American college football features an enormous amount of music woven into the fabric of the event, with selections accompanying approximately two-thirds of a game’s plays. Musical selections are controlled by a number of forces, including audio and video technicians, university marketing departments, financial sponsors, and wind bands. These b…[Read more]

O Brasil foi destino de uma grande parte da emigração açoriana desda a segunda metade do século XVIII até à segunda metade do XIX. Vindos de diversas origens, alguns destes indivíduos foram intelectuais que contribuíram para a atividade musical no Rio de Janeiro. Partindo de vários exemplos, nomeadamente os casos de Raphael Coelho Machado e Theoto…[Read more]

Angra foi uma importante cidade do arquipélago dos Açores enquanto centro de passagem das rotas marítimas atlânticas, assento de diocese desde 1534 e, na segunda metade do século XVIII, da Capitania-Geral dos Açores. Foram fundadas várias instituições religiosas na cidade desde o século XVI, nomeadamente igrejas paroquiais e conventos, até à sua…[Read more]

Robert Kennedy proclaimed, “Except for war, there is nothing in American life which trains a boy better for life than football.” While the sport’s governing bodies are presently distancing themselves from violent connections—altering rules in order to make the game safer for players—football culture remains firmly connected with militaris…[Read more]

Taking the idea of a “radical ethnomusicology” from Ed Emery (2017), I want to expose that the fact there is not a normal academic situation for ethnomusicology in the Balearic Islands it is also an opportunity to develop a radical and transforming scholar field, and I also rise some questions that I believe a radical Catalan ethnomusicology…[Read more]

One could call «industrial musicology» the study of the musical life in factories and workshops. Unlike agrarian societies, there are very few works about industrial workers’ musical activity, neither at the Catalan Countries nor Europe. Based on British and Catalan scholars’ few theoretical works, our research Música popular i indust…[Read more]

Baltasar Samper i Marquès (1888-­1966), from Majorca, was one of the most promi­nent musicians of the first third of the 20th century, forming part of the musical elite of Catalonia until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A long exile, first in France and later in Mexico, from where he was never to return, pushed him into the background an…[Read more]

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorce…[Read more]

A ermida de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, localizada junto ao solar da família Canto, na cidade de Angra (Ilha Terceira), foi construída por António Pires do Canto, um dos filhos do Provedor das Armadas Pero Anes do Canto, em meados do século XVI. Desde a sua fundação, esta ermida esteve ligada a uma das famílias mais influentes da ilha Terceir…[Read more]

A brief blog post with some notes on the historical soundscape of Flores Island (Azores), its churches mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

This paper explores the role of mobile telecommunication and technology firms (MTTs) in the distribution of recorded music in Ghana and Kenya. These countries both have vibrant music markets with weak formal distribution networks. Limited enforcement of copyright regimes and weak market regulation created new entrepreneurial business models. While…[Read more]

An essay written for the catalog for the exhibition, “Benga: Kenyan Kaleidoscope” (Bureau Sepän). Originally written in English; French translation by Gabriella Seemann.

Abstract from the catalog:
Se référant à une performance musicale à laquelle il a assisté et impliquant l’un des musiciens les plus en vue du Kenya, Dan Aceda, dans cet ess…[Read more]

In this paper we attempt the beginning of a critical study of Amir Khusrau’s contributions to Indian music. A very important book Hazrat Amīr Khusro kā ‘ilm-e-musīqī (The Music of Amir Khusrau), by Rashid Malik, exists in Urdu, which deals extensively with this subject. Unfortunately it is still unavailable in English. This paper draws heavily…[Read more]

In this article we propose to reignite a debate regarding the origin shawm (śahnāī or surnā) that had been started by Nazir Jairazbhoy in 1970 , and taken up by him again in 1980, in response to interesting suggestions by Deva and Dick.

Recently, international media outlets have celebrated São Paulo for its cosmopolitan musical output and its vibrant street art scenes. That discourse connected the city other generative periods in the histories of so-called “global cities,” such as New York of the 1970s. In those cities, the simultaneous developments of multiple creative scenes…[Read more]

Singing while working and working while singing have appeared to be, throughout history, the same social activity without a clear or categorical distinction. In this paper we explore this field in the industrial shoemaking environment in Menorca (Balearic Islands), regarding it as a social process of adaptation and resistance against contemporary…[Read more]

In the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), the eponymous heroine is a collector of ballads, who views her role as the loving preservation of traditional artworks. However, Prudencia’s perspective is challenged by her late-night encounter with the sinister Nick, whose own passion for collecting forces Pru…[Read more]

This chapter emerges from the energies and aspirations of the years leading up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, and explores three dramas created during this period: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (David Greig, 2011), The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project (Northern Stage, 2013) and Rantin (Kieran Hurley, 2013). It…[Read more]

Ever since appearing in Disney’s Saludos Amigos (1942), Ary Barroso’s musical ode to the Brazilian motherland, “Brazil,” is among the most recognizable songs circulating in Western Culture about Brazil. This essay shows how the song became detached from its roots as a nationalist samba to represent in audiovisual media such divergent ideas as tro…[Read more]