Book Title: Listening to The World

Book Description

Listen to the world. Explore music from around the globe. Acquaint yourself with a variety of international music styles and traditions. Investigate issues in popular music from both a social perspective (such as race, religion, language, economics, gender, diaspora, and politics), as well as an intrinsically musical position (beat, pitch, meter, rhythm, form, timbre, texture). Learn about how music reinforces values and negotiates tradition with innovation; how rural and urban contexts inform musical experiences; how soundscapes shape identity. Learn how to collect sounds and ask questions: what is this instrument’s name, how is it played and built; who plays it, why, and for whom? Why do all civilizations sing, play, and perform music? Like storytelling, like transcendence, spirituality, and religion, like politics and societal hierarchies shaped by taste, music is an intrinsic part of humanness. So, listen to world.