András Rónai, Freelance writer, Hungary & Anna Szemere, Central European University, Hungary
Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee
For decades, the state-run music industry in Hungary has artificially isolated musical worlds. The 2010 album I’ll Be Your Plaything is a concept album comprising at times drastically re-imagined cover versions of Hungary’s most popular hits from the socialist era. The album exemplifies how rich and appealing synthesis of sounds and traditions can be concocted when folk, classically trained, rock and jazz musical artists collaborate. Along with this freedom to blend and synthesize, the album opens up some long overdue space for women; playing with personas, voices and singing styles, Palya reflects on issues of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and coupledom across generations.
By gathering historical and musical fragments from a Europe torn apart by World War II and the Cold War, the East German playwright, Heiner Müller, and the West German composer, Heiner Goebbels, created Wolokolamsker Chaussee as a musical panorama that stretched across modern European history at a moment of international crisis. The question at the heart of the recording was prescient in the waning years of the Cold War, but it remains no less critical for the “crisis of Europe” today: Is it possible for Europe to be unified?
UK June 2021 • US June 2021 • 128 pages PB 9781501354427 • £16.99 / $22.95 • HB 9781501354434 • £60.00 / $80.00 ePub 9781501354441 • £17.04 / $20.65 ePdf 9781501354458 • £17.04 / $20.65 Series: 33 1/3 Europe • Bloomsbury Academic
UK June 2021 • US June 2021 • 128 pages PB 9781501346149 • £18.00 / $22.95 • HB 9781501346156 • £64.00 / $80.00 ePub 9781501346163 • £17.04 / $20.65 ePdf 9781501346170 • £17.04 / $20.65 Series: 33 1/3 Europe • Bloomsbury Academic
Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology
Carol Silverman, University of Oregon, USA From countercultural resistance to world music craze, Balkan music captured the attention of global audiences. Balkanology, the 1991 quintessential album of Bulgarian music, highlights this moment of unbridled creativity. Seasoned musicians all over the world are still in awe of the technical abilities of the musicians in Ansambl Trakia—their complex additive rhythms, breakneck speeds, stunning improvisations, dense ornamentation, chromatic passages, and innovative modulations. Bridging folk, jazz, and rock sensibilities, Trakia’s music has set the standard for Bulgarian music until today, and its members, especially Ivo Papazov, are revered stars at home and abroad. The album reveals how Romani (Gypsy) artists resisted the state’s prohibition against Romani music and fashioned a genre that became a youth movement in Bulgaria, and then a world music phenomenon. UK January 2021 • US January 2021 • 144 pages PB 9781501346293 • £18.00 / $22.95 • HB 9781501346309 • £64.00 / $80.00 ePub 9781501346316 • £17.04 / $20.65 ePdf 9781501346323 • £17.04 / $20.65 Series: 33 1/3 Europe • Bloomsbury Academic
Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago, USA
M U S I C & S O U N D S T U D I E S - 33 1/3
Bea Palya's I'll Be Your Plaything
Modeselektor’s Happy Birthday
Sean Nye, University of Southern California, USA Modeselektor, the notorious Berlin duo consisting of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, released Happy Birthday! in 2007. Engaging with this album, this book provides a unique lens through which to examine current trends in European pop and electronic music history beyond standard examples of German pop and electronic music, such as Kraftwerk and Rammstein. Employing theories of popular culture and electronic music in the 2000s, especially Simon Reynolds’s books Retromania and Energy Flash, Happy Birthday! argues for an updated study of electronic music and rave culture in twentieth-first century Europe, with specific focus on German studies. UK April 2021 • US April 2021 • 128 pages PB 9781501346255 • £18.00 / $22.95 • HB 9781501346248 • £64.00 / $80.00 ePub 9781501346262 • £17.04 / $20.65 ePdf 9781501346279 • £17.04 / $20.65 Series: 33 1/3 Europe • Bloomsbury Academic
Various Artists' DJs do Guetto Richard Elliott, Newcastle University, UK
Call it batida, kuduro, Afro house, Lisbon bass: anyone with a keen ear for contemporary developments in global electronic dance music can’t fail to have noticed the rise in popularity and influence of Lisbon-based DJs such as DJ Marfox, DJ Nervoso and Nidia Minaj. These DJs and producers are bringing the sound of the Lisbon projects to wider world via international club nights, festival appearances, recordings and remix projects for artists such as Panda Bear, Fever Ray and Elza Soares. This book uses the 2006 compilation DJs do Guetto as a prism for exploring this music’s aesthetics and its roots in Lusophone Africa, its evolution in the immigrant communities of Lisbon and its journey from there to the world. The story is one of encounters: between people, sounds, neighborhoods, technologies and cultural contexts. UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 128 pages PB 9781501357848 • £16.99 / $22.95 • HB 9781501357831 • £60.00 / $80.00 ePub 9781501357855 • £17.04 / $20.65 ePdf 9781501357862 • £17.04 / $20.65 Series: 33 1/3 Europe • Bloomsbury Academic
www.bloomsbury.com • USA, Canada, Latin America • 888-330-8477 • customerservice@mpsvirginia.com
3
