"An enormously significant, timely, rigorous, and engaging textbook that empowers students to simultaneously explore a great diversity and wealth of musical practices and genres, study musical concepts and aesthetics, and understand complex socio-political contexts. Encompassing global histories, in-depth case studies, and carefully created sets of practical activities (with excellent accompanying sound files and images), Hess invites and challenges students to listen deeply to multiple soundscapes, to think carefully about stereotypes, and to experience music as a way of knowing."—Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, author of Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism & Performance
"Carol Hess’s Experiencing Latin American Music is a much needed and innovative textbook for the twenty-first century college student and educator. The textbook engages students of the Americas in interrelated areas of music study from film, religion, and identity to dance, politics, and globalization. We need this textbook!"—David F. Garcia, author of Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins
“Expertly balancing geographic and historical approaches with musical detail and close attention to many well-chosen examples, Hess’s Experiencing Latin America Music offers a superb introduction to the region and its musical cultures. Faculty and students alike will appreciate the clear writing, the consideration given to both conceptual ideas as well as descriptive materials, and the sheer breadth of the volume’s coverage. A welcome addition to the still-sparse body of pedagogical works on Latin America and its extraordinary musics.”—Jonathan Ritter, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, UC Riverside
"By sidestepping individual national histories in favor of important shared themes that have shaped the Latin American experience, Carol Hess’s Experiencing Latin American Music offers a fascinating account that pays attention to how music works and how people make it work in a variety of personal, cultural, and historical moments. Written by one of the most influential Latin American music scholars of her generation, this much-needed textbook highlights the cultural dialogues that make a wide variety of music traditions meaningful transnationally and transhistorically."—Alejandro L. Madrid, author of In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13
