Routledge Folk Song Style and Culture - Music Anthropology

Explore the deep connection between musical expression and social structure in Folk Song Style and Culture by Routledge. This volume examines song and dance as forms of nonverbal communication that reveal much about cultural history. By analyzing patterns in performance, theme, text, and movement, the text provides a detailed look at human expression across a wide range of global cultures. Using large samples of films and recordings, the research applies the Cantometrics method to study how singing traditions trace the historic distributions of human culture. This approach treats song as a measure of man, finding that specific performance traits serve as communications about identifiable aspects of society. Readers will gain a clear understanding of the predictable and universal relations between music and the social environments from which they emerge.