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The Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections introduces Asian music as a way to ask questions about what happens when cultures converge and how readers may evaluate cultural junctures through expressive forms.
The volume's thirteen original chapters cover musical practices in historical and modern contexts from Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, including art music traditions, folk music and composition, religious and ritual music, as well as popular music. These chapters showcase the diversity of Asian music, requiring readers to constantly reconsider their understanding of this vibrant and complex area. The book is divided into three sections:
- Locating meanings
- Boundaries and difference
- Cultural flows
Contributors to the book offer a multidisciplinary portfolio of methods, ranging from archival research and field ethnography to biographical studies and music analysis. In addition to rich illustrations, numerous samples of notation and sheet music are featured as insightful study resources. Readers are invited to study individuals, music-makers, listeners, and viewers to learn about their concerns, their musical choices, and their lives through a combination of humanistic and social-scientific approaches.
Demonstrating how transformative cultural differences can become in intercultural encounters, this book will appeal to students and scholars of musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.
List of contents
Introduction: Cultural Intersections in Asian Music Part I: Locating Meanings 1. Indonesia, Meet the Beatles! Sound, Style, and Meaning in Indonesian Popular Music 2. Composing at the Intersection of East and West: Beyond Nationalism and Exoticism? 3. Composing Traditions: Cultural Consciousness and Hybridity in Cross-Cultural Musicking 4. From Humble Beginnings to Qin Master: The Remarkable Cross-Fertilisation of Folk and Elite Cultures in Yao Bingyan's Music Part II: Boundaries and Difference 5. Water Festival as Spectacle: Sino-Burmese Identities, Ethnic Politics, and Public Performances in Macau 6. Nature of Narye: Sounds, Spectacle, and the Politics of Performance in Fifteenth-Century Korea 7. Negotiating Rural Modernity with Acoustemology: The Hakka Children's Songs in Contemporary Taiwan 8. Peranakan Music and Multiculturalism in Singapore Part III: Cultural Flows 9. Imagined Homogeneity: Maqom in Soviet and Uzbek National Projects 10. Sikh Music and Its Revival in Post-Partition India 11. Tradition and Innovation in the Dayunday Courtship Drama of the Magindanao Muslim Filipinos from the Southern Philippines 12. Creativity in Sundanese Music and Radio Broadcasting in West Java, Indonesia 13. Music, Tourism, and Cultural Exchange Among the Naxi of Southwest China
Summary
The Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections introduces Asian music as a way to ask questions about what happens when cultures converge and how readers may evaluate cultural junctures through expressive forms.
Report
"A fine collection of essays that present Asian music as forming along a diverse array of continuums of interconnections: between local and global, east and west, elite and popular, ethnic identity claims, ritual and entertainment, human and nature, self and other, and imagined notions of community. The ethnographic studies and theoretical analyses here offer a new scope of understanding Asian music that defies fixed boundaries."
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Joys H. Y. Cheung, Graduate Institute of Ethnomusicology, National Taiwan Normal University
"This is an essential resource for scholars of Asian music. With contributions from a diverse group of internationally renowned academics, the chapters push beyond bounded understandings of musical communities by foregrounding social interaction and cultural exchange. These rich case studies are organised around key contemporary themes that will help to invigorate debate on music and society in Asia."
- Lonán Ó Briain, Department of Music, University of Nottingham
