Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2018
Flows of money and resources receive increasing treatment in music; however, lack of money and resources is rarely discussed comprehensively. This special half-issue of the Yearbook for Traditional Music titled “Music and Poverty” aims towards formulating a nuanced understanding of music and poverty relationships. This collection of articles considers what the complex theoretical issue of poverty can add to understandings of music and musical cultures, and vice versa. To this end, “Music and Poverty” builds on music-research publications that mention poverty and a growing number of scholarly studies of music that provide valuable information about music-of-poverty contexts. Although poverty has long formed a comprehensive focus of cognate disciplines of ethnomusicology, especially anthropology and sociology, and of studies in policy, economics, human rights, and health, most of ethnomusicology has yet to consider poverty explicitly or in detail, to open up multiple issues involved in it, and to draw on an extensive poverty literature relevant to culture.