The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival
Edited by Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill
Abstract
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.
Keywords:
Music revival,
Heritage,
Cultural process,
Transmission,
Recontextualization,
Institutionalization,
Globalization,
Authenticity,
Post-revival
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Jul 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199765034
- Published online:
- Dec 2013
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765034.001.0001
Editors
Caroline Bithell,
editor
Caroline Bithell is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Manchester, UK. She has published widely on Corsican music, which was the main focus of her research from 1993. Her monograph Transported by Song: Corsican Voices from Oral Tradition to World Stage appeared with Scarecrow Press in 2007. Her edited collection The Past in Music appeared as a special issue of the journal Ethnomusicology Forum (2007). Her new monograph on the natural voice and world song is forthcoming, together with other new work on Georgian polyphony. She is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival.
Juniper Hill,
editor
Juniper Hill, Marie Curie Intra-European Research Fellow, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, UK, and Lecturer, School of Music and Theater, University College Cork, Ireland
