Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples, Shorter Version

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This shorter version of the best-selling WORLDS OF MUSIC 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 a 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. The supplementary three-CD set works hand in hand with the authors' prose, providing students with access to 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.
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About the author (2009)

Jeff Todd Titon is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Brown University, where he directed the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology from 1986 to 2013. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan, cultural anthropology with Pertti Pelto, and musicology with Johannes Riedel. 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. He has done ethnographic 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 at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. He founded and directed an old-time, Appalachian, string-band ethnomusicology ensemble at Tufts (1981-1986) and then at Brown (1986-2013). He is the author or editor of eight books, including Early Downhome Blues, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, Give Me This Mountain, Powerhouse for God, and the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. A documentary photographer and filmmaker as well as author, he is considered a pioneer in applied ethnomusicology, phenomenological ethnography, and ecomusicology. His most recent research may be tracked on his blog at sustainablemusic.blogspot.com. 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.

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