But is it a musical? This question is regularly asked of films, television shows and other media objects that sit uncomfortably in the category despite evident musical connections. Musicals at the Margins argues that instead of seeking to resolve such questions, we should leave them unanswered and unsettled, proposing that there is value in examining the unstable edges of genre. This collection explores the marginal musical in a diverse range of historical and global contexts. It encompasses a range of different forms of marginality including boundary texts (films/media that are sort of/not quite musicals), musical sequences (marginalized sequences in musicals; musical sequences in non-musicals), music films, musicals of the margins (musicals produced from social, cultural, geographical, and geopolitical margins), and musicals across media (television and new media). Ultimately these essays argue that marginal genre texts tell us a great deal about the musical specifically and genre more broadly.

The National Library of Greece (Ethnike Bibliothike tes Ellados) is one of the richest depositories of Byzantine musical manuscripts and is surpassed by its holdings in Greece only by the multitude of manuscripts found in the monasteries of Mount Athos. In spite of being such a rich archive, the National Library has never published a catalogue of its musical manuscripts - not all of which are Byzantine or Greek. It is the purpose of this catalogue to recover or, in some instances, to present for the first time the repertory of the musical sources of the library. This project has been twelve years in the making for Professor Diane Touliatos, involving the discovery and detailed cataloguing of all 241 Western, Ancient Greek, and Byzantine music manuscripts. Not all of these are from Athens or modern Greece, but also encompass Turkey, the Balkans, Italy, Cyprus, and parts of Western Europe. This variety underlines the importance of the catalogue for identifying composers, music and performance practice of different locales. The catalogue includes a detailed listing of the contents as written in the original language as well as the titles of compositions (and/or incipits) with composers, modal signatures, other attributions and information on performance practice. Each manuscript entry includes a commentary in English indicating important highlights and its significance. There is a substantive English checklist that summarizes the contents of each manuscript for non-Greek readers. A bibliography follows containing pertinent citations where the manuscript has been used in references. There is also a glossary that defines terms for the non-specialist. Examples of some of the manuscripts will be photographically displayed. The catalogue will enlighten musicologists and Byzantinists of the rich and varied holdings of some of the most important musical manuscripts in existence, and stimulate more interest and investigation of these sources. As such, it will fill a major ga

Traditionally, American educators and communities have looked to Europe and Asia for ideas for rethinking and reforming education for America’s diverse children. This book, Contemporary Voices from the Margin: African Educators on African and American Education, brings together new voices of diverse African-born teacher educators and Africanist scholars who share personal experiences as well as researchbased perspectives about education in Africa and America that will be valuable to rethinking and reforming education for America’s struggling schools. The book is a comprehensive work of experienced educators and scholars in the field of teacher education and African Studies. The editors of the book invited a diverse group of African-born teacher educators and scholars from different countries of Africa who teach in the U.S. The contributors share a common African experience, but they are geographically diverse in countries of origin and research. Their knowledge about African communal living as well as colonial powers and imperialism as they operated in various African countries enables them to compare and contrast various educational models and practices, including traditional ones. They are also diverse in their fields of specialization but have expertise in multicultural education, urban education, and culturally responsive pedagogy that have become the focus of U.S. discourses in public education and teacher preparation programs. Given that these scholars were born or socialized, and educated in, as well as, taught schools and colleges in their respective African countries before settling in the United States, they bring a wealth of experience and insights into what it means to successfully educate children and youth. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines African processes and practices of education, both formal and informal, as contributing authors share perspectives about African indigenous education including cultural socialization and formal western-type education and organization of schools. Part 2 focuses on patterns and structures of formal, western-type education in selected African countries. Part 3 explores cross-cultural perspectives on American education. The contributors provide chapters of stimulating and rich perspectives that will engage the discourse on rethinking and reforming education and schooling for America’s diverse students.

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

Explores the meaning(s) of music, the most intricate and significant language invented by our culture.

The historical significance of music-makers, music scenes, and music genres has long been mediated through academic and popular press publications such as magazines, films, and television documentaries. Media Narratives in Popular Music examines these various publications and questions how and why they are constructed. It considers the typically linear narratives that are based on simplifications, exaggerations, and omissions and the histories they construct - an approach that leads to totalizing “official” histories that reduce otherwise messy narratives to one-dimensional interpretations of a heroic and celebratory nature. This book questions the basis on which these mediated histories are constructed, highlights other, hidden, histories that have otherwise been neglected, and explores a range of topics including consumerism, the production pressure behind documentaries, punk fanzines, Rolling Stones covers, and more.

"Robert Hatten's new book is a worthy successor to his Musical Meaning in Beethoven, which established him as a front-rank scholar . . . in questions of musical meaning. . . . [B]oth how he approaches musical works and what he says about them are timely and to the point. Musical scholars in both musicology and theory will find much of value here, and will find their notions of musical meaning challenged and expanded." —Patrick McCreless This book continues to develop the semiotic theory of musical meaning presented in Robert S. Hatten's first book, Musical Meaning in Beethoven (IUP, 1994). In addition to expanding theories of markedness, topics, and tropes, Hatten offers a fresh contribution to the understanding of musical gestures, as grounded in biological, psychological, cultural, and music-stylistic competencies. By focusing on gestures, topics, tropes, and their interaction in the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, Hatten demonstrates the power and elegance of synthetic structures and emergent meanings within a changing Viennese Classical style. Musical Meaning and Interpretation—Robert S. Hatten, editor

Songs from the Edge of Japan is an ethnographic account of the contemporary performance of the music of Yaeyama, in the south of Japan's Okinawa prefecture. The work includes interviews, analysis of popular and scholarly works in Japanese, musical and lyrical analyses, and accounts of fieldwork carried out in Yaeyama and Okinawa since 2000.

Since the turn of the millennium, films such as Chicago (2002) and Phantom of the Opera (2004) have reinvigorated the popularity of the screen musical. This edited collection, bringing together a number of international scholars, looks closely at the range and scope of contemporary film musicals, from stage adaptations like Mamma Mia! (2008) and Les Miserables (2012), to less conventional works that elide the genre, like Team America: World Police (2004) and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003/04). Looking at the varying aesthetic function of soundtrack and lyric in films like Disney's wildly popular Frozen (2013) and the Fast and the Furious franchise, or the self-reflexive commentary of the 'post-millennial rock musical', this wide-ranging collection breaks new ground in its study of this multifaceted genre.