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Excerpt: I never imagined that I would help produce a documentary film based on my ethnographic fieldwork. Meeting documentary filmmaker Shara Lange during new faculty orientation at the university where we were both newly hired eventually led to our film Banjo Romantika (2013)—a full-length feature based on my research on bluegrass music in the Czech Republic, in which I play a key role as writer, producer, and on-screen character. Taking part in this film project has led me to consider how film enriches relationships with field colleagues, providing new opportunities for teaching and learning. I find that collaborations like ours can reframe and extend ethnomusicological work in productive ways.

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Excerpt from Introduction" Social class is one of the fundamental analytical categories for studying southern cultures. Exploring southern society as the context for cultural life is an enduring concern of scholars from such disciplines as sociology, social history, anthropology, social psychology, and political science, among others, and this volume shows the vital public policy connections to scholarly issues of social class.

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Perhaps no melody in the country music canon has been as widely recognized and borrowed from as that of the song “The Great Speckled Bird.” This significant song has become resonant and representative of both country music culture and religious culture of the Protestant South. Through this historiographical study, I have traced the influences that helped shape “The Great Speckled Bird” and in so doing have illustrated distinct movements that led to popularizing the non-secular song through commercial country music. The composer’s use of sentimentality, neo- traditionalism, and religious ideas made it appealing to a rural southern culture struggling with the social, racial, and economic changes of the early twentieth century. As I develop and explore the diverse influences that helped to shape “The Great Speckled Bird,” I will illustrate the interconnectedness of country music culture and the wider popular and religious cultures of the white Protestant South.

Review of ‘Exploring American Folk Music, Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the U.S.’ by Kip Lornell

In this dissertation, I analyzed Max Neuhaus’s (1939-2009) and R. Murray Schafer’s (b. 1932) commentary and work regarding noise, its control, and its relationship with the environment from the 1960 to the 1980s. Both Neuhaus and Schafer as well as those more directly involved with noise abatement research and policy were responding to the challenges and possibilities that noise posed in the latter twentieth century. In this project, I delved into these substantial links and argued that responding to and engaging with noise abatement policies was a key impetus to much of their work, which scholarship has yet to critically examine. Inspired by the listening strategies that Neuhaus and Schafer set forth, I also considered ways in which music educators and social activists might approach sound, becoming aural advocates or activists when working in their communities. The works selected for analysis reflected contemporaneous studies held in the USA and Canada investigating the psychological and physiological impact of noise on humans, animals, and their landscape. Just as these investigations grew into the 1970s, new attention developed towards acoustic ecology and public sound art, both fields dealing with the relationship between sounds, living beings, and the environment. Neuhaus’s works analyzed include the Listen series (1966-76), his New York Times op-ed piece titled “BANG, BOOooom, ThumP, EEEK, tinkle" (1974), and the Emergency Vehicle Siren Redesign project (1978-1989). These Neuhaus projects provided an alternative to the movement towards acoustic ecology put forward by his contemporary, Schafer. Analyses of Schafer and the World Soundscape Project’s (WSP) publications included Ear Cleaning (1967), The Book of Noise (1970), and A Survey of Community Noise Bylaws in Canada (1972). Featured were primary sources from the Max Neuhaus Papers (Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library), newspaper reviews, and clippings. Also included were interviews with artists/associates of Neuhaus from his performance career (Phil Orenstein) and his Sirens project (Ray Gallon, Owen Greenspan, Herr Lugus, Julia Prospero, and Wolfgang Staehle) as well as Schafer's fellow WSP collaborator, Hildegard Westerkamp.

Agustin Barrios's guitar music has become increasingly popular over the last forty years. After his death, a revival of interest in his compositions began in the 1970s, motivated by a series of publications and recordings of his music by important guitar performers at that time. The most important of these recordings came from the Australian guitar performer John Williams, who was interviewed in 1976 by ABC Television Australia for a film about the Paraguayan composer. The next year, Williams recorded a collection of fifteen works in his album John Williams-Barrios: John Williams Plays the Music of Agustín Barrios Mangoré. After this, the published editions of Barrios's works have proliferated, many of these transcriptions of the composer's own recordings. However, the publication of differing transcriptions has led to a lack of authoritative editions, creating a confusing situation for performers. Therefore, this research intends to highlight the importance of making critical editions of Barrios's works based on folk music, using the Cueca as an example. This research offers an analysis and comparison of Chilean cuecas from the first half of the twentieth-century--the timeframe in which Barrios was in contact with this genre--to Barrios's Cueca. Second, it proposes a critical/performance edition of Barrios's work taking into account both the performance practice of traditional Chilean cuecas, and the two primary sources of this work: a handwritten manuscript and the composer's own recording. This research does not analyze nor compares the Argentinian and Bolivian versions of the cueca.