Reviews for Pawnee Music

The average rating for Pawnee Music based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-25 00:00:00 Jai Bylona I picked up this book as a gift for a friend who is interested in historic dance, not only as an interesting study, but as a challenge to see if she could turn the information into something performable. This book is a study of a set of Italian Istampittas -- a type of dance tune that evolved (like many dance genres) into more of an instrumental performance piece and that may in some cases also have had lyrics set to it. (See also French estampie etc.) But the author specifically explores what she believes to be Middle Eastern influences on the particular forms of this set of tunes, that set them apart from other tunes in the genre. The discussion and comparisons are copiously illustrated with notated tunes, which was one of the primary reasons I decided to pick the book up. (After all, reading about music is all very well, but what's the point without a chance to play it?) Now, I'm well aware that we have no direct evidence for the steps of the istampitta/estampie, so the "challenging" part of the gift is fairly open ended: anything from "learn some of the tunes" to "take one or more of the tunes and do something else interesting with it" to "make your best imaginative stab (but grounded in research) at what an istampitta dance might have looked like".

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-16 00:00:00 Troy Barker A nice description of Brazilian political and social history through the sounds of the Tropicalia movement. Covers a lot more than just the music of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes etc. but the descriptions of the politics and social movements of the latter half of the 20th century put the music in context. I thought it was a good companion to the BBC 4 documentaries (Brazil, Brazil) you can find on Youtube.