Music in the American Diasporic Wedding

Music in the American Diasporic Wedding explores the complex cultural adaptations, preservations, and fusions that occur in weddings between couples and families of diverse origins. Discussing weddings as a site of negotiations between generations, traditions, and religions, the essays gathered here argue that music is the mediating force between the young and the old, ritual and entertainment, immigrant lore and assimilation. The contributors examine such colorful settings as the integration of klezmer-tinged Mandarin tunes at a Jewish and Taiwanese-American wedding, an entire wedding services industry found in Chicago's South Asian community that holds expos featuring various different wedding music options, and a Puerto Rican couple "thundering" down the aisles of New York St. Cecilia Church to rap their marriage vows. These essays show how wedding music and performance inform complex multi-ethnic diasporic identities and ultimately remind us that how we listen to and celebrate otherness defines who we are.

Inna Naroditskaya is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. She is author of Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, Song from the Land of Fire: Continuity and Change in Azerbaijani Mugham, and coeditor of several volumes, including Music of the Sirens.