Reddit mentions: The best ethnic & international music books

I think every theory book I've ever read has opened up my mind in some way - while always being unsatisfactory in other ways (incomplete, too dense, too little on some forms of music, etc). My experience and interest is largely in popular music of all kinds, less in classical, so that has biased my reading somewhat; but I can recommend all the following (not 100%, but worth reading):

Eric Taylor: The AB Guide to Music Theory, pts I and II - good review of the basics, aimed at pupils studying for grades. Not deep in any way but good if you're just starting out. Solidly classical, which could be a downside for some. The concepts up to grade 5 are shrunk to useful pocket size in [this] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Steps-Music-Theory-Grades/dp/1860960901/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466150641&sr=1-1&keywords=theory+of+music+grades+1-5) - 100% recommended for any absolute beginner.

George Heussenstamm : [Harmony and Theory, pts 1 & 2 (Hal Leonard)] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hal-Leonard-Harmony-Theory-Diatonic/dp/1423498879/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466150878&sr=1-2&keywords=Hal+Leonard+Harmony+%26+Theory) Usefully split into Diatonic and Chromatic. I've read a few texts on standard classical theory, and this is the most approachable, IMO.

William Russo: [Jazz Composition and Orchestration] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jazz-Composition-Orchestration-William-Russo/dp/0226732150/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466151290&sr=1-1&keywords=russo+jazz+composition) Taught me more than I thought I wanted to know about counterpoint. Most of which I've now forgotten (not much call for it in the bands I played in...). But if you're not into big band jazz (at all), maybe not worth it.

William Russo: [Composing for the Jazz Orchestra] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Composing-Jazz-Orchestra-William-Russo-ebook/dp/B01EZ8OKQW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466149432&sr=1-1&keywords=william+russo) Neat little guide book on jazz arranging (NOT composition).

Mark Levine: [The Jazz Theory Book] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jazz-Theory-Book-Mark-Levine/dp/1883217040/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466151006&sr=1-1&keywords=levine+jazz+theory) 50% recommended. Well written and presented, eye-opening in many ways, but beware - chord-scale theory! (controversial stuff, in ways he doesn't admit.)

Robert Rawlins and Nor Eddine Bahha: [Jazzology] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jazzology-Encyclopedia-Jazz-Theory-Musicians/dp/0634086782/ref=pd_sim_14_5?ie=UTF8&dpID=41YkvVcCfEL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR120%2C160_&refRID=ZR730GKYPSZYA2THNXGT) The somewhat dry antidote to the above. 50% recommended. Should have been good, but somehow hard to read, easy to put down. Unlike Levine, no quotes from jazz standards or recordings - all music examples are written by the authors.

Dominic Pedler: [The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Songwriting-Secrets-%2522Beatles%2522-Dominic-Pedler/dp/0711981671/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466151087&sr=1-1&keywords=pedler+beatles) Outlines the vast number of theoretical concepts that the fab four would be astonished to learn they employed. Includes a useful appendix on basic concepts of tonal harmony. If you like pop and rock (and theory) but don't like the Beatles, still worth reading.

But then if you like the Beatles AND theory... [Alan Pollack's site] (http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-alphabet.shtml) is essential reading. (Pedler is deep, but doesn't examine EVERY song. Pollack is briefer, but does.

Allan F Moore: [Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Popular Song] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-Means-Analysing-Interpreting-Recorded/dp/1409438023/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466151140&sr=1-1&keywords=allan+moore+song+means) Does what it says in the title - and goes deep! (way beyond the plain old superficial harmony concepts peddled - sorry - by Pedler :-))

Walter Everett: [Rock's Tonal Systems] (http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.04.10.4/mto.04.10.4.w_everett.html) More stuff to raise the eyebrows of any rock musician. "Wow - we really do all that?"

Paul F Berliner: [Thinking in Jazz] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Jazz-Infinite-Improvisation-Ethnomusicology/dp/0226043819/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466151218&sr=1-1&keywords=thinking+in+jazz) Not a music theory book in the usual sense, but discusses how jazz musicians think about improvisation.

[Joshua Minsoo Kim] It depends on how we're defining obscure. I'll break it down based on genre/country and time period for what I specifically do for myself. Some of these are more elaborate than others and that's just a result of how much time I'm willing to invest based off my taste/interests.

For contemporary Japanese music I often go on OTOTOY, Mora, RecoChoku, or HMV Japan if I want to just browse for stuff. Otherwise it's mostly through YouTube subscriptions. Patrick St. Michel (former frequent contributor to TSJ) has a great blog that's relatively comprehensive for an English-language blog. I also look to TSJ writer Ryo Miyauchi for idol pop recommendations too. He has written stuff on his Medium page on the topic.

For contemporary Korean music I primarily use Melon (basically Korea's Spotify and Hot 100 all in one) and r/kpop. On Melon they allow you to look at recent singles that were released in a respective genre (updated way more frequently than Spotify) and I devour the rap charts daily just to keep up with that. Otherwise, a bunch of YouTube subscriptions (too many labels to name), Soundcloud subscriptions (mostly rap, r&b, and remixes), Bandcamp pages (dance music, indie), and adding musicians/producers/industry people on Facebook (yes, I know, lol).

For contemporary Southeast Asian pop I visit Music Weekly and look through the charts there every week. That usually then leads to me subscribing to YouTube channels and going off YouTube recommendations there. Some countries have different charts too that are helpful.

For contemporary African music I mostly just use various playlists on Spotify or YouTube and visit OkayAfrica from time to time.

For contemporary dance music (not dance pop) it's really just a matter of keeping up with retailers (e.g. Juno, Bleep, Clone, Deejay) and record labels you're interested in. Obviously mixes on Soundcloud and MixCloud are crucial to the scene and there are way too many to name. Resident Advisor is always handy too, of course. I think it's sometimes helpful to see who's DJing at various clubs, be it big name ones like Berghain or local ones near you, and help that guide your discovery.

For contemporary rap music it's a mix of the bigger name sites (Complex, HNHH, Fader) and the lesser-known ones (Passion of the Weiss, Warm & Easy for UK stuff) but honestly, Pitchfork's The Ones has proven to have such a larger scope than I ever expected (mainly because it's by Alphonse Pierre, one of the very best rap writers right now) that it's surely one of the best resources right now. Otherwise, YouTube and Twitter (much to my chagrin).

For any contemporary indie, experimental, non-pop stuff the easiest way is to just subscribe to record label and artist newsletters and Facebook pages. And obviously there's Pitchfork and Quietus and Tiny Mix Tapes and The Wire etc to help you navigate that more easily.

For any old music that isn't canonical, it's tough. Every canon list that's out on the internet right now by a major publication is filled with obvious (and Western) music. The easiest way to find stuff is to look through RYM (sort by year/decade and genre), discogs (see what releases that producers/engineers/artists have worked on besides stuff you know, sort by country or genre, etc), and download blogs that feature stuff you're interested in. Books on various topics are sometimes astronomically insightful and seem underutilized as a tool for music discovery by younger music fans (currently going through Rumba on the River right now and the amount of information it has that I wouldn't be able to readily find on the internet is large). I also think it's good to look at various record stores around the world given that have their stuff is online. Otherwise, I sometimes browse Mercado Livre for Brazilian music and Yahoo Auctions for Japanese music. Before private music torrent tracker what.cd was shut down, it had so much music to look through that proved irrefutably useful. Easily the best resource along with Soulseek (though since what shut down, I've noticed more users "locking" their files). The sites that have replaced what are in no way comparable in terms of having a comprehensive database (granted, they're still relatively new but it's still a huge bummer).

That covers most of it. Though I should mention that I also use TSJ a lot to keep up with pop music. I had followed the site for years before joining and it is definitely covering music that most sites aren't.

If anything was unclear or you want specific examples of certain things I mention, feel free to ask questions.

Thank you for clarifying again, and forgive me for the long and extensive posts. Naturally, nobody should feel pressured to do something they don't really want to do. At this stage in my life, I have little desire to become a fashion designer or crossbow hunter. Music is my life's passion and yet there are things I variously do and do not want to do at different points. I love composing, but right now I don't do it as much as I used to. Alternatively, when I was more active as a composer I was less active as a performer. Now, I perform more frequently. Neither of those things is really my livelihood, so I don't feel external pressure to do one or the other and I can vacillate between focusing on one or the other as I please. Me not feeling very compelled to compose at this moment is entirely different from me categorically not wanting to be a fashion designer or crossbow hunter, though.

Because one can be involved in an art while not actively engaging in that art (I still consider myself a composer – I have composed, after all), I want to examine this idea that artists feel compelled to do their art. I don't think that's the always case, and my point in the above comment was that such binaries do not adequately represent the human experience or the artistic impulse. If you say artists (in this case, writers) have a compulsion to create every day, then that engenders the notion of artists as specialists: only some people are capable of creating art in the first place because they naturally wake up in the morning and do it ("talent"). But this belies a bias of cosmopolitanism: we atomize people into particular social roles and then tie their identities to those roles. The opposite is true in the history of pre-colonial African cultural production – art is generalized: all people participate in art as a basic fact of life.

Thomas Turino, in Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, discusses the effects of cosmopolitanism on Zimbabwean participatory music traditions. In short, it was traditional for people in Shona villages to have all sorts of celebrations that involve communal music-making (which includes dancing and other modes of merriment), but in the postcolonial period, people were drawn away from the villages and into cities, becoming removed from village life and thus atrophying as musicians/dancers. I'll provide an excerpt:

>In indigenous Shona society, people have developed a tradition in which the most highly skilled drummer or mbira player can enter in and be challenged within the same performance as [by?] a neophyte who can only clap the basic pulse. The improvisatory techniques of Aymara wind players in Conima, Peru, create a similar situation in which there are spaces for different levels of expertise within the same tradition and performance. (132)

>...

>Rather than understanding neophyte contributions to Shona performance as secondary or incidental to the 'real' music produced by the specialist mbira players or drummers, as cosmopolitans might, some friends in Zimbabwe told me that they actually thought about this the other way around. That is, the core specialists were not the stars of the situation singled out from secondary participants or audiences but the ones responsible for maintaining a solid rhythmic groove and a melodic-harmonic foundation that made fuller participation both possible and enjoyable. The real music comes only when everyone is sonically, kinesthetically, and socially engaged. (133)

He then goes on to explain that listening and music-making habits in the emerging Zimbabwean middle class resembled those of their counterparts in other capitalist-cosmopolitan middle-class societies around the world. The result was that the divide between performer and audience became much starker, that musicians in this society were expected to be highly-skilled specialists and the place for neophytes disappeared. As a consequence, the entire way music was organized changed. Pay attention to the way in which Turino contrasts continuous participatory village ceremonies with punctuated, periodic presentational cosmopolitan concerts:

>The first generation of black Zimbabweans who came into close contact with white settlers learned from, and imitated, their mission-school teachers and employers in the hope of economic improvement. By the second and third generations, however, members of the African middle class were not simply imitating European and American lifeways but were developing cosmopolitan habits based on the models of their African parents, teachers, and neighbors and the other members of the middle class with whom they came in contact. (137)

>...

>The "concert" traditions represented a radical contrast with participatory music events taking place elsewhere in Zimbabwe. In bira ceremonies, people are packed together in small kitchen huts, people singing, dancing, clapping, ululating, accompanied by loud drumming and hosho; the sound and motion are dense and intense. The same rhythmic groove goes on all night. There are no artist-audience distinctions. The middle-class concerts were ideal presentational events. According to the artists of the golden era of "concerts" (1940-1964), the audiences were all a performer could hope for: they were still, polite, quiet, attentive, and appreciative. For their part, the concert artists arranged their performances so that they contained a good deal of variety to keep the audiences attentive and entertained. Musical and dance numbers were alternated with comic and dramatic skits. Musical variety was also emphasized, for example alternating a Mills Brothers-style presentation with a 'Latin' number, to please audiences. (140-141)

When you buy a ticket to a rock concert, you don't bring your guitar with you with the expectation that it's going to be a 1000+ person jam session. We expect a small group of highly-skilled players to provide all the music with a high degree of precision. This erects a barrier to entry for people who would otherwise be able to contribute to the musical soundscape (e.g. musicians).

Originally posted in https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/58ikxy/can_someone_define_rave/d90p5io/

The definition is different depending on who you talk to.

Personally I think of a rave as a recontextualized space in a Temporary Autonomous Zone spirit with a sound system playing electronic music

*****
Over the years I have grown to appreciate "freedom" as a very important aspect for ravers especially in the underground scene.

Going back out to a macro scale - with electronic dance music culture having grown and spread over the last 30ish years, there now exist differing layers of "rave culture" or as academia likes to call it "EDMC" (electronic dance music culture)

If you take people who have only gone to top 40 night clubs with stringent dress codes/discriminatory entry policies, then you plop them into something like EDC, they might think "wow this is so much freedom, I love raves"

But if you take those people and plop them into a free tekno rave, they might not even know what to do with themselves. "it's just a sound system in the woods, what am I supposed to do?!?" In the perfect case, the answer is: "whatever you want" - but not everyone gets this point of view, or is even interested. People make tradeoffs between music styles, sound system/visual production quality, personal freedom, personal opportunity costs (price of event/time to get there), feelings of safety, level of acceptance, etc. when deciding what to do with their lives.

Everything from the most basic of club nights to the most farout bunker rave, people will call "rave" - I think it's good to ask what people think the term means, but I personally wouldn't get too hung up about anyone's individual definition. It's been re-used for different purposes by people/groups that want to market a specific element of "original rave" (e.g. the sound system/electronic dance music) without including the freedom/friendly anarchy/TAZ aspects. I don't blame people for using the term in various ways, especially people who haven't studied or researched the culture, or haven't been to a free party themselves.

If anyone is interested in reading about EDMC on a global scale and its sociological/cultural impact, I highly recommend checking out Weekend Societies and Technomad by Graham St John and also the authors who contribute to Dancecult

you may also enjoy these threads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/4k4b9e/at_what_point_is_something_no_longer_a_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/58ikxy/can_someone_define_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/1ip9pb/what_do_you_think_a_rave_is/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/1hizh0/we_all_have_different_opinions_so_what_is_your/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/71b8w7/iheartravesunicorn_stuff_what_kind_of_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/x5a7w/rave_culture/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/9dphqj/how_do_you_define_a_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/9g8b4z/whats_a_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/8i7kgp/sub_dedicated_to_more_traditional_raving/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/814nx9/what_do_you_guys_class_as_a_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/7qgy8i/looking_for_something_that_can_illustrate/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/50nd49/who_here_has_actually_been_going_to_real_raves/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/1ae3yj/the_meaning_of_a_rave/

https://www.reddit.com/r/aves/comments/9s41d1/what_is_a_rave/

Hey!

I think it would be heavily dependant on who's available within your local area. In my old city of Newcastle there were a few teachers for pretty much any instrument you could care to imagine. It might be worth speaking with some of the people at your gurdwara and see if they either know an instrument and can teach you or can recommend you a teacher. It is also worth seeing if your gurdwara itself offers lessons. In Newcastle there also existed a lot of community centres focused around different countries, including a Pakistani and a Turkish centre. It might be worth seeing if there exist similar groups in your area and then asking there if anyone could help you.

I must admit that's not been going so well. I was too late to join the group class at the gurdwara, but that's likely to change now, as I'm hoping to join in August when the class restarts. I'm choosing to play the taus, if anything because it's rare and so it needs all the attention it can get! Trust me to pick one of the biggest instruments though...

Found these links for learning dilruba too:

• Har Sangeet offers a few free online lessons as well as an online learning program (which you'll have to pay for but the prices seem decently low. Plus you can submit your own playing for feedback as part of the lessons). Here's the link.
  
  
• There's also a book in English which if you can't find a teacher might be worth a look. It teaches esraj, dilruba and taus and is divided between beginner, intermediate and advanced books. Here's the link to the beginner's book. It has the advantage of being written by a native English speaker who is expert in teaching world music. It might serve to be useful as a starting point, and you could, once you'v got the basics sorted, then get some experience with another musician accompanying you who can offer help/advice/practice tips and the like.

> Wait, what free drink? I totally missed this.

If you're in London hmu on reddit. I buy first drink for anyone whose name I recognise from reddit, as a general rule.

>(I'm sure there is more theory out there, of course, I just don't know what it is or how to find it.)

Once you've got the basics, you're starting to get into specialist areas. It's a bit like saying "I want to learn some science". Music theory becomes musicology, and that's literally a degree topic.

You could look for the following books:

On the topic of analysing music, try Nicolas Cook. A Guide to Musical Analysis, 1994. I'm not a fan of a lot of what Nicolas Cook writes and says but I can't deny that as an entry level for people that haven't read deeply, he has some of the seminal texts.

On the topic of harmony and form, you could try either Aldwell and Schachter or the much cheaper, but much less thorough [Pratt](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dynamics-Harmony-Principles-Practice.

On the topic of music history, you probably want to start with a general overview of classical music. Nicolas Cook wrote A Very Short Introduction. A textbook like Burkholder, Grout and Palisca covers most of the areas first year undergrads are expected to learn in the UK. Alternately, something like that Taruskin is also very thorough.

When you then want to focus down, you can use bibliographies from any of those books to find your favourite area.

Ethnomusicology might be worth considering. Look at the Very Short Introductions to Ethnomusicology, World Music and Folk Music.

If you have an interest in film music and how that functions, then you could start by looking at a book like Music and Mythmaking which is quite a nice introduction. There's another Very Short Introduction which is also useful. Kalinak is someone I find generally on target. There's also the Mervyn Cooke introduction to the history of film music which I found slightly inaccurate as it got more modern, but that's often the case in these books written contemporarily.

A subsection of this is ludomusicology (my field!) which you probably want to get into by reading either Collins or Summers depending on whether you want to read an established author, or read something written by one of my potential supervisors. You might struggle to find either of these depending on where you are. You could also try Ludomusicology.

There's also composition, but this might be a good start?

Jazz I'm not as sure about off the top of my head, alas.

E: It's worth noting that a lot of this steps away from purely mathematical relationships though. The mathematical relationships just get weird as you push further and as mentioned elsewhere in this AMA, the people that study them are the kind of people that nerds avoid at parties because they might want to talk about mathemusic.

I imagine a lot of these kids already listen to a bunch of hip hop. They'll have their own tastes and preferences and opinions, which you can definitely use to your advantage.

For some stuff they're probably not familiar with:

Scratch is a really great film about DJing. It's rated R for language so you might need parental permission. It goes over the significance of the four elements and includes a fair bit of history. Not to mention the dopest shit you've ever seen on turntables.

Black Noise is a great book. It will definitely be over their heads, but it could be great background for you and there are parts you could photocopy to put a lesson plan together about the modern cultural impact of hip hop. You can really challenge the cognitive dissonance of listening to music that seems to preach values you don't share.

Here are a bunch of NPR interviews with important people discussing hip hop.

I think a great exercise would be to assign one of the essential albums from HHH for them to listen to. Give them a 1-2 sentence description of each MC/album and let them pick one they haven't heard to listen to. Have them write 1-2 pages on what they think and then discuss them as a group. It would be a really cool place to start and it would be some guaranteed expanding of horizons. Of course, if your school has strict regulations about profanity etc, this might be a problem. I'd emphasize that this is not going to expose them to anything they haven't seen before...

Good luck!

Thank you! I tend to look at history as a whole picture, as events tend to not occur in a vacuum. I started doing that with researching what led to genocide and the long term consequences of it, but it also applies to stuff like K-Pop.

I don't know how much you're interested in K-Pop history, but if you want to do research, here are some resources that I use:

• Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop by Michael Fuhr
  
  • If you’re interested in learning about K-Pop from more of an academic view, this is a great book for that. This book even goes as far back as the late-1800s to explain how music in Korea changed after westerners started hanging around. It’s primarily written from a cultural anthropology view, but also goes into music theory. The only problem I had with it is the inaccurate information it states about H.O.T basics (that could easily have been checked on Wikipedia). Amazon is pretty much the only place you can get this book.
    
• Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture (2nd Edition) by Mark Russell
  
  • Informative book primarily about the history of movies and Chaebol companies in Korea. There are also interesting chapters about television and comics. Not the best source for learning about K-Pop, as the small section mainly just talked about Lee Soo-man. I also got this book from Amazon.
    
• KOFICE
  
  • Short for “Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange”, this site has a wealth of information about the Hallyu Wave. Most notably, it produces Global Hallyu Reports about how the Hallyu Wave effects Korea’s politics, economy, and cultural outreach.

It looks like you're into artists that fall broadly into what we might call Egyptian pop and others who are more West African (Mali) styles. I'm not up on my Egyptian pop, but if you're into Moctar and Anivolla, you should definitely check out Tinariwen and Ali Farka, if you haven't already.

The most important melodic theme all of the you mentioned share is that their sound is based on maqamat, which are simply Arabic scales and modes. If you're looking for literature, I recommend starting with The Maqam Book, by David Mu'Allem. Beware: maqamat are similar in some ways to scales in Western Music, but there are also significant differences. For instance: Western scales are cyclical. They repeat the same intervals in any octave. maqamat are not cyclical, and their intervals may change based on the octave. In modern music, this non-cyclical aspect of maqamat often exchanged for a cyclical approac, as Western music continues to influence modern Arab and Turkish music. Also, maqamat are quartertonal; some (not all) of their intervals are quartertones and 3-quartertones. maqamat on fretted instruments can be tricky. They work great on cellos.

If you just want to get your toe wet for now, you can try noodling around in Phrygian and Phrygian Dominant.

Good luck!

Here's some other stuff for people interested:

Joe Straus' Introduction to Post Tonal Theory

• For solid post tonal and heavily set theory based stuff
  
  Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music by Barry Schrader
  
  
• this book is old but has some cool stuff in it about earlier electronic music and it's cheap
  
  Samuel Solomon's How to Write for Percussion
  
  
• The best percussion book
  
  Rothenberg and Ulvaeus' Book of Music and Nature
  
  
• If you're in to, well music and nature this is a great anthology of writings by people like Cage, Takemitsu, Oliveros, etc. on the subject.
  
  Cope's Techniques of the Contemporary Composer is okay.
  
  
• for composery stuff
  
  My favorite orchestration book is actually the Blatter
  
  Composing Electronic Music by Curtis Roads is a very good new electronic book
  
  The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
  
  
• Practically a must read
  
  On Sonic Art by Trevor Wishart
  
  
• is a must read also

• Activities like Feldenkrais or Alexander technique which improve body awareness and usage.
  
• Solo exercises. I like this one for leaders. Balance is usually a challenge.
  
• Reading about the music and culture. Tango Secrets is a great primer on music.
  
• Reading blogs.
  
• http://tangoimmigrant.blogspot.com/
  
• https://tango-high-and-low.com/
  
• http://tangocommuter1.blogspot.com/
  
• https://iheal.wordpress.com/
  
• https://nicoandstephie.wordpress.com/
  
• http://www.mytangodiaries.com/
  
• http://mshedgehog.blogspot.com/
  
• I've got more if you want. :)
  
• Podcasts. Not too many out there. I like Joe's and Tango Angeles.
  
• Watch demos on youtube. One good activity is to try to identify what qualities you like/dislike about a certain couple. Some of the best dancers out there now include Chicho Fromboli, Carlitos Espinoza y Noelia Hurtado, to start.

Try checking out Worlds of Music.

I have this book sitting on my shelf from a class I took years ago. I can't speak too much to the quality of the book as I really did not like the class (and honestly don't remember using the book that much), but taking a quick glance at it now seems like it might fit your interests. In this "shorter version," the sections are:

1. The Music Culture as a World of Music
   
2. North America/Native America
   
3. Africa/Ewe, Mande, Dagbamba, Shona, BaAka
   
4. North America/Black America
   
5. East Asia/Japan
   
6. India/South India
   
7. Asia/Indonesia
   
8. Latin America/Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru
   
9. Discovering and Documenting a World of Music
   
   Each of these is written by a different scholar who seems to be a specialist in that particular area (based on a quick glance at the author bios). It also seems to have received good reviews on Amazon, and with the low prices on this particular edition, it might be worth checking out.

Here's a fun fact: that performance was special enough to be granted the cover of a music textbook!

https://www.amazon.com/Music-Social-Experience-Steven-Cornelius/dp/0136017509#immersive-view_1475024878230

Pretty cool that such a general subject deems Bobby worthy of a cover. Now if only those Norton Anthologies would add more Dylan content!

I'm not sure about general surveys, and I'm also not sure about the distinction you're drawing between esotericism and traditional African religions, but I can provide two good case studies. E.E. Evans-Pritchard's film Witchcraft Among the Azande (Youtube link to full film) is a classic of ethnography (and therefore a bit dated), depicting divination and other practices among the Azande people of central Africa. The other is Steven Friedson's book Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, which deals with divination within the frame of medical diagnosis among the Tumbuka people of Malawi. You might also be interested in West African secret societies (e.g. Poro, Sande).

Fela Kuti was a complicated dude.

Cultural hero, Pan-Africanist, enemy of the state, lived in a barbed wire compound with what basically amounted to a standing personal army, had dozens of wives some of whom remain devoted advocates of his cult and many who later denounced him as a tyrant.

This book is an interesting resource on a pretty interesting dude.

Oh, and for those who are too ingrained in the world of pop music and can't take all the instrumental jamming, you can always skip to here and get to the bit with the singing. It's a pretty catchy tune.

I understood maybe like 5% of that. Honestly have not a clue. I got interested in the oud because a friend of mine found it at a flea market and gave ot to me, and there are some traditional players that play at restaurants near where I live. Most of what I know is from watching youtube, and the music is BEAUTIFUL. I just have a really hard time hearing the scale. I do hear the semitones in the music, but when I try to play it myself I find myself squeezing it back into a western scale. I don't know much more than tha. Someone did recommend this book to me though: https://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Musical-Scales-Teachings-without/dp/0974588245/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481437545&sr=1-5&keywords=makam+music

If you actually want to learn it, I have this book on the subject and it's very informative.

If you want to strictly stick within western tonality, try the Minor Harmonic, Major Locrian and Double Harmonic scales. Though to be completely honest, you could probably achieve the same effect to western ears by using basically any "exotic" scale, like the Gypsy scale, Egyptian, etc. etc.

I agree with the other comments here about listening (both recordings and getting to as many live performances as you can) being the most important thing. Since you sound a bit more of an academic I thought I'd also offer a suggestion on a written text you might find interesting, especially considering your phrase: "performance practices and improv"

https://www.amazon.com/Saying-Something-Improvisation-Interaction-Ethnomusicology/dp/0226534782

"Saying Something" by Ingrid Monson. Fantastic work regarding what it really means to improvise in jazz, as a language and cultural thing as well as the strictly musical thing.

A great book on this topic is this one: https://www.amazon.com/Maqam-Book-Doorway-Scales-Modes/dp/965505053X

It was written by an Iraqi Jew who has promoted Maqam music in Israel and preserved Iraqi music.

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Music/Culture) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0819562750/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_s3aLybES3S24T

Really, you should go to the "Customers also bought" section for this one or for Can't Stop Won't Stop and see what jumps out at you.

Julian Jaynes - The origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Impossible to ignore

Free Play

On Repeat

Improv Wisdom

Have you read "On Repeat"?
It deals with that specific topic.

https://www.amazon.com/Repeat-How-Music-Plays-Mind/dp/0199990824

This is the textbook. You doing absolutely need it, but if you want to do well just read the chapters that the professor stresses you to read. You also need it to write the papers.