that the currently assumed link between music and identity helped produce the narratives of ethnic difference that drove Sri Lanka's civil war (1983-2009), Sykes argues that the promotion of connected music histories has a role to play in post-war reconciliation. The Musical Gift includes a study of how NGOs used music to promote reconciliation in Sri Lanka, and it contains a theorization of the relations between musical gifts and commodities. Eschewing a binary between the gift and identity, Sykes claims the world's music history is largely a story of entanglement between both paradigms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted widely across Sri Lanka over a span of eleven years--including the first study of Sinhala Buddhist drumming in English and the first ethnography of music-making in the former warzones of the north and east--this book brings anthropology's canonic literature on "the gift" into music studies, while drawing on anthropology's recent "ontological turn" and "the new materialism" in religious studies.

How do the temporal features of sacred music affect social life in South Asia? Due to new time constraints in commercial contexts, devotional musicians in Bengal have adapted longstanding features of musical time linked with religious practice to promote their own musical careers. The Politics of Musical Time traces a lineage of singers performing a Hindu devotional song known as kīrtan in the Bengal region of India over the past century to demonstrate the shifting meanings and practices of devotional performance. Focusing on padābalī kīrtan, a type of devotional sung poetry that uses long-duration forms and combines song and storytelling, Eben Graves examines how expressions of religious affect and political belonging linked with the genre become strained in contemporary, shortened performance time frames. To illustrate the political economy of performance in South Asia, Graves also explores how religious performances and texts interact with issues of nationalism, gender, and economic exchange. Combining ethnography, history, and performance analysis, including videos from the author's fieldwork, The Politics of Musical Time reveals how ideas about the sacred and the modern have been expressed and contested through features of musical time found in devotional performance.

From the cinema to the recording studio to public festival grounds, the range and sonic richness of Indian cultures can be heard across the subcontinent. Sound articulates communal difference and embodies specific identities for multiple publics. This diversity of sounds has been and continues to be crucial to the ideological construction of a unifying postcolonial Indian nation-state. Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship addresses the multifaceted roles sound plays in Indian cultures and media, and enacts a sonic turn in South Asian Studies by understanding sound in its own social and cultural contexts. “Scapes, Sites, and Circulations” considers the spatial and circulatory ways in which sound “happens” in and around Indian sound cultures, including diasporic cultures. “Voice” emphasizes voices that embody a variety of struggles and ambiguities, particularly around gender and performance. Finally, “Cinema Sound” make specific arguments about film sound in the Indian context, from the earliest days of talkie technology to contemporary Hindi films and experimental art installations. Integrating interdisciplinary scholarship at the nexus of sound studies and South Asian Studies by questions of nation/nationalism, postcolonialism, cinema, and popular culture in India, Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship offers fresh and sophisticated approaches to the sonic world of the subcontinent.

Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, Second Edition, is a foundational work for courses in ethnomusicological theory. The book examines key intellectual movements and topic areas in social and cultural theory, and explores the way they have been taken up in ethnomusicological research. New co-author Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone investigate the discipline’s past, present, and future, reflecting on contemporary concerns while cataloging significant developments since the publication of the first edition in 2008. A dozen contributors approach a broad range of theoretical topics alive in ethnomusicology. Each chapter examines ethnographic and historical works from within ethnomusicology, showcasing the unique contributions scholars in the field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs, while illuminating the field’s relevance and pointing the way toward new horizons of research. New to this edition: Every chapter in the book is completely new, with richer and more comprehensive discussions. New chapters have been added on gender and sexuality, sound and voice studies, performance and critical improvisation studies, and theories of participation. New text boxes and notes make connections among the chapters, emphasizing points of contact and conflict among intellectual movements.

This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of contexts, it focuses on the economic and social values produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. It discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social c

Explores the development of nineteenth-century performance copyright laws which shape how we define and value drama and music.

The hidden material histories of music. Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.