Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music presents intriguing explanations of extraordinary musical creations from diverse cultures across the world. All the authors are experts, deeply engaged in the traditions they describe. They recount the contexts in which the music is created and performed, and then hone in on elucidating how the music works as sound in process. Accompanying the explanatory prose is a wealth of diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures--court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia--much of which has never been so thoroughly analyzed before. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book's companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising provocative questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today's interconnected world. For everyone listening in wonderment to the richness of world music, whether listener, creator, or performer, this book will be an invaluable resource and a fount of inspiration.

Michael Tenzer's profile page

John Roeder's profile page

Michael Tenzer is Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of two previous books, Balinese Music (Periplus, 1991 [1998, 2nd. Ed.]) and Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music (Chicago 2000) which received the 34th ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Society for Ethnomusicology's Merriam Prize. He edited this book's predecessor, Analytical Studies in World Music (Oxford 2006). The first western composer to create new music for Balinese groups in Bali, his compositions in diverse genres have been commissioned, performed and acclaimed internationally. In 2009 New World Records released a CD of his music, Let Others Name You. John Roeder is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, is a music theorist who specializes in explaining music outside the traditional Western canon, especially contemporary art music and world music. He focuses on basic processes of pitch and rhythm, but he has also developed mathematical and computational models of music, and has directed research into the preservation of the digital records of art, government, and science.