A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Legg
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Conventional Notation ◽  
Analytical Research ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
And Performance

AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.

An analysis of performance practices in African American gospel music: rhythm, lyric treatment and structures in improvisation and accompaniment

Popular Music ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Legg ◽  
Carolyn Philpott
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Musical Characteristics ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Analysis Of Performance

AbstractAfrican American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.

scholarly journals “At This Age, This Is Who I Am”: CeCe Winans, Exilic Consciousness, and the American Popular Music Star System

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 475-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Self ◽  
Star System ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
American Popular Music

Abstract My paper addresses the intersections of the American popular music star system, Black female Gospel singers, Gospel Music, and the exilic consciousness of the Sanctified Church with special attention to life and music of Gospelwoman Priscilla Marie “CeCe” Winans Love. I argue that CeCe Winans and the marketing campaign for Winans’ album Let Them Fall in Love, is indicative of the encroachment of American popular music’s star system into self-elected “exiled” Gospel Music and into the lives of “exiled” Gospelwomen. Gospelwomen are 20th and 21st century urban African American Protestant Christian women who are paid for singing Gospel Music and who have recorded at least one Gospel album for national distribution. The self-elected exile of Gospelwomen refers to their decision to live a life based on the values of the Kingdom of God while encountering and negotiating opposing values in American popular culture. Gospelwomen and Gospel Music are impacted by the demands of stardom in America’s celebrity culture which includes achieved success and branding. Gospelwomen negotiate these components of stardom molding them into mechanisms that conform to their beliefs and needs.

Influence, Hybridity and How the Past is a Foreign Country

2018 ◽  
pp. 43-68
Author(s):  
Edna Lim
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Foreign Country ◽  
Hybrid Films ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One

This chapter discusses two ways that films from the golden age could be considered Singapore films. First, when viewed within the context of its time, the golden age is a cinema of hybrid films produced by a culturally heterogeneous and transnational industry and country. The hybridity of the films is apparent in the narrative, musical style and language which reveal a diversity of influences ranging from other cinematic conventions such as Hollywood and Bollywood cinemas and performance practices like bangsawan theatre. Second, watching these films now creates a ‘consciousness of doubling’ between the Singapore in the films and the one materially present today. It is precisely because we see (an)other Singapore being performed at each viewing that the films from the golden age can be considered Singapore films.

ORCHESTRATION AND PITCH PRECISION IN THE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC OF MARC SABAT

Tempo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (295) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Taylor Brook
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
Unique Manner ◽  
And Performance ◽  
High Degree

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between orchestration and microtonality in the music of Marc Sabat through a score-based analysis of two recent works, Asking Ocean (2016), for string quartet and large ensemble, and The Luminiferous Aether (2018), for large orchestra. Excerpts from these two compositions are discussed to highlight the challenges of composing for orchestral forces in a musical style that demands a high degree of microtonal pitch precision. Through retuning, alteration, and a sensitivity to the construction, techniques and performance practices of orchestral instruments, Sabat has developed a unique manner of orchestrating that is at once timbrally rich and uncompromising in pitch precision. After a brief introduction to the extended just intonation framework that Sabat employs, his concepts of ‘fixed microtonal pitches’ and ‘tuneable intervals’ are discussed and connected to orchestration in his scores. Drawing upon this analysis, connections are made between the microtonal system with orchestration and musical aesthetics broadly.

Music and Religiosity among African American Fundamentalist Christians

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thérèse Smith
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of a church to its surrounding secular context. It outlines the relationship of an African American Missionary Baptist Church congregation to its surrounding community in Mississippi in the 1980s, drawing on the insider binary of “saint-sinner”; points to the strong role that individual scriptural interpretation and performance play in this church; and traces several church performances that show the nuanced and flexible nature of the boundary between “saint” and “sinner.” While the dominant local popular music, blues, is generally categorized as “sinner’s” music, it is sometimes allowed for listening to (but not performance) because of a nuanced understanding of the relationship of listening and performance to the Christian believer. In addition, knowledge of blues and other popular genres is important for believers in interpreting sermons, in which speech slides into musical performance and references these genres as symbols to narrate the “saint-sinner” binary.

Practices of Enchantment: The Theatre of Zora Neale Hurston

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Biers
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Materialist Theory ◽  
American Author ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

Contemporary critical work in the field of new materialism, whose practitioners take seriously the concept of nonhuman agency, has largely neglected the genres of theatre and performance. African American author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s folk revues of the 1930s offer an opportunity to examine the intersections between contemporary new materialist theory and the stage, revealing that black Atlantic performance practices have long explored concepts of nonhuman agency in the service of a cultural and racial politics.

Taste and familiarity affect the experience of groove in popular music

2019 ◽  
pp. 102986491983917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Senn ◽  
Toni Amadeus Bechtold ◽  
Florian Hoesl ◽  
Lorenz Kilchenmann
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Considerable Effect ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
Listening Experiment

Groove is a common experience in music listeners, often described as an enjoyable impulse to move in synchrony with the music. Research has suggested that the groove experience is influenced by listeners’ musical taste and their familiarity with a musical repertoire. This study reports the results from an online listening experiment in which 233 participants rated the groove quality of 208 short clips from different Western popular music styles. Findings show that participants’ familiarity with a song, its musical style, and listeners’ preference for that style have a considerable effect on the groove experience. Overall, pop and funk stimuli triggered a stronger groove experience than rock stimuli. Listeners had a tendency to give high groove ratings to music they had heard before and to music that belonged to a style they liked. Results also show that professional musicians had a tendency to experience more groove in response to funk compared to pop music, whereas non-musicians experienced more groove with pop compared to funk. Together, these effects explained approximately 15% of the groove ratings’ variance. In sum, listeners’ attitudes and their musical backgrounds have a considerable impact on their experience of groove.

W. de Wicumbe's Rolls and Singing the Alleluya ca. 1250

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 639-709
Author(s):  
Karen Desmond
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Monastic Communities ◽  
And Performance

Abstract A set of thirteenth-century parchment fragments, including the remnants of two rolls and one manuscript codex, preserves a largely unstudied repertoire unique to medieval England. In addition to a single motet and a setting of a responsory verse, the Rawlinson Fragments preserve twelve three-voice Alleluya settings. While polyphonic Alleluyas are well known from the continental Magnus liber repertoire, these insular Alleluya settings are quite different. Most significantly, while composed on the text and pitches of plainchant, they include newly composed texts in at least one voice—that is, they are polytextual chant settings. Aspects of their musical style certainly draw on other polyphonic genres—organum, conductus, and motet. This article presents the paleographical and codicological evidence that corroborates an early date for these fragments (in the 1240s), confirms their connection to Reading Abbey, and situates their repertoire within a broader context. My analysis points to intriguing points of overlap with both the plainchant prosula tradition and the Magnus liber organa and motets. It reopens broader questions about the copying and performance practices of liturgical polyphony, including previous suggestions that motet texts may have been sung within the performance of the Magnus liber organa, regardless of the scribal copying conventions that separated organum and motet in the surviving Magnus liber manuscripts. The article also considers the role of the Rawlinson Fragments’ main scribe, Benedictine monk W. de Wicumbe, who was active within the monastic communities of Leominster and Reading as a composer of plainchant and polyphony, and as precentor, most likely in charge of his community's musical life.

Jaco Pastorius, the Electric Bass, and the Struggle for Jazz Credibility

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Brian F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Electric Bass ◽  
Public Persona

This article explores Jaco Pastorius’s efforts to legitimize himself as a jazz electric bassist. Even though the instrument had existed at the margins of jazz for decades, by the 1970s it was overwhelmingly associated with rock and funk music and therefore carried with it the stigmatized connotations of outsider status. Building on the work of Bill Milkowski, Kevin Fellezs, Lawrence Wayte, and Peter Dowdall, I situate Pastorius’s career within the broader context of 1970s jazz fusion. I then analyze how he deliberately used his public persona, his virtuosic technical abilities, the atypical timbre of his fretless electric bass, and his work as a composer and bandleader to vie for acceptance within the jazz tradition. As I argue, Pastorius specifically attempted to establish his jazz credibility through his first two solo albums, initially by disassociating himself from his own instrument, and then by eventually abandoning the musical style that had made him famous. Ultimately, Pastorius’s story serves as a useful case study of the tangible ramifications of authenticity disputes and the complicated ways in which musicians have attempted to navigate contested musical spaces within popular music.

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