The Musical World(s) of Queen

2021 ◽  
pp. 174-189
Author(s):  
Nick Braae
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Hard Rock ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
The World ◽  
Primary Reference ◽  
American Popular Song

This chapter begins from the premise that’s Queen idiolect or ‘sound’ was distinct in popular music. Using the concept of ‘style planets’, the idiolect characteristics are connected to numerous and varied stylistic sources including 1970s hard rock, 1970s Baroque pop, 1960s pop, soul, and pre-WWII American popular song. These influences are identified in the textural structures, performance gestures, and harmonic choices. Using the concept of ‘musical worlding’, it is suggested that a hypothetical listener might regard Queen’s idiolect as predominantly placed within the world of hard rock, but made to sound distinct and unique because of the integration of seemingly incongruous style influences within their songs. This analysis is conducted with primary reference to ‘We Are the Champions’

The Beau Monde

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The World

Chapter 3 explores the world of elite leisure in both its high and low forms to uncover how the aristocracy continued to shape the West End in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is devoted to nightlife and is intended to show that one purpose of pleasure districts was to construct the idea of the night-time economy. The chapter explores the world of gentlemens’ clubs and other locations of masculine pleasure before moving into an examination of opera, ballet, and gambling; both sources of aristocratic networks. The second half of the chapter then looks at the world of low life in the Covent Garden and Maiden Lane areas; territory of the ‘flash’ and the bohemians. Affluent gentlemen explored what they saw as the ‘underworld’. Here was a world of disreputable bars and spaces for popular song. There is a detailed analysis of venues such as the Cider Cellars which shaped the development of popular music and culture with its bawdy ballads.

Canção da América – style and emotion in Brazilian popular song

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-349
Author(s):  
Martha de Ulhôa Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The World ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

During the 1960s bossa nova was the trademark of Brazilian popular music. In the 1980s a second wave of Brazilian popular artists, such as Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Caetano Veloso, has emerged on to the international popular music scene. These artists have been issuing and distributing their records through international labels, and have also had their music recorded by other artists and groups like Pat Metheny and Manhattan Transfer (recipient of a Grammy for their album Brasil). Milton Nascimento, who since 1968 has been playing in concerts around the world with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Wayne Shorter, also receives good reviews in Europe. The Observer describes Milton Nascimento as ‘one of the top musicians in the world’, whose poetry ‘… fuses emotion, feeling, experience, dreams, [and] hopes’ with ‘a burnished voice … tempered with a taut edge at times’, and ‘beautiful melodies which are deceptively intense and powerful even when surrounded by funky keyboards or lush strings’. For the reviewer: ‘His songs have summed up the collective feelings of a nation’. And for Brazilians what is the meaning of Milton Nascimento's music?

Eubie Blake

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin ◽  
Ken Bloom
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
True Story ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Josephine Baker ◽  
American Popular Song

The book tells the story of one of the key composers of 20th-century American popular song. Through his music, Eubie Blake rose from the slums of Baltimore to the heights of Broadway success. His show Shuffle Along was the first African American show to win a major white audience, becoming the tenth most popular show of the 1920s. The show introduced future black stars—including Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Florence Mills—and the syncopated chorus line, and introduced jazz-styled music to Broadway. Blake’s composing skills were matched by his piano mastery. Even in the Depression, Eubie continued composing innovative new works. At 61, he studied the Schillinger Method to expand his harmonic knowledge and ability to compose beyond the confines of traditional popular song. Blake’s persistence in maintaining his ties to ragtime and Broadway paid off in the late 1960s, when he was rediscovered due to new recordings and personal appearances. In the last decade of his life he influenced an entirely new generation of pianists and composers from the jazz and classical worlds. This is the first biography to explore the wealth of personal records, interviews, and deep research to illuminate Blake’s life and impact on over 100 years of American culture. It tells the true story of African American performers struggling to achieve recognition and success in the popular music world at a time of deep racism. Blake’s career blazed a path for countless others to rise above the limitations previously faced by blacks in the popular music world.

Korngold and His World

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
American Film ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Erich Wolfgang Korngold ◽  
American Popular Song

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957) was the last compositional prodigy to emerge from the Austro-German tradition of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was lauded in his youth by everyone from Mahler to Puccini and his auspicious career in the early 1900s spanned chamber music, opera, and musical theater. Today, he is best known for his Hollywood film scores, composed between 1935 and 1947. From his prewar operas in Vienna to his pathbreaking contributions to American film, this book provides a substantial reassessment of Korngold's life and accomplishments. Korngold struggled to reconcile the musical language of his Viennese upbringing with American popular song and cinema, and was forced to adapt to a new life after wartime emigration to Hollywood. The book examines Korngold's operas and film scores, the critical reception of his music, and his place in the milieus of both the Old and New Worlds. It also features numerous historical documents—many previously unpublished and in first-ever English translations—including essays by the composer as well as memoirs by his wife, Luzi Korngold, and his father, the renowned music critic Julius Korngold.

Reflections into the Spirit of the Islamic Corpus of Knowledge and the Rise of the New Science

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Dhaouadi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Third World ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Primary Reference

There is no question that contemporary western civilization has beendominant in the field of science since the Renaissance. Western scientificsuperiority is not limited to specific scientific disciplines, but is rather anovetall scientific domination covering both the so-called exact and thehuman-social sciences. Western science is the primary reference for specialistsin such ateas as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics,psychology, and sociology. It is in this sense that Third World underdevelopmentis not only economic, social, and industrial; it also suffersfrom scientific-cultutal underdevelopment, or what we call "The OtherUnderdevelopment" (Dhaouadi 1988).The imptessive progress of western science since Newton and Descartesdoes not meari, however, that it has everything tight or perfect. Infact, its flaws ate becoming mote visible. In the last few decades, westernscience has begun to experience a shift from what is called classical scienceto new science. Classical science was associated with the celestialmechanics of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, the new physics of Galileo,and the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes introduced a radical divisionbetween mind and matter, while Newton and his fellows presented a newscience that looked at the world as a kind of giant clock The laws of thisworld were time-reversible, for it was held that there was no differencebetween past and future. As the laws were deterministic, both the pastand the future could be predicted once the present was known.The vision of the emerging new science tends to heal the division betweenmatter and spirit and to do away with the mechanical dimension ...

Reports From the Field: Confessions of a Facebook Punk, or How Not to Do Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-244
Author(s):  
Gareth Dylan Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Purpose In Life ◽  
Sociology Of Music ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The World

The author is rarely certain of his purpose in life—a condition that is heightened by a busy yet reluctant level of engagement with social media. The author utilizes Facebook and Twitter to promote activity around popular music education and sociology of music education. There is considerable overlap in the author’s life between professional and personal domains, which seems amplified by social media. Facebook and Twitter provide less formal, more direct means to engage with the world than traditional modes of peer-reviewed communication among academic colleagues. Social media provide a platform for working through ideas and for addressing problems with urgency and immediacy. As such, and despite some messiness and increased levels of vulnerability and risk, the author encourages peers to engage with social media’s immediate and powerful, punk pedagogical potential.

Introduction

Popular Music ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
David Horn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
International Association ◽  
Outstanding Contribution ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Vernacular Music ◽  
The World ◽  
Set Up

This issue of Popular Music is produced in honour of Paul Oliver, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to popular music scholarship.Paul was a member of the original Editorial Board for Popular Music when it was set up in 1980 and continued to serve as a member of that body, and subsequently of the Editorial Group, until 1990. He was also a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and has maintained a keen interest in the organisation, continuing to attend, and speak at, its international conferences. His vision of both the potential and the needs of the Association as a global network lay behind his proposal in 1985 that a project be undertaken to compile a worldwide encyclopedia of popular music, an idea which subsequently bore fruit in EPMOW (The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World). All these achievements are worth celebrating in themselves, but it is Paul's outstanding contribution to scholarship in the area of vernacular – particularly African-American vernacular – music that we wish to honour with this issue.

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