The power to do something

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Socioeconomic Inequality ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Musical Practices

This book has examined human rights, and the development of capability—the “power to do something”—in musical practices. It has explored if (popular) music-making can enhance human rights and capabilities of the poorest of the poor, such as homeless and street-involved people, who feel that music is a “thing” that can never be taken away from them. This conclusion points out how the book defined capabilities in a novel and useful way. When synthesizing the book’s main findings, it describes a causal relationship between developing human capabilities, and strengthening human rights which operate in complex ways musical and cultural moments. Specific human capabilities can be nurtured so as to develop specific human rights. The chapter reflects and elaborates on critiques of human rights pertinent to music in and as culture. With attention to socioeconomic inequality, it offers inspiration for making, and thinking about, musical and cultural efforts to promote human rights and capabilities.

Music Downtown Eastside

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Community Centers ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Therapy Sessions

Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken away of them. It draws on two decades of ethnographic research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Klisala Harrison takes the reader into popular music jams and therapy sessions offered to the poorest of the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. There she analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and how human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated in those musical moments. When doing so, she also offers new and detailed insights on the relationships between music and poverty, a type of social deprivation that diminishes people’s human capabilities and rights. The book contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices. Harrison’s study demonstrates that capabilities and human rights are interrelated. Developing capabilities can be a way to strengthen human rights.

scholarly journals Dancing to architecture: Popular music, economic crisis and urban change in 1980s industrial Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
Giacomo Bottà
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Technological Advance ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Musical Practices

This article examines popular music practices in industrial cities during the time of economic downturn and crisis (the early 1980s). In particular it takes into account the birth of alternative DIY musical practices and their use of urban space at the imaginary and material level. The article will start with an introduction to music making and to the effects it has on space / place perception and use. I have examined case studies from industrial cities and compared the way different music scenes developed during times of crisis and achieved relevant cultural expressions. The main interest of this paper is to show how the economic downturn brought to a series of cultural innovations, which were not directly connected to technological advance and resulted out of re-use, recycle or innovative use of available technologies and practices.

Bodies of Music / Songs of Magic

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-199
Author(s):  
Guthrie P. Ramsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
Musical Practices

Rev. John F. Watson published a tract in 1819 meant to discourage black Methodist congregants from musical practices that they obviously enjoyed but that he loathed. Despite Watson’s bias, his words provide modern-day readers with a sense of how the music sounded, its communal nature, and its in-real-time compositional techniques—with striking clarity. Unbeknownst to him, these qualities would constitute foundational principles for future music-making in black communities. Drawing on modern theorists, the Fields’s study of “racecraft,” and Sylvan’s on “the religious dimensions of popular music,” Ramsey examines a range of archival documents and images from the nineteenth century to illustrate how fresh readings can provide useful reinterpretations of what was seen in an earlier era as negative assessments of black artistry

Organizations hosting music-making for urban poor

2020 ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Music Programs ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Institutional Contexts

This chapter examines how human rights and capabilities emerge within organizations hosting music initiatives and targeting Downtown Eastside urban poor. It observes that music facilitators having considerable freedom about how to engage human rights, which are rarely specified in organizational frameworks—aims, missions, and mandates—of aid organizations that host participatory musical events, and of organizations that facilitate public music performances, for instance, performing arts companies and music academies. The chapter notes a susceptibility of jams and music therapy in aid organizations to closure. The popular music initiatives for urban poor unfold within institutional contexts of financial inequity where some music facilitators are paid very little or nothing, and certain administrators are handsomely rewarded. During the contentious urban redevelopment process of gentrification, the vulnerability of the aid organizations and their music programs, as well as the financial inequities across all organizations intensify.

Óscar Romero and the Politics of Sainthood

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The One

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization

Vamping the Stage

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
New Music ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Modern

Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.

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