The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival

English | Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014 | PDF | 720 pages | 25 MB
Across many societies and eras people have invoked musical practices of the past in order to reinvigorate or transform contemporary culture. This book, which brings together new research into traditional, folk, indigenous, early music, and dance scenes by an international cohort of thirty scholars, examines revival as theoretical concept, cultural process, and medium of change.

Through a combination of conceptual essays and ethnographic case studies, it offers a more geographically and temporally comprehensive examination of revival initiatives than is currently available in any one volume.

Extending its purview to cases of renaissance and recovery in diverse parts of the world that have not traditionally been viewed through the revival lens, it reveals the potency of acts of resurgence, restoration, and renewal in reshaping musical landscapes and transforming social experience.

The authors’ interrogation of fundamental shifts that have taken place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—from tradition to heritage, from folk to world music, from bounded to imagined communities, from regional to transnational affiliations—builds on approaches from ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, historical musicology, folklore studies, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.

Together, they contribute important new theoretical and methodological perspectives as they bring their findings into dialogue with critical debates across these disciplines. Enriched by their nuanced treatment of issues such as historical reinterpretation, transmission, authenticity, cultural activism, recontextualization, institutionalization, globalization and post-revival legacies, the book offers the reader a deeper understanding of the role and significance of musics we imagine to be historical in today’s postindustrial, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan societies.