Extending the inquiry of his early groundbreaking books, Christopher Small strikes at the heart of traditional studies of Western music by asserting that music is not a thing, but rather an activity. This new work outlines a theory of what Small terms "musicking, " a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower. Using Gregory Bateson's philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical concert in a typical symphony hall, Small demonstrates how musicking forms a ritual through which all the participants explore and celebrate the relationships that constitute their social identity. This trip through the concert hall will have readers rethinking every aspect of their musical worlds.

Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening

In this trenchant inquiry into the state of feminism, Angela McRobbie breaks open the politics of sexual equality and 'affirmative feminism' and sets down a new theory of gender power. Challenging the most basic assumptions of the 'end' of feminism, this book argues that invidious forms of gender re-stabilisation are being re-established. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called female freedom, appearing supportive of female success, yet tying women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. With a scathing critique of 'women's empowerment', McRobbie has developed a distinctive feminist analysis that she uses to examine socio-cultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women's lives: from fashion photography and the television 'make-over' genre to eating disorders, body anxiety and 'illegible rage'.

A turning point in feminist theory, The Aftermath of Feminism will set a new agenda for gender studies and cultural studies.

The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change

In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris's concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies. Paying particular attention to asset pedagogy's failures to remain dynamic and critical in a constantly evolving global world, they offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past toward a CSP that keeps pace with the changing lives and practices of youth of color. The authors argue that CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed response to demographic and social change. Building from their critique, Paris and Alim suggest that CSP's two most important tenets are a focus on the plural and evolving nature of youth identity and cultural practices and a commitment to embracing youth culture's counterhegemonic potential while maintaining a clear-eyed critique of the ways in ...

What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward

The author provides quantitative evidence of a cultural phenomenon. Using data on musical dislikes from the 1993 General Social Survey, He links literatures on taste, racism, and democratic liberalism by showing that people use cultural taste to reinforce symbolic boundaries between themselves and categories of people they dislike. Contrary to Bourdieu's (1984) prediction, musical exclusiveness decreases with education. Also, political tolerance is associated with musical tolerance, even controlling for educational attainment, and racism increases the probability of disliking genres whose fans are disproportionately non-White. Tolerant musical taste, however, is found to have a specific pattern of exclusiveness : Those genres whose fans have the least education-gospel, country, rap, and heavy metal-are also those most likely to be rejected by the musically tolerant. Broad familiarity with music genres is also significantly related to education. He suggests, therefore, that cultural tolerance constitutes multicultural capital as it is unevenly distributed in the population and evidences class-based exclusion

Anything but heavy metal : Symbolic exclusion and musical dislikes

Previous literature has failed to empirically demonstrate the conceptual distinction that social scientists make between "dominant" and "non-dominant" cultural capital. This article provides evidence of the coexistence of these two forms of capital within the social and academic lives of poor ethnic minority students. Using in-depth interviews with 44 low-income African American youth, I illustrate how these students negotiate their perceptions of the differential values placed by educators on these two forms of capital. Often, scholars research the effects of (dominant) cultural capital in social reproduction across various social classes, but not the influence of (non-dominant) cultural capital on status relations within socially marginalized communities. By taking into account the interplay between these two forms of capital in the lives of low-income minority students, researchers might develop a more complete and nuanced understanding of how culture ultimately affects the prospects of mobility for lower status social groups.

/pdf/black-cultural-capital-status-positioning-and-schooling-2wzh5k47p5.pdf

Black Cultural Capital, Status Positioning, and Schooling Conflicts for Low-Income African American Youth

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

List of Illustrations Preface 1. Daddy's Second Line: Toward a Cultural Poetics of Race Music 2. Disciplining Black Music: On History, Memory, and Contemporary Theories 3. "It's Just the Blues": Race, Entertainment, and the Blues Muse 4. "It Just Stays with Me All of the Time": Collective Memory, Community Theater, and the Ethnographic Truth 5. "We Called Ourselves Modern": Race Music and the Politics and Practice of Afro-Modernism at Midcentury 6. "Goin' to Chicago": Memories, Histories, and a Little Bit of Soul 7. Scoring a Black Nation: Music, Film, and Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop 8. "Santa Claus Ain't Got Nothing on This!": Hip-Hop Hybridity and the Black Church Muse Epilogue: "Do You Want It on Your Black-Eyed Peas?" Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop

By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture - a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of \"jazz\", \"black music,\" \"popular music,\" and \"art music\" are founded. \"New Musical Figurations\" gives a view of this many sided artist. Radano examines Braxton's early years on the South Side of Chicago, whose vibrant black musical legacy inspired him to explore new avenues of expression. Here is a detailed history of Braxton's central role in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the principal musician-run institution of free jazz in the United States. After leaving Chicago, Braxton was active in Paris and New York, collaborating with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and other composers affiliated with the experimental-music movement. From 1974 to 1981, he gained renown as a popular jazz performer and recording artist. Since then he has taught at Mills College and Wesleyan University, given lectures on his theoretical musical system, and written works for chamber groups as well as large, opera-scale pieces.

Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction@@@Jazz in American Culture@@@New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique

Eileen Southern, recently called "a quiet revolutionary,"' published The Music of Black Americans: A History in 1971. The appearance of her book in the wake of the Black Power Movement, the turbulent social upheaval of the late 1960s, links it to an auspicious historical moment. Among other dramatic social changes, the period saw the radicalization of the word "black," a designation standing provocatively, even proudly, in Southern's main title. Furthermore, widespread student protests led to sweeping curricular advances in colleges and universities across the nation, most notably, the addition of courses in black history and culture. Designed to fill a void in the new curriculum, Southern's work broke new ground in its method and scope, inspiring others (both directly and indirectly) to similar inquiry and helping to establish black music as a scholarly specialty. Thus The Music of Black Americans stands as an important symbol of the epoch in which it first appeared, even as it filled a glaring lacuna in American musical scholarship as a whole. Work on black music that followed has featured research rich in variety and scope: musical biography and autobiography, archival and oral histories, systematic research on jazz and blues, the compilation of bibliographies and indices, ethnographic studies, critical editions, and much more. In addition, the recent introduction of contemporary cultural and social theory into the field has pointed out new critical directions, stimu1. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. coined this apt portrayal in his essay, "Eileen Jackson Southern: Quiet Revolutionary" (1992), which outlines Southern's early life and scholarly contributions to the field of black music scholarship.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/779375.pdf

Guthrie P. Ramsey

Papers

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop

Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction@@@Jazz in American Culture@@@New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique

Cosmopolitan or provincial?: ideology in early black music historiography, 1867-1940

Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade