Binaurality, Stereophony, and Popular Music in the 1960s and 1970s

2017 ◽  
pp. 103-110
Author(s):  
Franco Fabbri
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 155-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Carroll

AbstractThis article examines curriculum and practice in Australian secondary classroom music education, in order to trace the inclusion of, and provision for, students with learning orientations based on popular music forms. A 60-year period of curriculum reform, matriculation statistics and literature is surveyed with a focus on the state of New South Wales (NSW), where the ‘non-literate’ student musician was first acknowledged in curriculum documents dating from the late 1970s at the senior secondary level (Music Syllabus Year 11 and 12: New 2 Unit A Course. Draft Document). Three overlapping eras frame discussion. The first discusses the original post–World War II school curriculum established for Western art music (WAM); the second discusses the period of curriculum reform beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, which leads to the inclusion of popular music at junior secondary levels; and the third is the present era from roughly 1980 onwards, where separate pathways of instruction are maintained for WAM and students with interests in popular and contemporary musics. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) from the sociology of education is employed, with analysis unveiling a series of historic code shifts and clashes with implications for present practice. An unveiling of these codes explains the cause of ongoing tensions surrounding the inclusion of popular music and musicians in Australian music classrooms and provides foundation for much-needed curriculum development in the NSW context, and potentially elsewhere, where similar dynamics underpin practice in secondary classrooms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.


Author(s):  
Anna Stirr

Nepal's twentieth-century tradition of leftist music, known as pragatisil git or progressive song, developed musically during the 1960s and 1970s along with state-sponsored nationalist genres meant to serve as musical representations of Nepali identity. The differences were primarily in the lyrics: pragatisil git's leftist themes were deemed too incendiary for a regime that forbade political organization. Composers writing songs for the national radio were encouraged to produce love songs, deemed apolitical and therefore safe. At first glance, communist pragatisil git avoids themes of love, in stark contrast to mainstream folk and popular music. Yet, while themes of romance are indeed absent from most Nepali communist music, a closer look demonstrates a strong concern with other forms of love and sentiment. This chapter focuses upon the theme of class love, examining how it is imagined to be socially transformative, and how it has changed through different communist parties' imaginings.


Popular Music ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nasser Al-Taee

This article explores political, cultural and musical issues surrounding the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis, particularly over Jerusalem, which each party uses to symbolise and promote their own perception of the conflict. Specifically, I examine selected popular musical landmarks that capture the essence of the struggle from the ultra-nationalistic tones of the 1960s and 1970s to the more reconciliatory ones in the 1990s advocating peace. Special attention is given to musical cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian singers who played a strong role in the promotion of peace within a utopian dream of coexistence between Arabs and Jews.


Muzikologija ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 167-194
Author(s):  
Jelena Jovanovic

It is commonly understood that a concept album is ?a studio album where all musical or lyrical ideas contribute to a single overall theme or unified story? (Shuker 2002: 5). In this paper this term will be used to denote an album containing extra-musical themes and not simply collections of compositions defined only by genre or theme. In order for an album to belong to this category, it must have taken a thematic unity realized by the common content (thematically) of its compositions and common musical means. Although the beginnings of such creative trends can be traced from 1940, the 1960s and 1970s brought the most influential releases of this kind, especially The Beatles? album Sgt. Pepper?s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which has had a great impact on many authors. As far as is known, the topic of concept albums in Yugoslavia has not yet been elaborated, so this article seems to be the first dedicated to this subject. It seems that in Yugoslavia there had been albums with elements of concept released before the appearance of the Kamen na kamen group album in 1973, entitled LP-60993 (Zagreb: Jugoton). The author of the album was Nikola Borota Radovan. After that, a double LP by the same ensemble and songwriter appeared in 1975 entitled OOUR/AVNOJ (RTV Ljubljana), with even more clearly expressed characteristics of concept. The aim of this article is to show that the thematic and conceptual elements of these editions are firmly connected to those of the concept album. These LPs were formed within the following thematic and contextual frames: 1) Borota`s general inclination towards folklore tradition(s) as a permanent source of inspiration, 2) models among the greatest popular music works that influenced his writing projects, primarily The Beatles? concept albums, and 3) social, economic and political circumstances in Yugoslavia at the time when these albums appeared. Even if it is not strictly a concept album in the full sense, the album LP- 60993 might be regarded as the first album with elements of concept published by a Yugoslav author, according to all the criteria and analyzed results. The elements that show a clear connection to the concept are as follows: leading subject(s)/idea(s) that demand(s) the order of compositions, organization of musical elements and motives on macro- and micro-levels (to produce formal and thematic unity), elements of narrative and musical/sound symbols, including elements of musique concr?te.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-471
Author(s):  
ODED HEILBRONNER

When discussing the relationship between popular music and social-political change in the long 1960s, historians and critics have tended to fluctuate between two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's approach, echoed in Jon Savage's recent book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. In Marwick's cross-national survey, he examines social change in the West during the ‘Long Sixties’ (1958–72), when a ‘cultural revolution’ occurred in which protest music played a major role. On the other hand, there are Peter Doggett's and Dominic Sandbrook's observations that the top-selling albums of the 1960s and 1970s did not include some masterpiece by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, or other leading figures in rock music, but rather the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. Sandbrook writes that it ‘projected a familiar, even conservative vision of the world, based on romantic love and family life. In a period of change it offered a sense of reassurance and stability, not only in its plot but also in its musical style . . . [T]hese were the values of millions . . . in the Swinging Sixties’. Doggett similarly points to the popularity of Julie Andrews and the soundtracks of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. These soundtracks ‘made no attempt to alter the culture or educate the listener’ he suggests, and that is why they have been relegated ‘to a footnote in the history of popular music’ even while being the top-selling records of 1965 and 1966.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN IRELAND ◽  
SHARIF GEMIE

In this paper we analyse one particular interaction: the development of a self-consciously “Eastern”-sounding music within Western pop music. We understand this in the context of several “journeys to the East”: some virtual (the interest in oriental religions, the adoption of Eastern musical forms) and some real (the journeys taken to the East by some musicians and by thousands of young people). We will consider, first, the milieu within which these changes took place, and then analyse the methods, scale and motivations of those Western artists who took inspiration from Eastern, mainly Indian, music in the 1960s and 1970s to create what became known as “raga rock.” Our aim is to demonstrate that these developments added up to a “neo-orientalism”: resembling the older, imperial orientalism in its tendency to simplify and romanticize the East, but different from it in the passionate sincerity of its admiration for certain Eastern forms, which were taken to the point of challenging dominant cultural and even political norms within the West.


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