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

Writings about music in East Asia and Japan.

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."

David Locke received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in 1978 from Wesleyan University, where he studied with David McAllester, Mark Slobin, and Gen’ichi Tsuge. At Wesleyan, his teachers of traditional African music included Abraham Adzinyah and Freeman Donkor. He conducted doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Ghana from 1975 to 1977 under the supervision of Professor J. H. K. Nketia. In Ghana, his teachers and research associates included Godwin Agbeli, Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, and Abubakari Lunna. He has published numerous books and articles on African music and regularly performs the repertories of music and dance about which he writes. He teaches in the Music Department of Tufts University, where he also serves as a faculty advisor to the Tufts-in-Ghana Foreign Study Program and member of the steering committee of the Africana Studies Program. His recent projects include an oral history and musical documentation of dance-drumming from the Dagbamba people, and an in-depth musical documentation of Agbadza, an idiom of Ewe music. He is active in the Society for Ethnomusicology and has served as the president of its Northeast Chapter. He founded the Agbekor Drum and Dance Society, a community-based performance group dedicated to the study of traditional Ghanaian music, and the Samanyanga Mbira Club, a community-based performance group dedicated to the study of Shona mbira music. Study of Akan traditional music-culture is Locke's most recent focus.