A Caribbean music festival as a window on social change
Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition. Born in the years leading up to Grenada's 1979 Socialist Revolution, the Parang Festival today offers a vehicle for Carriacouans to articulate and assert a progressive understanding of local cultural identity as well as a regional, pan-Caribbean belonging. Rebecca S. Miller examines the varying impact that factors such as cultural ambivalence, globalization, and technology have had on the performance of Carriacou's folk and traditional music and dance forms. Using historical sources and current ethnography, she illuminates the enduring significance of the Parang Festival to illustrate the social and political history of Carriacou as well as this culture’s contemporary process of modernization. The book includes a web link allowing the reader to listen to a variety of musical examples.
“Rebecca Miller has taken full advantage of her lengthy fieldwork—and her own experience as one of the only living exponents of Canute Caliste’s style of violin playing—to create the most complete study ever made of this historically important tradition.”—Donald R. Hill, professor of Africana/Latino studies and anthropology, SUNY College at Oneonta
“In this first ever study of Caribbean string band music, Rebecca Miller deftly weaves together political history and contemporary ethnography. Using Carriacou's Parang Festival as a lens, Miller examines issues of cultural identity in the context of political upheaval and globalization.”—Michael Largey, associatea professor and Chair of Musicology, Michigan State University
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REBECCA S. MILLER is an assistant professor of music of the Americas at Hampshire College, a public sector folklorist/documentary maker, and an accomplished traditional fiddler.
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