1st Edition
Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes
By Henry Stobart
Copyright 2006
358 Pages
by
Routledge
Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes is a musical ethnography of a Quechua-speaking community of northern PotosÃ, in the Bolivian Andes. Based on extensive fieldwork, it explores how music permeates the lives of this group of herders and agriculturalists, and how it is deeply interwoven with agricultural and social (re)production. In this harsh highland environment,... Read more
Contents: Part I Creating Context; Introduction: the poetics of production: Worlds of sound: energy, weeping and feeding: the background to music; Orchestrating the year: seasonal alternation, calendars,and power. Part II Guitars and Song: Fabricating tradition and the Macha groove: guitars, artisans, seasonality and performance; Marrying the mountain and the production of people: songs of courtship and marriage. Part III The Music of a Year; May - June Violent harmony and the making of men: julajula panpipes and harvest time; June - October Cacophony, community and the water war: saints, siku panpipes, and miraculous 'renewal'; November - January Invoking the dead and crying for rain:souls, flutes, llamas and compassion; January - February/March Disembodied voices and dancing potatoes: carnival, devils, sirens, musical creation and new potatoes. Part IV Kacharpaya - 'despatch': The fragile community: epilogue; Appendices; Character glossary; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Henry Stobart is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
'... a fundamental resource for anyone interested in indigenous music traditions of South America. Students and scholars with other areas of interest would do well to review this book as a model of exemplary scholarship. Essential.' Choice ’The beauty of this book is that while it is about so many things that might be considered 'not music', it is always tightly interwoven with a sonorous landscape and with the specificities of performance practices that are described in reference to the entire body... Music and the Poetics of Production, written in an accessible jargon-free style, succeeds in connecting with scholarship on aesthetics, social production, and performance, as well as with a body of literature about culture and modernity in the Andes. Stobart's book should be of great interest to anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and anyone with an interest in the music and culture of this region.’ The World of Music ’If asked to recommend a single book that conveys the magic and connective powers of indigenous Andean music as well as exemplifies prominent themes and approaches in traditional Andean studies, I might well choose this one... I intend to use this book in my courses and recommend it warmly to students and colleagues who wish to understand the powerful integration of music making and dance with subsistence activities, senses of time, spirituality, love making, and community in the Andes and beyond.’ Journal of Folklore Research ’... detailed and engaging... a winning combination of scholarly detail and illuminating anecdote.’ British Bulletin of Publications ’Stobart is at his best when describing the 'sensory explosions' that constitute the calendrical feasts that are the primary context for music-making, along with drinking and other forms of ritual performance... The book includes an audio CD with excerpts from Stobart's field recordings of musical performances, soundscapes and Quechua storytelling, all carefully cues to the text.
