A Companion to Federico Fellini

 

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini presents new methodologies and fresh insights for encountering, appreciating, and contextualizing the director’s films in the 21^st century. A milestone in Fellini scholarship, this volume provides contributions by leading scholars, intellectuals, and filmmakers, as well as insights from collaborators and associates of the Italian director. Scholarly yet readable essays explore the fundamental aspects of Fellini’s works while addressing their contemporary relevance in contexts ranging from politics and the environment to gender, race, and sexual orientation.

As the centennial of Federico Fellini’s birth in approaches in 2020, this timely work provides new readings of Fellini’s films and illustrates Fellini’s importance as a filmmaker, artist,and major cultural figure. The text explores topics such as Fellini’s early cinematic experience, recurring themes and patterns in his films, his collaborations and influences, and his unique forms of cinematic expression. In a series of “Short Takes” sections, contributors look at specific films that have particular significance or personal relevance. Destined to become the standard research tool for Fellini studies, this volume:

• Offers new theoretical frameworks, encounters, critiques, and interpretations of Fellini’s work
• Discusses Fellini’s creativity outside of filmmaking, such as his graphic art and his Book of Dreams published after his death.
• Examines Fellini’s influence on artists not only in the English-speaking world but in places such as Turkey, Japan, South Asia, Russia, Cuba, North Africa.  
• Demonstrates the interrelationship between Fellini’s work and visual art, literature, fashion, marketing, and many other dimensions of both popular and high culture.
• Features personal testimonies from family, friends and associates of Fellini such as Francesca Fabbri Fellini, Gianfranco Angelucci, Valeria Ciangottini, and Lina Wertmüller
• Includes an extensive appendix of freely accessible archival resources on Fellini’s work

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini is an indispensable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Fellini, Italian cinema, cinema and art history, and all areas of film and media studies.

 

Cuban Fire: The Story of Salsa and Latin Jazz

 

 

This title tells the saga of popular music of Cuban origin, and its major artists from the 1920s to today. Afro-Cuban music derives its richness from the fusion of various cultures. On the island of tobacco, rum and coffee, the marriage of sacred and secular African musical genres with Spanish and French melodies has given rise to numerous genres which have gained international fame: son, rhumba, guaracha, conga, mambo, cha-cha-cha, pachanga, nueva timba. In the US, Cubans have settled alongside other Hispanic communities. In New York, the boogaloo, salsa and Latin jazz, created by musicians such as Machito, Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo emerged from contact with Puerto Ricans and African-Americans, and the rhythms of Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo were integrated into salsa and Latin jazz.

 

The Guitar in America Victorian Era to Jazz Age

The Guitar in America offers a history of the instrument from America's late Victorian period to the Jazz Age. The narrative traces America's BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late 19th-century musical and commercial movement dedicated to introducing these instruments into America's elite musical establishments.

Using surviving BMG magazines, the author details an almost unknown history of the guitar during the movement's heyday, tracing the guitar's transformation from a refined parlor instrument to a mainstay in jazz and popular music. In the process, he not only introduces musicians (including numerous women guitarists) who led the movement, but also examines new techniques and instruments.

Chapters consider the BMG movement's impact on jazz and popular music, the use of the guitar to promote attitudes toward women and minorities, and the challenges foreign guitarists such as Miguel Llobet and Andres Segovia presented to America's musicians.

This volume opens a new chapter on the guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and documenting how banjoists and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in an effort to raise social and cultural standing. At the same time, the audiobook considers the BMG community within America's larger musical scene, examining its efforts as manifestations of this country's uneasy coupling of musical art and commerce. 

The Harmonium in North Indian Music

 

The harmonium holds an ambiguous reputation in India as well as in its "home continent" of Europe. There is an abundance of clear statements made by distinguished Indian musicians, theoreticians and also politicians who time and again would decry the instrument. Rabindranath Tagore's famous description of the harmonium as "that bane of Indian music" is just one example. And yet, the harmonium is arguably the instrument most widely used for accompanying the foremost medium of North Indian classical music, i.e. the human voice. Thus, by all appearances the anxiety about the harmonium's potentially destructive impingement on traditional music, is not shared by the majority of the musicians.

This book seeks to understand the complex history of the harmonium in North India, analyse the apparent conflict between musical theory and practice and describe how the instrument is used in musical practice. Is the harmonium an instrument suitable for Indian music? Can it live up to the requirements of Indian music? Can it live up to the requirements of Indian music? These questions pervade the whole book, at the end of which, they will appear in a whole new light.

 

Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940–1960

 

In the mid-twentieth century, certain elements of the American popular music industry (publishers, recording companies, and broadcasters) began to redefine their product as something more than mere entertainment. This became evident in the arguments made by competing sides in a series of clashes that unfolded during that period, starting with the ASCAP-Radio dispute of 1941 and ending with the payola scandal in 1959. Although these disputes typically revolved around economic issues, in making their cases to the public the respective sides often asserted the significant role played by popular music in promoting core national values. While such rhetoric was basically self-serving, when set against the backdrop of major events like World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Cold War, it resonated strongly with the public and helped convince many that popular music offered more to its audience than momentary diversion. Considering that the resolutions to these conflicts also tended to expand opportunities for previously marginalized styles and performers, notably African-Americans and rural southerners, it became natural to link popular music to ideas of social progress as well. This contributed to the creation of what could be called “rock and roll culture,” a coherent set of values related to concepts of youth, authenticity, sexual liberation, and social equality that emerged by the end of the 1950s. These traits became a prevalent part of American culture through the end of the twentieth century, with popular music seen a perhaps the most significant medium for expressing those values.