The Erotic Muse
If you've ever wanted to know the "correct" words to "Roll Me Over," or wondered where the melody of "Sweet Betsy from Pike" came from, this book can answer your questions. Extensively revised and including forty more songs than its predecessor, this new edition of The Erotic Muse is a unique scholarly collection of bawdy or forbidden American folksongs. Ed Cray presents the full texts of some 125 songs, with melodies for most of them and detailed annotations for all. His lively commentary places the songs in historical, social, and, where appropriate, psychological context.
The Resisting Muse
This volume examines the various ways popular music has been deployed as anti-establishment and how such opposition both influences and responds to the music produced. The book's contemporary focus (largely post-1975) allows for comprehensive coverage of extremely diverse forms of popular music in relation to the creation of communities of protest. The Resisting Muse examines how the forms and aims of social protest music are contingent upon the audience's ability to invest the music with the 'appropriate' political meaning.
Muse Sick
Grammy-winning music producer, Ian Brennan’s seventh book, Muse-Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes, acts as a primer on how mass production and commercialization have corrupted the arts. Broken down into a series of core points and actions plans, Muse-Sick is a concise and affordable pocket primer follow-up to Brennan’s two previous music missives, How Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the arts and Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth. Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people’s homes and haunting their psyche through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something that the average citizen might have little influence upon leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where some change can concretely occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent commercialized and pre-packaged fruit, we begin to re-balance the world, one engaged listener at a time. In fifty-nine concise and clear points, Brennan reveals how corporate media has constricted local culture and individual creativity, leading to a lack of diversity within “diversity.” Muse-Sick’s narrative portions are driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles with widely disparate groups, such as the Sheltered Workshop Singers. Marilena Umuhoza Delli’s striking photographs accompany and bring to life each tale. As John Waters says: “I didn’t think it was possible to write a shocking book about music anymore. But Brennan has.”
The Muse's Choice. A favourite Collection of Songs, set for the Violin, German Flute&Harpsicord ... Book 1st
Music on the Move
Music is a mobile art. When people move to faraway places, whether by choice or by force, they bring their music along. Music creates a meaningful point of contact for individuals and for groups; it can encourage curiosity and foster understanding; and it can preserve a sense of identity and comfort in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. As music crosses cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries, it continually changes. While human mobility and mediation have always shaped music-making, our current era of digital connectedness introduces new creative opportunities and inspiration even as it extends concerns about issues such as copyright infringement and cultural appropriation. With its innovative multimodal approach, Music on the Move invites readers to listen and engage with many different types of music as they read. The text introduces a variety of concepts related to music’s travels—with or without its makers—including colonialism, migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, and hybridity. The case studies represent a variety of musical genres and styles, Western and non-Western, concert music, traditional music, and popular music. Highly accessible, jargon-free, and media-rich, Music on the Move is suitable for students as well as general-interest readers.