Download or read book Albanian Traditional Music written by Spiro J. Shetuni and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most musicians and musicologists in the West, traditional Albanian music remains an obscure subject, even though Albania has produced a monumental cultural and corresponding musical heritage. This book examines the distinct musical culture of southeastern Europe, both monophonic and polyphonic, by delineating its four main musical dialects: Gheg, Tosk, Lab and Urban. The origins, fundamental features, musical styles and genres of the four dialects are discussed. Additional topics covered include an historical and demographic analysis of Albania, the history of Albanian ethnomusicology and the various classifications in Albanian music. Relying heavily on field research and recordings, this text introduces traditional Albanian music to both ethnomusicologists and curious readers.
Download or read book Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s written by Eno Koço and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author examines the indigenous diatonic and chromatic modes used in Albanian urban music and classifies them under traditional headings and as part of a newly established grouping, here termed south-western Balkan modes. The core of the work is the analysis of Albanian urban lyric songs, seen as an artistic version of the traditional Albanian urban songs.
Download or read book Lament from Epirus An Odyssey into Europe s Oldest Surviving Folk Music written by Christopher C. King and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2018 In the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Geoff Dyer, a Grammy-winning producer discovers a powerful and ancient folk music tradition. In a gramophone shop in Istanbul, renowned record collector Christopher C. King uncovered some of the strangest—and most hypnotic—sounds he had ever heard. The 78s were immensely moving, seeming to tap into a primal well of emotion inaccessible through contemporary music. The songs, King learned, were from Epirus, an area straddling southern Albania and northwestern Greece and boasting a folk tradition extending back to the pre-Homeric era. To hear this music is to hear the past. Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos—one of whom may have committed a murder—he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity: What is the relationship between music and language? Why do we organize sound as music? Is music superfluous, a mere form of entertainment, or could it be a tool for survival? King’s journey becomes an investigation into song and dance’s role as a means of spiritual healing—and what that may reveal about music’s evolutionary origins.
Download or read book A Dictionary of Albanian Religion Mythology and Folk Culture written by Robert Elsie and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In some senses, Albania is a living museum of the past. Originally a small herding community in the most inaccessible reaches of the Balkans, the presence of Albanians in southeastern Europe has been documented for over a thousand years. Albanian traditional folk culture, which evolved over centuries of relative isolation, is surprisingly rich. Yet despite recent events this culture remains little known to the Western world. Due to the lasting effects of a half century of Stalinist dictatorship, very few individuals even in Albania know much about their own popular traditions. The Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture makes available for the first time a wealth of knowledge about Albanian popular belief and folk customs. Alphabetical entries shed light on blood feuding, figures of Albanian mythology, religious beliefs, communities, and sects, calendar feasts and rituals, and popular superstitions, as well as birth, marriage, and funeral customs, and sexual mores. This unique volume will stand as the standard reference work on the subject for years to come.
Download or read book Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene written by Donna A. Buchanan and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early twentieth century, 'balkanization' has signified the often militant fracturing of territories, states, or groups along ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides. Yet the remarkable similarities found among contemporary Balkan popular music reveal the region as the site of a thriving creative dialogue and interchange. The eclectic interweaving of stylistic features evidenced by Albanian commercial folk music, Anatolian pop, Bosnian sevdah-rock, Bulgarian pop-folk, Greek ethniki mousike, Romanian muzica orientala, Serbian turbo folk, and Turkish arabesk, to name a few, points to an emergent regional popular culture circuit extending from southeastern Europe through Greece and Turkey. While this circuit is predicated upon older cultural confluences from a shared Ottoman heritage, it also has taken shape in active counterpoint with a variety of regional political discourses. Containing eleven ethnographic case studies, Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse examines the interplay between the musicians and popular music styles of the Balkan states during the late 1990s. These case studies, each written by an established regional expert, encompass a geographical scope that includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, and Montenegro. The book is accompanied by a VCD that contains a photo gallery, sound files, and music video excerpts.
Download or read book Engendering Song written by Jane C. Sugarman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-10-27 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Prespa Albanians, both at home in Macedonia and in the diaspora, the most opulent, extravagant, and socially significant events of any year are wedding celebrations. Combining photographs, song texts, and vibrant recordings of the music with her own evocative descriptions, ethnomusicologist Jane C. Sugarman focuses her account of Prespa weddings on notions of gendered identity, demonstrating the capacity of singing to generate and transform relations of power within Prespa society.
Download or read book Music in the Balkans written by Jim Samson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks how a study of many different musics in South East Europe can help us understand the construction of cultural traditions, East and West. It crosses boundaries of many kinds, political, cultural, repertorial and disciplinary. Above all, it seeks to elucidate the relationship between politics and musical practice in a region whose art music has been all but written out of the European story and whose traditional music has been subject to appropriation by one ideology after another. South East Europe, with its mix of ethnicities and religions, presents an exceptionally rich field of study in this respect. The book will be of value to anyone interested in intersections between pre-modern and modern cultures, between empires and nations and between culture and politics.
Download or read book Albanian Identity in History and Traditional Performance written by Eno Koço and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a group of individual musical essays collected under common Albanian themes, with a particular focus on historical identities and traditional musical performance. It shows that, at the beginning of the 18th century, there was a growing interest in representing the Albanian hero Scanderbeg on the operatic stage, as some well-known composers of baroque music began to place a greater emphasis on music’s dramatic power to elicit emotional response. The book also notes that this sense of drama was also incorporated into the vocal forms such as opera.
Download or read book Songs of the Frontier Warriors written by Robert Elsie and published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Epics of Gilgamesh, Homer, Vergil, Shahnameh, are sources of our knowledge of religious beliefs. This epic is a welcome introduction to the spiritual world of the Albanians as they fought the crusades. The "Songs of the Frontier Warrior is the first English-language translation ever made of Albanian epic verse. As the product of a little-known culture and a difficult, rarely studied language, the Albanian epic has tended to remain in the shadow of the Serbo-Croatian, or more properly, Bosnian epic, with which it has undeniable affinities. This translation may thus be regarded as an initial attempt to rectify the imbalance and to give scholars and the reading public in general an opportunity to delve into the exotic world of the northern Albanian tribes. The present bilingual edition offers a broad selection of the best known songs. Also included are an introduction, a glossaries of terms and sources, and a selective bibliography.
Download or read book Wild Songs Sweet Songs written by Nicola Scaldaferri and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord collected singularly important examples of Albanian epic song while conducting fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania. A complete catalogue of their collected materials, Wild Songs, Sweet Songs is an authoritative guide to one of the most significant collections of Balkan folk epic in existence.
Download or read book Greek Music in America written by Tina Bucuvalas and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies Contributions by Tina Bucuvalas, Anna Caraveli, Aydin Chaloupka, Sotirios (Sam) Chianis, Frank Desby, Stavros K. Frangos, Stathis Gauntlett, Joseph G. Graziosi, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Michael G. Kaloyanides, Panayotis League, Roderick Conway Morris, National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage Fellows, Nick Pappas, Meletios Pouliopoulos, Anthony Shay, David Soffa, Dick Spottswood, Jim Stoynoff, and Anna Lomax Wood Despite a substantial artistic legacy, there has never been a book devoted to Greek music in America until now. Those seeking to learn about this vibrant and exciting music were forced to seek out individual essays, often published in obscure or ephemeral sources. This volume provides a singular platform for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America through essays and profiles written by principal scholars in the field. Greece developed a rich variety of traditional, popular, and art music that diasporic Greeks brought with them to America. In Greek American communities, music was and continues to be an essential component of most social activities. Music links the past to the present, the distant to the near, and bonds the community with an embrace of memories and narrative. From 1896 to 1942, more than a thousand Greek recordings in many genres were made in the United States, and thousands more have appeared since then. These encompass not only Greek traditional music from all regions, but also emerging urban genres, stylistic changes, and new songs of social commentary. Greek Music in America includes essays on all of these topics as well as history and genre, places and venues, the recording business, and profiles of individual musicians. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about Greek music in America, whether scholar, fan, or performer.
Download or read book A Journey of the Vocal Iso n written by Eno Koço and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is concerned with the vocal iso(n) repertory, used, on the one hand, in the oral traditions of the multipart unaccompanied singing (IMUS) of the Southwest Balkans, or, more specifically, South Albania, North Epirus in Greece and a small part of the Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), and on the other hand in Byzantine chanting. The vocal iso(n) is an important component of these traditions, which are still practised today in the Southwest Balkans region. The study presents evidence on various manifestations of the practice in their particular geographical regions, and examines in detail the historical roots of these traditions. An ison, a drone holding-note, is the voice that provides the drone in Byzantine chanting. This chant is part of the liturgical music of the Orthodox Churches, in contrast to the IMUS, which has developed as a secular repertory. The Byzantine liturgical singing of the Arbëresh Diaspora of South Italy and Sicily, which has been passed down orally from the 15th century to the present day, as well as non-liturgical singing, is also explored in this book. The three unaccompanied forms of singing, two of which use the ison (IMUS and Byzantine chanting) and the third, the Arbëresh, which does not (with some exceptions in recent times), are analysed in separate sections of the book. Unlike many studies of similar subject matter, which suffer from a one-sided point of view because of national bias, this book is multifaceted and even-handed. While multipart singing in Albania is usually considered to be a solely Albanian phenomenon, in Greece, it is thought of as being Greek. In fact, the multipart singing of the Albanian and Greek, as well as Aromanian and some Slavic populations is more intrinsically bound to the region than to any ethnic group. The distinct sound of iso(n) singing echoes the internal and external historic influences of the region, interwoven with the complex modal idioms.
Download or read book White Bicycles written by Joe Boyd and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-07-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd. More than any previous '60s music autobiography, Joe Boyd's White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. His greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake - the first time he's been written about by anyone who knew him well. As well as the '60s heavy-hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians: everyone from the great jazzman Coleman Hawkins to the folk diva Sandy Denny, Lonnie Johnson to Eric Clapton, The Incredible String Band to Fairport Convention.
Download or read book Agents of Empire written by Noel Malcolm and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a Venetian-Albanian family in the late sixteenth century forms the basis of a sweeping account of the interaction between East and West Europe and the Ottoman Empire at a pivotal moment in history.
Download or read book Traditional Songs and Music of the Kor Region of Albania written by Eno Koço and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the repertory of traditional urban song and music of the Korçë area in general and more specifically the karakteristike (characteristic) or ‘distinctive’ song associated with Korçë city, Albania. The first half of the 20th century marked the climax of an evolution which started in the mid-19th century with the oral tradition of urban song in Korçë. While the translation of ‘Kënga Karakteristike Korçare’ into ‘Korçare Distinctive Song’ seems to be an odd name for a genre, it is, however, a translation as close as possible to the original Albanian, denoting the characteristic songs of Korçë. The term ‘characteristic’ implies peculiar or specific songs, different not only from the traditional urban song of Korçë, but also from any kind of song, whether folk, popular, traditional urban or art, composed and performed among the Korçë people. The book also introduces the Korçare urban song and urban lyric song, as well as the Saze music, which were introduced during the Ottoman domination of the Balkans.
Download or read book Abridgement of Roman History written by Eutropius and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-10 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise history of the Roman Empire published in the fourth century, from the creation of Rome through Valens' accession. The book, translated by John Selby Watson, tells the story of Rome's early monarchy and republic till the time of Constantine and his successors to the death of Jovian (364 AD). Flavius Eutropius was a Roman historian who lived during the second part of the fourth century. He served as the city's secretary (magister memoriae), traveled with Emperor Julian (361-363) on his operations against Persia, and continued to live until the reign of Valens (364–378), to whom he dedicated the Breviarium historiae Romanae (the Breviarium of Roman History), which is also the point at which the history of that work comes to an end.
Download or read book Albania written by Gillian Gloyer and published by Bradt Travel Guides. This book was released on 2008 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an insider and Albania enthusiast, the Bradt guide to Albania takes a fresh look at how and where to explore the heritage of this hidden corner of eastern Europe.
