This Machine Plays Country Music

Author(s):  
Timothy Miller

This chapter explores the origins and development of the pedal steel guitar, showing the evolution of instrument traditions as an undercurrent to histories of genre and style. The pedal steel’s emergence in the early 1950s was a continuation of developments from the previous decades, as the exploration of technological answers to the musical “problems” of the steel guitar led to an expanded palette of sounds and gestures. The development of the instrument’s technology and vocabulary occurred within a community of musicians and makers whose priorities both reinforced and challenged the aesthetic values of country music. This history is illustrated through transcriptions and analyses of recordings by key innovators of the 1950s–1970s. The chapter concludes by discussing different trajectories of the pedal steel in the twenty-first century, where it remains a crucial part of country music but has also found a place in other genres and styles.

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVANTHI MEDURI

In this paper, I discuss issues revolving around history, historiography, alterity, difference and otherness concealed in the doubled Indian/South Asian label used to describe Indian/South Asian dance genres in the UK. The paper traces the historical genealogy of the South Asian label to US, Indian and British contexts and describes how the South Asian enunciation fed into Indian nation-state historiography and politics in the 1950s. I conclude by describing how Akademi: South Asian Dance, a leading London based arts organisation, explored the ambivalence in the doubled Indian/South Asian label by renaming itself in 1997, and forging new local/global networks of communication and artistic exchange between Indian and British based dancers and choreographers at the turn of the twenty-first century.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna McMullan ◽  
Trish McTighe ◽  
David Pattie ◽  
David Tucker

This multi-authored essay presents some selected initial findings from the AHRC Staging Beckett research project led by the Universities of Reading and Chester with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. For example, how did changes in economic and cultural climates, such as funding structures, impact on productions of Beckett's plays in the UK and Ireland from the 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century? The paper will raise historiographical questions raised by the attempts to map or construct performance histories of Beckett's theatre in the UK and Ireland.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 34-56
Author(s):  
Méropi Anastassiadou-Dumont

The article examines Muslim pilgrimages to Christian places of worship in Istanbul after the 1950s. It aims to answer whether and how the Ottoman heritage of cultural diversity fits or does not fit with the pattern of the nation-state. After a brief bibliographic overview of the issue of shared sacred spaces, the presentation assembles, as a first step, some of the key elements of Istanbul’s multi-secular links with religious practices: the sanctity of the city both for Christianity and Islam; the long tradition of pilgrimages and their importance for the local economy; meanings and etymologies of the word pilgrimage in the most common languages of the Ottoman space; and the silence of the nineteenth century’s Greek sources concerning the sharing of worship. The second part focuses more specifically on some OrthodoxGreek sacred spaces in Istanbul increasingly frequented by Muslims during the last decades.


Author(s):  
Hannah Lauren Murray

This chapter examines the state of the field of Charles Brockden Brown studies since 2000. Taking a thematic approach, I discuss four dominant strands in twenty-first-century criticism: geographies, medical humanities, economies, and aesthetics. These sections cover the scholarly debate over a transnational, imperial, or postcolonial Brown; consider the new ways in which early national medicine intersects with his fiction; chart the rise of market and class-based criticism; and discuss a return to formal concerns in light of the aesthetic or postcritique turn. The final section of this chapter looks ahead to emergent trends in future Brown scholarship in response to the previous decade’s work.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Ethnersson Pontara

During the last decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to how cinema deals with traditional aesthetic values in its representation of opera. This research shows that contemporary cinema both manifests and challenges conceptions of opera anchored in romantic-modernist ideals. Recent film, however, also reveals an intriguing complexity surrounding conceptions of opera through the way in which it reflects promotion strategies of the classical music industry. This article draws attention to promotions of singers and opera music found in recent cinema that contribute to juxtapositions of different conceptions of opera. By letting operatic performances have a particular impact on fictional listeners and their ensuing actions, films associate opera with ideals belonging to a romantic-modernist discourse. However, they let this impact emanate from a way of performing opera that stands in contradiction to these same ideals. Discussing some central scenes from three recent films, I argue that the films’ displays of singers and opera music in this way remodels romantic-modernist discourses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-326
Author(s):  
Rob Coley

The formerly dissident status of the essay film has, in recent years, been exchanged for a great deal of favorable attention both inside and outside academia. In the more overly moralistic commentary on the form, the contemporary essay film is submitted as a tactical response to a surfeit of audiovisual media, to an era in which most of us have become both consumers and producers of a digital deluge. The work of Adam Curtis is notably absent from these ongoing debates. Yet Curtis is far from an underground figure—he has been making essayistic films for the BBC for more than twenty years and was the first to produce work directly for the iPlayer platform. Using archival images to examine the present, his films produce counterintuitive connections and abrupt collisions that supplant the authority of narrative causality for a precarious network of associations and linkages. This article treats Curtis’s recent body of work diagnostically. It argues that, quite apart from any promise of escape or deliverance, the aesthetic form of his work actively inhabits the rhythms and vectors of contemporary media. For Curtis, the media-technological conditions of the twenty-first century provoke a crisis that is both political and epistemological, one in which sensemaking can no longer claim to take place at a distance from the infrastructure that mediates such processes but is instead thoroughly and inescapably immanent to it, a situation that prevents contact with the outside. His films are about what he calls “destabilized perception,” but importantly they are also a function of this condition, one that in turn demands a shift in how we conceive the essay film in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Ying Xiao

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. During the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced an explosion of films for youth, imbued with the aesthetic and ethic of rock ‘n’ roll. This chapter examines a variety of films, from the countercultural to the more mainstream, focusing on the voice, image, persona, and iconography of Cui Jian, and offering an audiovisual perspective on urban youth cinema and Chinese rock. The emergence and development of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film from the late 1980s to the twenty-first century resulted from widespread, multifaceted transformations in postsocialist China. At the core of this rock imaginary is the aesthetic of cinema vérité and postsocialist realism. In sync with the kaleidoscopic manifestation of the cityscape and long tracking shots of protagonists roaming the metropolis, rock music and the hand-held mobile camera seek to document a reality of postmodern life and capture a feeling of postsocialist anxiety-a concern for realism articulated through dialogue and ambient sound.


Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari

The conclusion begins with a consideration of the ways in which Aaron Copland’s sound has become associated with American exceptionalism in its different twenty-first-century articulations. It argues that the Cold War rebranding of Americanist music described in this book, achieved with the willing participation of Copland and many of his colleagues, made this realignment of the meaning of Copland’s music possible. It explains that the Americanists did indeed experience serialism as “tyrannous” during the 1950s, the result of music-stylistic choices becoming politicized and binarized at a time when so many choices were silently interpreted as an ideological “either/or.” In closing, the conclusion considers the larger issues surrounding musical nationalism, culture, politics, and power that the Americanists’ story raises.


Author(s):  
Jasper Bernes

The Epilogue considers the possible fate of the artistic critique of labor in the decades to come. As demand for labor weakens because of ongoing structural transformations, the link between art and labor will likewise weaken, Bernes argues. Thus, artists would do well to revive older traditions linking the poet to wagelessness. The Epilogue examines these traditions, beginning with the Renaissance ballad and continuing through the Romantic poetry of vagrancy and the African American fugitive lyric, linking this poetic history to a theoretical investigation of what Karl Marx calls “surplus populations.” The long history of the poetics of wagelessness gives some indication of the aesthetic outlines of the coming era. In closing, Bernes looks at two contemporary poets, Fred Moten and Wendy Trevino, who engage this long tradition and mobilize it to meet the specific conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-385
Author(s):  
Gina Gwenffrewi

Abstract Within transgender studies, Jan Morris casts a problematic shadow, with Aren Aizura identifying how “Morris's entire literary and historical oeuvre . . . [is] a tacit articulation of a British colonial ideology.” Yet this position appears to be based on Morris's works between the 1950s and 1970s, up to and including her memoir Conundrum, and represents arguably only the first of three periods in Morris's writing. This essay argues that two subsequent periods diversify our understanding of Morris as a complex, transcultural figure: her broadly leftist, anticolonial writing on Wales and the Welsh language (1980s–90s), and then in the twenty-first century when Morris increasingly appears to question the colonial, nationalist, and cisheteropatriarchal ideologies that have shaped her previous writing. This essay concludes that Morris's body of work provides valuable evidence as to the complex interplay of Welsh, British, and European conceptions of gender that characterize her attitude and writing on transgender identity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document