Mario Dunkel Livres

In the early years of the Cold War, Western nations increasingly adopted strategies of public diplomacy involving popular music. While the diplomatic use of popular music was initially limited to such genres as jazz, the second half of the 20th century saw a growing presence of various popular genres in diplomatic contexts, including rock, pop, bluegrass, flamenco, funk, disco, and hip-hop, among others. This volume illuminates the interrelation of popular music and public diplomacy from a transnational and transdisciplinary angle. The contributions argue that, as popular music has been a crucial factor in international relations, its diplomatic use has substantially impacted the global musical landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Addressing a range of music examples and texts, the fifteen essays in this volume explore the interaction between both conceptions of time and space and the intermedial relationship between words and music. This intermedial experimentation may serve to adopt the spatio-temporal attributes of the other medium or to comment on a form’s own mediality. It has much to say about processes of literary and musical composition and reception, the role of tradition and intertextuality, and the medial constellation in which these works situate themselves. The articles here collected testify to the success of the first conference of the Word and Music Association Forum, founded in 2009 to offer graduate students and post-docs a forum for presenting and discussing work in word and music studies.

This book illuminates the various ways in which Charles Mingus's music interacted with the sociocultural movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It explores the artist as a pioneer of an idiomatic aesthetics of resistance in jazz music that is rooted in African American traditions and is much more than merely a form of protest. Mingus's music presents a continuous challenge to an unimaginative, streamlined culture built on racism and conformity by openly protesting against it, by questioning its historical foundations, and by exemplifying its countercultural antithesis.