Future-proofing the Electronic Music School

2021 ◽  
pp. 226-231
Author(s):  
Will Kuhn ◽  
Ethan Hein
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Lesson Plan ◽  
Rapid Evolution ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Music School ◽  
New Development ◽  
Student Cohorts

A central difficulty of building a curriculum around current popular music styles is the rapid evolution of those styles. In this chapter, we give strategies for maintaining a music technology program’s cultural relevance over longer time spans, without rewriting every lesson plan every year. Rather than trying to respond to every new development in popular culture, we propose that teachers follow the hip-hop ethos of maintaining freshness. And rather than chasing novelty, we suggest that teachers look for common threads across popular styles and trends, and teach to those commonalities. We also propose identifying out-of-date styles that have become appealingly retro, since these can become a long-lasting feature of the curriculum without losing freshness. We also give strategies for maintaining cultural continuity as student cohorts graduate, and how the same set of technical skills can underlie a wide variety of genre-based projects. Finally, we address broader problems like adapting to new teaching formats and the ramifications of committing to a software platform.

Electronic Music School

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kuhn ◽  
Ethan Hein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Digital Audio ◽  
State University ◽  
New York University ◽  
Music School ◽  
Technology Program ◽  
College Age ◽  
Digital Audio Workstation

This book is a practical blueprint for teachers who want to begin teaching project-based music technology, production, and songwriting to secondary and college-age students. It aims to inspire teachers to expand beyond the usual ensemble offerings and to create a culture of unique creativity at their schools. The approach primarily draws upon the authors’ experiences developing and implementing the music technology program at Lebanon (Ohio) High School, one of the nation’s largest secondary-level programs, and courses at New York University and Montclair State University. While the lesson templates can be used with any hardware and software setup, the popular digital audio workstation Ableton Live is used for specific examples and screenshots.

Bombing, Breakin', and Gettin' down: The Folk and Popular Culture of Hip-Hop

1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Sharon R. Sherman ◽  
Tony Silver ◽  
Henry Chalfant ◽  
Charles Ahearn
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hip Hop

Electronic Music and the Problem of Electricity

2021 ◽  
pp. 253-273
Author(s):  
Gavin Steingo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electrical Energy ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Electricity Supply ◽  
Material Constitution ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Electricity Infrastructure

For the past twenty years, South African popular music has been dominated by electronic genres such as house, kwaito, and hip-hop—especially among the Black population living in and around major urban centers. Based on fieldwork in the townships of Soweto, this chapter focuses on a fundamental condition of possibility for any kind of electronic music: electricity. Since 2008, South Africa has experienced massive problems with its electricity infrastructure. These problems resulted in widespread rolling blackouts between 2008 and 2009, and since 2014 the situation has worsened. The chapter asks what becomes of electronic music in a context where access to electricity is radically unreliable, if not completely absent. What do musicians do when the electricity supply stops? What kinds of affect become impossible, and what kinds of affect are generated? How do power outages impact a musician’s relationship to citizenship and to the state? The chapter traces the lines of connection between informal home studios and Eskom (South Africa’s state-owned electricity utility) as way of listening to and for infrastructure—developing a critique regarding the tropes of invisibility and breakdown in infrastructural research along the way. It further illuminates the ways that electronic musicians in South Africa are compelled to engage the very material basis of their activities. With this approach, the meaning of the term “electronic music” is revealed to be much more than a generic or stylistic description. In South Africa, electronic music refers first and foremost to its material constitution as electrical energy.

Genre and Capital in Avant-garde Electronica

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71
Author(s):  
Eliot Britton
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
Flexible Boundaries ◽  
Structured Approach

This article applies a genre level approach to the tangled discourse surrounding the points of convergence between avant-garde electronica and electroacoustic music. More specifically the article addresses related experimental practices in these distinct yet related fields of electronic music-making. The democratisation of music technology continues to expand into an increasingly diverse set of musical fields, destabilising established power dynamics. A flexible, structured approach to the analysis of these relationships facilitates the navigation of crumbling boundaries and shifting relationships. Contemporary electronic music’s overlapping networks encompass varying forms of capital, aesthetics, technology, ideology, tools and techniques. These areas offer interesting points of convergence. As the discourse surrounding electronic music expands, so must the vocabulary and conceptual models used to describe and discuss new areas of converging artistic practice. Genre level diagrams selectively collapse, expand and arrange artistic fields, facilitating concrete, coherent arguments and the examination of patterns and relationships. Through the genre level diagram’s establishment of distinct yet flexible boundaries, electronic music’s sprawling discourse can be cordoned off, expanded or contracted to suit structured analyses. In this way, this approach clarifies scope and facilitates simultaneous examination from a variety of perspectives.

scholarly journals Synthesizers, Virtual Orchestras, and Ableton Live: Digitally Rendered Music on Broadway and Musicians’ Union Resistance

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (03) ◽  
pp. 273-304
Author(s):  
LIAM E. GIBBS
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Production Values ◽  
Downward Pressure ◽  
Acoustic Instruments ◽  
Union Local ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Industry Professionals ◽  
Previous Scholarship

AbstractAs Broadway musicals embrace contemporary popular music styles, orchestrators must incorporate the digital technologies necessary for producing convincing simulations of genres like hip hop and electronic music. At the same time, as production values soar, producers work to minimize their budgets, often putting downward pressure on the size of the orchestra. Although digital and electronic music technologies can expand the sonic register of the Broadway orchestra, they can also replace traditional acoustic instruments and save money. The Broadway musicians’ union, Local 802, has regularly sought to control the use of digital technologies and ensure that live musicians produce as much music as possible. Thus, Local 802's advocacy for the employment of their members can limit the sounds heard on Broadway.The following narrative considers three digital technologies—synthesizers, virtual orchestras, and Ableton Live—and examines case studies and controversies surrounding their use in Broadway orchestras and implications for liveness in performance. Informed by interviews with industry professionals, author observation of pit orchestras in rehearsal and performance, archival research, popular and industry media, and previous scholarship, I argue that the union's entrenched interests and antiquated regulations can stifle musical innovation on Broadway by resisting the use of digital music technologies.

Immunizing Strategies: Hip-Hop and Critique in Tanzania

Africa ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koen Stroeken
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Political History ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Exposure

AbstractTanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors that normally mitigate the social impact of popular culture. Second, the article explores the global relevance of their social critique. Bongo Flava attempts to outwit the sophisticated indifference and neoliberalism of postcolonial rulers and ruled. Partly inspired by African American popular culture, many songs expose the postcolonial strategy of survival, which is to immunize oneself against the threat of commodification by fully embracing it, the contamination yielding extra power. The lyrics, in their irony and pessimism, exhibit the same immunizing tendency. However, this tendency is curbed by two principles that safeguard streetwise status: the rapper's willingness to ‘duel’ and the Kiswahili credo of activating bongo, ‘the brains’.

Reflections on the Development of Cultural Studies in Japan

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 293-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoko Tamari
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
Cultural Intervention ◽  
Current State ◽  
Excellent Research ◽  
New Development ◽  
History Of

Although Japan had its own distinctive ‘pre-history’ of cultural studies, which produced some excellent research on popular culture, which can be traced back to the 1920s, the current state of cultural studies has been criticized by conventional mainstream academics; whereas the younger generation has been attracted by cultural studies as a new academic trend. An important new development in cultural studies in Japan is Cultural Typhoon. This new movement seeks to avoid institutionalization and create an alternative academic public sphere alongside broadened cultural practices, social activities and political interventions. Cultural studies in Japan can be seen as a part of a new diversity in cultural studies, which has some potentialities to move beyond the academy and open new dialogical spaces for communication and cultural intervention.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document