Losing the local: Sydney and the Oz Rock tradition

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Homan

In a tiny inner city pubThe amps were getting stackedLeads were getting wound upIt was full of pissed Anzacs‘Got no more gigs for Tuesday nights’ said the barman to the star,‘We're putting pokies in the lounge and strippers in the bar’The star, he raised his fingers and said ‘fuck this fucking hole’But to his roadie said ‘it's the death of rock and roll’‘There ain't no single place left to play amplified guitarEvery place is servin' long blacks if they're not already tapas bars(TISM (This Is Serious Mum), ‘The Last Australian Guitar Hero’, 1998)Introduction: local music-makingA number of recent studies have focused upon the places and spaces of popular music performance. In particular, analyses of British live music contexts have examined the role of urban landscapes in facilitating production/consumption environments. Building upon Simon Frith's (1983) initial exploration of the synthesis of leisure/work ideologies and popular music, Ruth Finnegan's detailed examination of amateur music practices in Milton Keynes (1989) and Sara Cohen's account of the Liverpool scene (1991) reveal the benefits of engaging in detailed micro-studies of the local. Paul Chevigny's history of the governance of New York City jazz venues (1991) similarly provides a rich insight into performance contexts and the importance of hitherto unnoticed city ordinances in influencing the production of live music.

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kronenburg

On 15 August 1965, The Beatles performed before more than 55,600 fans at Shea Stadium, New York, USA. In what was by far the biggest event to date of its type, that evening a dramatic revelation of the commercial possibilities of popular music took place, and changed the nature of the music business for ever. Simultaneously, despite using more powerful amplification than had been used before, the virtually non-existent connection between the musicians and their audience revealed the enormous technical and architectural challenges of large-scale concerts. Though this concert took place in a permanent building structure, the equipment it was hoped would temporarily alter its use for performance purposes was portable. That it was clearly inadequate for this task reinforced the need for new mobile facilities that would do the job better [1, 2].


1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laird Okie

Daniel Neal's The History of the Puritans was a standard eighteenth-century source for modern historians and, as will be shown, prefigured nineteenth-century Whig conceptions of Puritanism. Published in four volumes between 1732 and 1738, Neal's work went through at least twenty-one editions or reprints; the last one was done in 1863. New editions were printed in London, Bath, Dublin, New York, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the History was twice expanded by continuators in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The History of the Puritans was not a narrowly religious or sectarian study: Neal strove to elucidate the Puritan contribution to the state. A Congregationalist minister, Neal produced the closest thing we have to an official Dissenting history of England, one which glorified the role of Puritanism in fostering English liberty. To study Neal's History is to gain insight into the historical and political ideology of early eighteenth-century Dissent.


Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.


Author(s):  
Miriam Bak McKenna

Abstract Situating itself in current debates over the international legal archive, this article delves into the material and conceptual implications of architecture for international law. To do so I trace the architectural developments of international law’s organizational and administrative spaces during the early to mid twentieth century. These architectural endeavours unfolded in three main stages: the years 1922–1926, during which the International Labour Organization (ILO) building, the first building exclusively designed for an international organization was constructed; the years 1927–1937 which saw the great polemic between modernist and classical architects over the building of the Palace of Nations; and the years 1947–1952, with the triumph of modernism, represented by the UN Headquarters in New York. These events provide an illuminating allegorical insight into the physical manifestation, modes of self-expression, and transformation of international law during this era, particularly the relationship between international law and the function and role of international organizations.


Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.


1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siry

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.


1980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Sinclair

In 1980 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers celebrates the centenary of its founding. The occasion has provided an opportunity for the Society to look back and survey its accomplishments, its distinguished members, and its constant dialogue — among its members and with the American people — concerning the role of engineering in a technological society. The dynamic tensions within the ASME make a fascinating background to this centennial history. The central role of the Society’s headquarters in New York is examined the light of various movements for regional and professional sections within (and occasionally outside) the Society. The technical question of standards is shown to be a constant and creative problem for members — reflecting their attitudes towards their role in a political system often reluctant to enforce nation-wide standars in business and industry. From the Progressive Era, and its attempts to reform city government and check the power of private utilities, to the 1970s and its renewed concern with ecology and business ethnics, the Society has provided a microcosm of informed debate about technical engineering problems which — as this book makes clear — concerns us all.


Author(s):  
Mª Isabel Romero Ruiz

The presence of Empire in the Victorian period and its aftermath has become a new trope in neo-Victorian studies, introducing a postcolonial approach to the re-writing of the Victorian past. This, combined with the metaphor of the sea as a symbol of British colonial and postcolonial maritime power, makes of Joseph O’Connor’s novel Star of the Sea a story of love, vulnerability and identity. Set in the winter of 1847, it tells the story of the voyage of a group of Irish refugees travelling to New York trying to escape from the Famine. The colonial history of Ireland and its long tradition of English dominance becomes the setting of the characters’ fight for survival. Parallels with today’s refugees can be established after Ireland’s transformation into an immigration country. Following Judith Butler’s and Sarah Bracke’s notions of vulnerability and resistance together with ideas about ‘the other’ in postcolonial neo-Victorianism, this article aims to analyse the role of Empire in the construction of an Irish identity associated with poverty and disease, together with its re-emergence and reconstruction through healing in a contemporary globalised scenario. For this purpose, I resort to Edward Said’s and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ideas about imperialism and new imperialism along with Elizabeth Ho’s concept of ‘the Neo-Victorian-at-sea’ and some critics’ approaches to postcolonial Gothic. My main contention throughout the text will be that vulnerability in resistance can foster healing.


Author(s):  
Sean F. Edgecomb

This review considers Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music Marathon which took place at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York from October 8 to October 9, 2016. Using Jacques Derrida's theory of "l'avenir," best translated as the "unexpected visitor" I analyze a variety of the components found in the performance including, queer dramaturgy, song selection, choreography, audience participation and costumes. My critical review examines the concert which pulled liberally from the American songbook, using popular music from 1776 to 2016 in an attempt to collectively exorcise the specters of the patriarchy and exonerate the oppressed in what Mac deemed a “radical faerie ritual.”


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