Review of: Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, by Louise Meintjes.

Review of Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World by Eric Charry 2012

This report lays out preliminary notes and findings from an on-going investigation intothe ways in which mobile phone commerce, or ‘m-commerce’, is transforming the Kenyan music industry.

BOOK REVIEW
African musics in context: institutions, culture, identity, edited by Thomas Solomon, Kampala, Uganda, Fountain Publishers, 2015, xxvi + 365 pp., £28.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-9-970-25245-9
Ethnomusicology in East Africa: perspectives from Uganda and beyond, edited by Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Thomas Solomon, Kampala, Uganda,…[Read more]

Review of: Hip-Hop Colony. DVD. Michael Wanguhu, director, 2007. Chatsworth, CA: Emerge Media Group.

Employing approaches from ethnomusicology and vocal anthropology, Eisenberg undertakes an interpretive-ethnographic analysis of Indian taarab, a genre of Swahili song on the Kenyan coast that features Swahili words set to Hindi film song melodies performed in a distinctly Indian style. Eisenberg argues that Swahili musicians and audiences derive…[Read more]

Taking its name from the Arabic term tariba, meaning the ecstatic feelings evoked by true musical artistry, taarab has its origins in court music traditions of the Arab elite of late nineteenth-century Zanzibar and coastal Kenya.

The problem of Muslim belonging in predominantly Christian Kenya has taken on added urgency for academics and policymakers in recent years, in light of attacks by global Islamist militants on Kenyan soil, a massive influx of Muslim migrants from Somalia, and struggles over the future of the country’s Islamic courts system, among other factors. I…[Read more]

NYU graduate seminar in music. Music-GA 2199-002. Version: Spring 2017.

Course Overview

Sound and space are intimately and inextricably linked–perhaps especially when that sound is of the special sort we call “music.” In this seminar we will chart a path through the eclectic, multidisciplinary literature on sound and space, by isolating key…[Read more]

This report summarizes the results of ethnographic research that I carried out in 2011-12 on the music recording industry in Nairobi, Kenya, under the auspices of the European Research Council-funded Music Digitisation Mediation (MusDig) project. For more on MusDig, visit http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk.

This paper represents an early attempt at pulling together ethnographic data collected during a year of fieldwork on digital music production and distribution in Nairobi, Kenya. An early version was presented at “Popular Expression in the ‘Silicon Savannah’: Perspectives on the Digitisation of Art and Life in Kenya,” Goethe InstitutK Nairobi…[Read more]