Pioneer Spirits: New media representations of women in electronic music history

The Alternative Histories of Electronic Music conference in 2016 reflected a rise in research that explores new and alternative directions in electronic music historiography. Accordingly, attention has been focused on practitioners previously either ignored or thought to be marginal; a significant number of these figures are women. This fact has caught the attention of print and online media and the independent recording industry and, as a result, historical narratives of female electronic musicians have become part of the modern music media discourse. While this has many positive aspects, some media representations of the female electronic musician raise concerns for feminist scholars of electronic music history. Following the work of Tara Rodgers, Sally MacArthur and others, I consider some new media representations of electronic music’s female ‘pioneers’, situate them in relation to both feminist musicology and media studies, and propose readings from digital humanities that might be used to examine and critique them. This article expands on a talk given at AHEM and was first conceived as a presentation for the Fawcett Society event Sound Synthesis and the Female Musician, in 2014.

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George Katsaros: The Last Café-Aman Performer 1

Greek Music in America ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496819703.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 119-136

Author(s):

Stavros K. Frangos

Keyword(s):

American Culture ◽

Music History ◽

The Body ◽

Recording Industry ◽

Modern Music ◽

American Experience ◽

Musical Forms

There is probably no more prolific writer on Greek American culture and history than anthropologist Steve Frangos. His essays span many realms of culture, but the body of work regarding early Greek American recordings is particularly strong. His essay on “George Katsaros: The Last Café-Aman Performer” examines early Greek musical forms and transformations as documented by the recording industry. By using the career of iconic musician Katsaros as an example, he finds a reflection of the collective Greek American experience and illustrates that Greek music must be viewed through the lens of modern music history in order to determine whether certain genres are created traditions.

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“I don’t Teach Violence, I Teach Self-Control”; The Framing of Mixed Martial Arts Between Mental Health and Well-Being

Frontiers in Sociology ◽

10.3389/fsoc.2021.750027 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

Author(s):

Lorenzo Domaneschi ◽

Oscar Ricci

Keyword(s):

New Media ◽

Central Italy ◽

Well Being ◽

Media Representations ◽

Self Control ◽

Media Discourse ◽

Sports Media ◽

Points Of View ◽

Analytical Tools ◽

Health And Well Being

This paper draws on conceptual and analytical tools from cultural sociology to analyze media representations of the MMA right after the murder of a twenty-year-old boy, that took place in a small village in central Italy by a gang of young men, two of whom frequented a MMA gym. While often characterized as violent and uncivilized, MMA has a core following of fans who watch and practice MMA out of an interest in the effects of the sport in terms of health and well-being. Through in depth qualitative analysis of MMA media discourse offered by traditional and new media, this paper explores the way the MMA media constructs symbolic boundaries around different kinds of fights inside and outside the gym, through aesthetic and moral evaluations based on the hierarchical ‘distinctions’ between “violence” and “health” as possible outcomes of the MMA training process. Particularly, we carry out a discourse analysis based on Italian Newspapers, Magazines and Facebook groups dedicated to MMA, through which we frame the multiple representations of the discursive production built around the MMA in Italy. Our aim is to identify the different ways in which the discussion about this event provided narrative paths and points of view about the meaning of MMA, focusing on the reputational consequences concerning health, especially in its physical and mental expressions. This research may prove useful for scholars interested in MMA, culture, and sports media studies.

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Tinkering with Cultural Memory

Feminist Media Histories ◽

10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.5 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 1 (4) ◽

pp. 5-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Tara Rodgers

Keyword(s):

New Media ◽

Cultural Memory ◽

Electronic Music ◽

Music History ◽

The United States ◽

Popular Appeal ◽

The 1960S ◽

Historical Accounts ◽

Radio Corporation Of America ◽

Male Subjects

In 2015, analog synthesizers are resurgent in popular appeal. Robert Moog is often celebrated as the central and originary figure who launched a so-called revolution in sound by making synthesizers widely available in the late 1960s and early '70s. This essay examines the figure of the humble tinkerer, as exemplified by Moog, along with other historically specific and archetypal forms of masculinity that are embodied by the male subjects at the center of electronic music's historical accounts. Critical readings of audio-technical discourse, and of the periodization of synthesizer histories, reveal that women are always already rendered out of place as subjects and agents of electronic music history and culture. Yet a set of letters, written by young women across the United States to Harry F. Olson at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the mid-1950s and analyzed in this article, demonstrates that women were an enthusiastic audience for the RCA synthesizer a decade before Moog built his prototypes. As they did with new media, including wireless radio and the phonograph, in the early twentieth century, women played a key role at midcentury in enabling the broad-based market for analog synthesizers that greeted Moog and others in the 1960s once these instruments were made available for widespread use.

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Media Representations of Women Athletes: How Are Girls Affected?

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e715022007-001 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth A. Daniels

Keyword(s):

Women Athletes ◽

Media Representations ◽

Representations Of Women

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Nashville Cats

10.1093/oso/9780197502815.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Travis D. Stimeling

Keyword(s):

Music History ◽

Country Music ◽

Primary Sources ◽

Recording Industry ◽

Global View ◽

Production And Distribution ◽

History Of ◽

The 1950S ◽

Hall Of Fame ◽

The City

Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first history of record production during country music’s so-called Nashville Sound era. This period of country music history produced some of the genre’s most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Yet, despite country music’s overwhelming popularity during this period and the continued legacy of the studios that were built in Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s, little attention has been given to the ways in which recording engineers, session musicians, and record producers shaped the sounds of country music during the time. Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first book to take a global view of record production in Nashville during the three decades that the city’s musicians established the city as the leading center for the production and distribution of country music.

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‘As parents congregated at parties’: Responsibility and blame in media representations of violence and school closure in an Indigenous community

Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1177/1440783317722855 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 53 (3) ◽

pp. 592-606

Author(s):

Clarissa Carden

Keyword(s):

Young People ◽

Print Media ◽

Indigenous Community ◽

School Closure ◽

Media Representations ◽

Media Discourse ◽

School Teachers ◽

Remote Indigenous Community ◽

Primary Groups ◽

The Way

This article considers the discourses of responsibility and blame emerging from newspaper reportage of a crisis in the remote Indigenous community of Aurukun in Northern Queensland, Australia. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the sociology of racism and add to the existing body of scholarship on the ways in which deracialised media discourse can nevertheless be racist. The month of May 2016 saw violence perpetrated by young people against the teachers and principal of the community’s only school. Teachers were evacuated to the regional city of Cairns on 10 May due to violence in the community and fears for their safety. They returned on 18 May, only to be evacuated again on 25 May. These events form the focus of the reportage analysed in this article. The way in which three primary groups of players – parents, teachers and police – are portrayed in mainstream print media is analysed in order to ascertain how responsibility and blame are apportioned in relation to these events.

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