Ethnomusicologizing: Essays on Music in the New Paradigms

(Paperback)

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In Ethnomusicologizing: Essays on Music in the New Paradigms, composer and musicologist brings together a series of essays on music making in contemporary culture. More specifically, it focuses on the myriad ways we engage with musicas makers, as listeners, as consumers, as producers. Banfield labels this fully engaged process as ethnomusicologizing, as he explores the ways we create, share, teach, and discuss music. Throughout he argues that music is more than the experience of structured sound. It is rather a way of being more critically present as musicians and as citizens of sharing in the world itself. Ethnomusicologizing contains writings on contemporary music and culture studies, offering glimpses on more than just music history through reflective essays, interviews with contemporary artists, and exercises in the analysis and criticism of popular culture. In this work, Banfield instructs readers in the ways by which we may better appreciate and understand creative artistry and process, and their relation to history and its meaning. The essays comprise a choir of voices and perspectives that provide insight into contemporary music culture that provide readers a text that uses his own experiences as a musicianand in particular his travels through the musical world of Cubaas well as his takes on contemporary popular recording artists, American music traditions, and music education to explore every aspect of creating, performing, and being in music. Offering many points of entry into the idea that musical experience, global citizenship and community-mindedness are all parts of a greater whole, Ethnomusicologizing encourages artists and readers to talk about the meaning of musicand art more generallyin entirely new ways.

Reviews

Today, many young musicians are driven by a short-sighted desire for money, fame, and power. But the purpose of arttrue artremains the search for meaning, purpose, inspiration, and spiritual fulfillment. Banfield is hopeful in this regard: 'Young people feel they are a more integral part of their success story if they are allowed to bring to a product a piece of who they are, what their story is. I think, despite our capitalistic surges, people always return back to the basic humanistic codes'. Such nuanced appraisals make Ethnomusicologizing a provocative and profitable read. * Thinking On Music *

Author Bio

Bill Banfield serves as professor of Africana Studies / Music and Society, composition, and graduate history studies at the Berklee College of Music. He is director of the Center for Africana Studies. An award-winning composer, former Pulitzer Prize judge, jazz guitarist, recording artist, and public radio show host, he is the author of six books on music, arts, cultural criticism, and history.