Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples

Writings about music in East Asia and Japan.

Anne K. Rasmussen is Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology and the Bickers Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the College of William and Mary, where she also directs the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. Her research interests include music of the Arab and Islamic world; music and multiculturalism in the United States; music patronage and politics; issues of orientalism, nationalism, and gender in music; fieldwork; music performance; and the ethnographic method. Rasmussen received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied with A. J. Racy, Timothy Rice, and Nazir Jairazbhoy. Gerard Béhague and Scott Marcus are also among her influential teachers. Rasmussen is author of Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (2010); coeditor with David Harnish of Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia (2011), coeditor with Kip Lornell of The Music of Multicultural America (1997, 2015); and editor of a special issue of the world of music on “The Music of Oman” (2012). She is the author of articles and book chapters in numerous publications and has produced four CD compact disc recordings. Winner of the Jaap Kunst Prize for best article in published in 2000, she also received the Merriam Prize honorable mention for her 2010 book from the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). Rasmussen has served that society twice as a board member and was elected SEM president in 2014.

John M. Schechter is Professor Emeritus of Music (Ethnomusicology and Music Theory), at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied Latin American ethnomusicology with Gerard Béhague; folklore with Américo Paredes; Andean anthropology with Richard Schaedel; and Quechua with Louisa Stark and Guillermo Delgado-P. Beginning in 1986, he created―and subsequently directed until 2000―the U. C. Santa Cruz Taki ñan and Voces Latin American Ensembles. With Guillermo Delgado-P., Schechter is coeditor of Quechua Verbal Artistry: The Inscription of Andean Voices/Arte Expresivo Quechua: La Inscripción de Voces Andinas (2004), a volume dedicated to Quechua song text, narrative, poetry, dialogue, myth, and riddle. He is general editor of, and a contributing author to, Music in Latin American Culture: Regional Traditions (1999), a volume examining music-culture traditions in distinct regions of Latin America. He authored The Indispensable Harp: Historical Development, Modern Roles, Configurations, and Performance Practices in Ecuador and Latin America (1992). Schechter’s chapter on Víctor Jara appeared in the 2011 volume Popular Music and Human Rights: Volume II: World Music, edited by Ian Peddie. His other publications have explored formulaic expression in Ecuadorian Quichua sanjuán, and the ethnography, cultural history, and artistic depictions of the Latin American/Iberian child’s wake music ritual. Schechter currently serves on the international advisory board of the MUSIKE Project, an ethnomusicological, theme-based journal published under the auspices of the SPANDA Foundation.

Jeff Todd Titon is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Brown University, where he directed the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology from 1986 to 2013. He received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan, cultural anthropology with Pertti Pelto, and musicology with Johannes Riedel. He founded the ethnomusicology program at Tufts University, where he taught from 1971 to 1986. From 1990 to 1995 he served as the editor of Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in North America on religious folk music, blues music, and old-time fiddling, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For two years, he was the guitarist in the Lazy Bill Lucas Blues Band, a group that appeared at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. He founded and directed an old-time, Appalachian, string-band ethnomusicology ensemble at Tufts (1981–1986) and then at Brown (1986–2013). He is the author or editor of eight books, including Early Downhome Blues, which won the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, Give Me This Mountain, Powerhouse for God, and the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. A documentary photographer and filmmaker as well as author, he is considered a pioneer in applied ethnomusicology, phenomenological ethnography, and ecomusicology. His most recent research may be tracked on his blog at sustainablemusic.blogspot.com.

Timothy J. Cooley is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses in Polish and American vernacular, and folk, and popular music, as well as music and sports, and music and tourism. He also is affiliated faculty with the university's Global and International Studies Program. He earned a Master's degree in Music History at Northwestern University, and received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Brown University, where he studied with Jeff Todd Titon. His book MAKING MUSIC IN THE POLISH TATRAS: TOURISTS, ETHNOGRAPHERS, AND MOUNTAIN MUSICIANS won the 2006 Orbis Prize for Polish Studies, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He enjoys playing Polish mountain fiddle music, American old-time banjo, and singing in choirs. A revised second edition of his book SHADOWS IN THE FIELD: NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR FIELDWORK IN ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, edited with Gregory F. Barz, was published in 2008. Cooley served as the editor of ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology. His most recent book, SURFING ABOUT MUSIC (2014) considers how surfers from around the world musically express their ideas about surfing and the surfing communities, and how surfing as a sport and lifestyle is represented in popular culture.

David B. Reck earned a B.A. in music at the University of Houston; a Masters of Music at the University of Texas; and his doctorate degree from Wesleyan University. In the 1960s, he was active in the new music scene in New York City with performances of his compositions at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Modern Art, and at festivals throughout Europe. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he enrolled in the College of Carnatic Music (Madras, India) in 1968 and began a lifetime of study of South Indian classical music in the Karaikudi tradition of veena. An accomplished veena player in the Karaikudi tradition, he has concertized on three continents. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has served on numerous committees for the Guggenheim Foundation, the Broadcast Music, Inc. annual composition competition, the Fulbright Scholarship Committee, and the National Endowment for the Arts. At Amherst College he initiated courses in Asian music and culture, film, ethnomusicology, classical and popular music and culture, J.S. Bach, the Beatles, world music composition, modernism, and songwriting, along with establishing a pioneering world music concert series. Publications include Music of the Whole Earth, and Musical Instruments: Southern Area" in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent, plus numerous articles on South India's classical music and on the influence of India's music on popular and classical music in the U.S. and Europe."