Sounding Survival

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An original study of how American industrialization transformed the documentation, preservation, and historical memory of Native American music through the work of George Catlin, John Wesley Powell, Washington Matthews, Jesse Walter Fewkes, and Frances Densmore, tracing the evolution of ethnographic practice from visual observation to early sound recording. 

This essay examines Balinese gamelan as a musical system deeply connected to ritual, community, and conceptions of sacred time. The essay explores the instruments, interlocking musical structures, tuning systems, performance practices, and ceremonial settings that give gamelan its distinctive sonic character. 

Resonant Histories: Music in Guatemala traces the development of Guatemalan music from ancient Maya ceremonial practices through colonial institutions, the rise of the marimba, twentieth-century musical nationalism, and contemporary musical life. Drawing on historical and musicological scholarship, it examines how music has shaped—and been shaped by—Guatemala’s changing cultural, religious, and political landscape. 

Voices Between Worlds: Music in Korean Shamanism explores the history, performance, and preservation of Korea's shamanic musical traditions through the scholarship of Keith Howard, Laurel Kendall, Robert C. Provine, and other leading ethnomusicologists, examining the role of ritual music in Korean religious and cultural life. 

Women at the Heart of Music: Gender, Patronage, and Musical Networks in Sixteenth-Century North India examines how women shaped North Indian musical life through performance, patronage, devotion, education, and networks of transmission, while exploring why their contributions were largely excluded from later musical histories. 

Before Ethnomusicology explores the opening chapters of the Miladinov Brothers' Bulgarian Folk Songs (1861), examining how the collection's editorial design and documentary methods laid important foundations for the preservation and study of Bulgarian musical tradition.