The Cambridge History of World Music

Philip V. Bohlman

Dec 2013 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected religions, cultures, languages and nations throughout world history. The chapters in this History take readers to foundational historical moments – in Europe, Oceania, China, India, the Muslim world, North and South America – in search of the connections provided by a truly world music. Historically, world music emerged from ritual and religion, labor and life-cycles, which occupy chapters on Native American musicians, religious practices in India and Indonesia, and nationalism in Argentina and Portugal. The contributors critically examine music in cultural encounter and conflict, and as the critical core of scientific theories from the Arabic Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Overall, the book contains the histories of the music of diverse cultures, which increasingly become the folk, popular and classical music of our own era.

About the author

Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago and Honorarprofessor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. A pianist, he is the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret and ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago. Among his honors are the Edward Dent Medal, the Berlin Prize, the Derek Allen Prize from the British Academy and the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. He is currently completing the volume, Ethnomusicology, for the Cambridge Introductions to Music series.