MU 205: World Music

This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with Spain's first encounters with Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valdés, Arsenio Rodriguez, Benny Moré, and Pérez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view.

Rock It Come Over is the most extensive study of Jamaican folk music yet published. It is also an examination of the roots of that music and a record of the folk heritage that is, in spite of many efforts, rapidly retreating before the pressures of life today.

A guide to the cultural festivals, traditional culture, musical forms, dances, instruments, music education, government institutions concerned with music, and copyright mechanisms in Belize, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Kitts & Nevis, Antigua and Barbado, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Trinidad & Tobago, and Guyana.

The Brazilian Sound [is] an encyclopedic survey of Brazilian popular music that ranges over samba, bossa nova, MPB, jazz and instrumental music and tropical rock, as well as the music of the Northeast.

Javier F. León and Helena Simonett curate a collection of essential writings from the last twenty-five years of Latin American music studies. Chosen as representative, outstanding, and influential in the field, each article appears in English translation. A detailed new introduction by León and Simonett both surveys and contextualizes the history of Latin American ethnomusicology, opening the door for readers energized by the musical forms brought and nurtured by immigrants from throughout Latin America.