Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World

Music doesn’t stop at the border, and neither should your textbook. This text gives students a global sense of music and its significance across cultures by introducing them to a diverse repertoire and developing listening skills applicable to all music. An accessible three-part model for listening—sound, setting, and significance—facilitates comparisons of various musical styles and meanings, and with Total Access, Soundscapes provides the digital resources students need to discover new music in a digitally connected world.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and has taught at Columbia, NYU, and Wesleyan. A Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, she is a Past President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has received fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Shelemay's research interests include musical ethnography, music and memory, and Ethiopian music and musicians in their North American diaspora. She is the author of nine books and editions, including Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Prize of the International Musicological Society. An outstanding teacher, Shelemay received an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 1982, the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize at Harvard in 2006, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard. In 2014, Shelemay was elected an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences.