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Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions of regionalism, race, and representation as well as changing relationships to the natural world to highlight the intersections between classical music and the diverse worlds of Indians, pioneers, and cowboys. Levy draws from an array of genres to show how different brands of western Americana were absorbed into American culture by way of sheet music, radio, lecture recitals, the concert hall, and film. Frontier Figures is a comprehensive illumination of what the West meant and still means to composers living and writing long after the close of the frontier.

In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book highlights sound's invisible, disruptive and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation.

Honorable Mention, 2019 Foreword INDIES Awards - Performing Arts & Music Honorable Mention, Graphis 2021 Design Annual Competition​ Popular music has long been a powerful force for social change.Protest songs have served as anthems regarding war, racism, sexism, ecological destruction, and so many other crucial issues.

In January 1978, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that \"There is all across our land a growing sense of peace and a sense of common purpose.\" Yet in the ensuing months, a series of crises disturbed that fragile sense of peace, ultimately setting the stage for Reagan's decisive victory in 1980 and ushering in the final phase of the Cold War.

This book offers a detailed analysis of the history of female musicians in the Highlife music tradition of the Republic of Ghana, particularly the challenges and constraints these women faced and overcame. Highlife – a form of West African music infusing Ghana’s traditional Akan dance rhythms and melodies with European instruments and harmonies – grew in popularity throughout the 20th century and hit its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Although women played significant roles in the evolution and survival of the genre, few of their contributions have been thoroughly explored or documented. Despite being disregarded and ignored in many spheres, female Highlife musicians thrived and became trailblazers in the Ghanaian music industry, making particularly vibrant contributions to Highlife music in the 1970s. This book presents the voices of female Highlife artists and documents the ideological transformations expressed through their musical works, exploring the challenges they confronted throughout their musical careers and their contributions to music and culture in Ghana.

After the First World War, some musicians embraced ‘international’ identities in novel ways, requiring novel strategies. 6 During the 1920s, internationalist initiatives were launched in musicology, music education, folk music and more, joining a more general proliferation of institutions devoted to cultural internationalism. 7 In the domain of Western art music, the most high-profile internationalist organization of the era was the ISCM, founded in Salzburg in 1922. 8 The ISCM’s principal activity during the interwar period was to organize an annual contemporary music festival. This peripatetic event, hosted in a different European city each year, served two intertwined ambitions: to promote contemporary music and to further international cooperation. The latter aspiration gave rise to an unofficial nickname – the ‘musical League of Nations’ – encapsulating the ISCM’s perceived affinities with other, heftier internationalist endeavours. 9 A ‘musical League of Nations’ was, however, an ambivalent and precarious project: the moniker recognized, through analogy, a necessary proximity to the era’s chief prototype of an international structure; but it clung, by way of its adjective, to a degree of detachment from the treacherous waters of politics and diplomacy.

Music, and folk music in particular, is often embraced as a form of political expression, a vehicle for bridging or reinforcing social boundaries, and a valuable tool for movements reconfiguring the social landscape.Reds, Whites, and Bluesexamines the political force of folk music, not through the meaning of its lyrics, but through the concrete social activities that make up movements. Drawing from rich archival material, William Roy shows that the People's Songs movement of the 1930s and 40s, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s implemented folk music's social relationships--specifically between those who sang and those who listened--in different ways, achieving different outcomes. Roy explores how the People's Songsters envisioned uniting people in song, but made little headway beyond leftist activists. In contrast, the Civil Rights Movement successfully integrated music into collective action, and used music on the picket lines, at sit-ins, on freedom rides, and in jails. Roy considers how the movement's Freedom Songs never gained commercial success, yet contributed to the wider achievements of the Civil Rights struggle. Roy also traces the history of folk music, revealing the complex debates surrounding who or what qualified as \"folk\" and how the music's status as racially inclusive was not always a given. Examining folk music's galvanizing and unifying power,Reds, Whites, and Bluescasts new light on the relationship between cultural forms and social activity.

The perils of equating notions of freedom with artistic vitality Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Joseph Horowitz writes: \"That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.\" He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian \"psychology of exile\" traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov's hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He here focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a \"freedom not to matter,\" and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration's arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today's fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, The Propaganda of Freedom newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement.

Cannabis, including hemp and its psychoactive counterpart, has a long but largely overlooked historical geography. Situating the topic within varied perspectives such as world-systems theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, and the moral economy of drugs, this paper charts its diffusion over several millennia, noting the contingent and uneven ways in which it was enveloped within varying social and political circumstances. Following a brief theorization, it explores the plant's early uses in East and South Asia, its shift to the Middle East, and resultant popularity in the Arab world and Africa. Next, it turns to its expansion under colonialism, including deliberate cultivation by Portuguese and British authorities in the New World as part of the construction of a pacified labor force. The fifth section offers an overview of cannabis's contested history in the United States, in which a series of early 20 th -century moral panics led to its demonization; later, the drug enjoyed gradual liberalization.

This paper aims to examine the literary strategies and political perspectives of Somnuek Chusil, a renowned Nora artist in the Southern Thai region. Contrast to recent international and Thai research on Nora dance that focused on the aspect of ritual, social function, and adaptation under the condition of global modernity, the authors’ analysis centers on the noted Nora artist’s lyrical composition, encompassing 40 of lyrics, to understand his political worldview and literary strategy as part of local experience to the changing of Thai society. The findings reveal four language strategies employed by Somnuek—simile, hyperbole, the use of idioms, and incorporation of the Southern Thai dialect. Of particular note is the dialect’s distinctive role in critiquing political figures and instilling a sense of awareness regarding rights, freedom, and democratic citizenship. Despite the diverse interpretations of political concepts in global academia, Somnuek skillfully harnesses various dialects and writing techniques making him being locally competent interlocutor, and ascending to the status of a famous folk artist in southern Thailand.