Are Popular Music Curricula Antiracist?: The CCNY Music Department as a Case Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-451
Author(s):  
Matthew K. Carter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
American Music ◽  
Ear Training ◽  
Music Department ◽  
City College ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Theorist

In a recent virtual talk at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, music theorist Philip Ewell considered how music educators and researchers might begin to “undo the exclusionist framework of our contemporary music academy.” Ewell's enterprise resonated with me not only as one who teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, history, performance, and ear training, but also as an instructor in a recently adopted Popular Music Studies program at the City College of New York (CCNY). The CCNY music department's shift in focus from a mostly white, mostly male, classical-based curriculum towards a more diverse and polystylistic repertory of popular music chips away at the exclusionist framework to which Ewell refers.

Eileen Southern

Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-379
Author(s):  
David Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
American Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
College Administration ◽  
Music Department ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Congregational Singing ◽  
Renaissance Music

Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).

scholarly journals A Preliminary Bibliographical Guide to Doctoral Theses on Music in Nigeria (1990 – 2010)

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Onomudo Aluede
Keyword(s):  
Music Therapy ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Doctoral Degrees ◽  
Doctorate Degree ◽  
Popular Music Studies

This study is essentially a referential guide which explores simply, the titles of doctoral degrees in music acquired by Nigerians in the last two decades. It presents a diary of the areas of specialisations of their holders. To this effect, doctorate degree titles in music were collected. The study revealed that there are more ethnomusicologists than music educators, composers, performers, popular music studies, music media and music therapy practitioners presently in Nigeria based on the titles of the theses collected.  In reaction to this, it is suggested, among other things, that stake holders should explore other avenues such as workshops and master classes to serve as an initial proactive forum where these palpable lapses will be redressed.  

Tracing the color line in the American music market and its effect on contemporary music marketing

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Paul G. Barretta
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Public Library ◽  
American Music ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Us ◽  
Music Market

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth consideration of the color line in the US music market, much deeper treatment than that of a superficial social construct. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis was performed using archives from the Performing Arts Division of the New York Public Library. Findings A complex intersection of social and capitalist influences is fueled by culture and economics, filtered through the contributions of artists and media. Six major categories: social, media, artist, culture, industry, and economics contribute to its development and propagation. It continues to affect contemporary music markets. Research limitations/implications Interpretation of archival data is subject to availability of material and subjectivity of the researcher. Steps were taken to minimize bias. The research implies an opportunity for the US music market to celebrate diversity and social justice. Practical implications Focusing on the symbolic use of music, marketers have the opportunity to empower consumers to embrace diversity, reversing the trajectory of the color line. Social implications Embracing cultural heritage and celebrating diversity can promote economic gain without detriment to cultural interests. Originality/value The present research provides a much deeper consideration of the color line in the American Music Market than previous literature does. The consideration includes a combination of forces, from profit focused to cultural.

Songbooks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Weisbard
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Theodore Dreiser ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Village Voice

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

Johanna Beyer

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Beal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Early Death ◽  
American Music ◽  
Active Member ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Music Community ◽  
Charles Seeger ◽  
New Generation

Composer Johanna Beyer's fascinating body of music and enigmatic life story constitute an important chapter in American music history. As a hard-working German émigré piano teacher and accompanist living in and around New York City during the New Deal era, she composed plentiful music for piano, percussion ensemble, chamber groups, choir, band, and orchestra. A one-time student of Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, and Henry Cowell, Beyer was an ultramodernist, and an active member of a community that included now-better-known composers and musicians. Only one of her works was published and only one recorded during her lifetime. But contemporary musicians who play Beyer's compositions are intrigued by her originality. This book chronicles Beyer's life from her early participation in New York's contemporary music scene through her performances at the Federal Music Project's Composers' Forum-Laboratory concerts to her unfortunate early death in 1944. This book is a portrait of a passionate and creative woman underestimated by her music community even as she tirelessly applied her gifts with compositional rigor. The first book-length study of the composer's life and music, it reclaims a uniquely innovative artist and body of work for a new generation.

Getting into the groove?

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-402
Author(s):  
Jill Halstead
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Music And Gender

Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender.Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London and New York: Routeledge, 1997, 353 pp.Sex, sexuality and articulations of gender are well-established components in the production and performance of popular music. Hence, Sexing the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley, is a very welcome addition to this vital and growing area of popular music studies and cultural theory more generally. The collection reflects the reality that studies of gender and sexuality in popular music are born of a hybrid lineage; accordingly the book approaches its subject from a range of disciplines such as sociology, cultural theory, media studies, sychology and musicology, and as such is a vibrant mix. Despite its relative diversity, the book's structure and progression is fluent and focused.

scholarly journals For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn

2010 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Born
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Music Study

What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisciplinarity in music research that is more often articulated, one that – in the guise of a turn to practice or performance – sutures together the historically inclined, humanities model of musicology with the micro-social, musicologically inclined aspects of ethnomusicology. The article suggests, moreover, that this vision obscures other sources of renewal in music scholarship: those deriving from anthropology, social theory and history, and how they infuse the recent work gathered under the rubric of a relational musicology. As an alternative to the practice turn, a future direction is proposed that entails an expanded analytics of the social, cultural, material and temporal in music. The last part of the article takes the comparativist dimension of a relational musicology to four topics: questions of the social, technology, temporality and ontology.

A sound education: the gramophone and the classroom in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1920–1940

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Symes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Considerable Period ◽  
The Way

The advent of the gramophone transformed the cultural conditions of contemporary music, including the way it was taught. For a considerable period of time, musicians and music educators disparaged the gramophone. The members of the musical appreciation movement were more sympathetic and helped transform the gramophone's educational image during the 1920s and 1930s. They argued that the gramophone, contrary to its detractors, might stem the appeal of popular music. As is clear from the sentiments of those espousing the pedagogic uses of the gramophone – which are analysed in this paper – their advocacy went far beyond music and was part of a broader cultural agenda, which included arresting the moral dangers associated with popular music.

Book Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Martin Van Bruinessen ◽  
Michael M. Gunter ◽  
Joost Jongerden ◽  
Michiel Leezenberg ◽  
Stanley Thangaraj
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
City College ◽  
Tennessee Technological University ◽  
Technological University

Michael M. Gunter (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Kurds, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 483 pp., (ISBN: 9781138646643). Reviewed by Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Kardo Bokani, Social Communication and Kurdish Political Mobilisation in Turkey, Balti, Republic of Moldova: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017, 252 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-330-33239-3) Reviewed by Michael M. Gunter, Tennessee Technological University, United States Emel Elif Tugdar & Serhun Al, eds., Comparative Kurdish Politics in the Middle East: Actors, Ideas, and Interests, Cham: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018, pp. 235, (ISBN: 978-3319537146) Reviewed by Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University, The Netherlands Christoph Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 364 pp, (9781108684842). Reviewed by Michiel Leezenberg, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Thomas Schmidinger, The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019, 192 pp. (ISBN: 978-1629636511). Reviewed by Stanley Thangaraj, City College of New York, United States

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document