Music Technology in Ethnomusicology

Author(s):  
Gabriel Solis

Ethnomusicology has often had an ambivalent relationship with technology: we owe our discipline to mid-twentieth-century developments in recording technology. Nevertheless there is a strong counter-modern streak that characterizes ethnomusicologists as a group. This essay investigates the reasons for ethnomusciologists’ mistrust of certain kinds of music technology and interprets ambivalence as a mode of critical engagement. It surveys turning points in the field from comparative musicology to the critical turn and from the critical turn to the new digital humanities. I conclude that digital humanities needs ethnomusicological ambivalence in the form of critical engagement. Good data analytics needs a skeptical view from the vantage point of music scholars and contextual knowledge-bearers in the cultures of study.

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Abdolali Yazdizadeh

Hyperreality is a key term in Jean Baudrillard’s cultural theory, designating a phase in the development of image where it “masks the absence of a profound reality.” The ambiance of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) closely corresponds to Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal as images persist to precede reality in the fictional world of the novel. Since for Baudrillard each order of simulacra produces a certain mode of ideological discourse that impacts the perception of reality, it is plausible that the characters of this fictional context should be ideologically impacted by the hyperreal discourse. From this vantage point it is possible to have a new critical assessment of Yossarian’s (protagonist) antiheroic stance and study the role of the “business of illusion,” whose ideological edifice is based on the discourse of the hyperreal, on his antiheroic stance and actions. By drawing on Baudrillard’s cultural theory this paper aims to read Heller’s novel as a postmodern allegory of rebellion against the hyperreality of the twentieth-century American life and trace its relevance to modern-day U.S.


Author(s):  
Marion Schmid

The introduction contextualises the French New Wave's ambivalent relationship to the older arts with regard to cinema's wider struggle for recognition in the course of the twentieth century. Surveying the debates around medium specificity, cinematic 'purity' and 'impurity' from the classical avant-garde to the Nouvelle Vague, it addresses the French New Wave's complex discursive construction in relation to the more established arts. Reframing traditional studies of the French New Wave, it argues for an intermedial approach to illuminate this seminal movement of film history. The corpus, rationale and approach of the book are also introduced and clarified.


2021 ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Kathryn Babayan

In the Conclusion, I draw on the analytical purchase of eroticism to provide a distinct vantage point onto the connections between urbanity, friendship, and spirituality. Adopting a different way of doing history in the field of early modern Persianate studies, I focus on a discrete moment in the story of Isfahan to think more broadly with historians of sexuality about the valences of erotic desires that bound together networks of friends living in previous centuries. Thinking sex with the early moderns compels me to see erasures that today silence passionate friendships and obscures the entangled history that love shared with eros and beauty. My history of Isfahan presents an early emergence of heteroerotic anxieties, provoked by the adab of urban love and Sufi homoerotic desire, that in the twentieth century were recuperated to make Iran modern.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Evershed

This chapter explores shifting and often contradictory dynamics which have manifested themselves in the relationship between Scottish Conservatism and Ulster Unionism. It provides a brief historical overview of this relationship which, it argues, has been highly salient in the consolidation of Conservatism as a political force in Scotland during the twentieth century, but which has become more ambiguous as understandings of ‘Union’, processes of secularisation, patterns of integration and differentiation, as well as the nature of centre-periphery relations in Northern Ireland and Scotland have increasingly diverged. The chapter also looks at how this relationship has continued to be reshaped into the twenty-first century by a potent mix of political forces which has included the Irish peace process, the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-310
Author(s):  
Alfonso Iglesias Amorín

The Spanish army participated in several armed conflicts in Moroccan territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These conflicts tested the capacity of the Spanish nation to inspire and induce its citizens to defend it. How the wars were fought, how they were transmitted to the population, and how the population reacted to them evolved with the times. Although nationalist fervour and ‘nation consumption’ intensified, so did the sacrifice the nation required of its people. In this gap between patriotic zeal and actual willingness, it is possible to observe the degree of nationalization among Spaniards. Analysis ‘from below’, based on the perceptions of the lower classes versus those of the upper classes, or of individuals versus the community, expands and refines the traditional scope to make nuances visible. This departure from traditional historiography, based on analysis ‘from above’, moves beyond the patriotic enthusiasm for the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859 to the indifference surrounding the War of Melilla of 1893, resistance to recruitment as the Barranco del Lobo disaster struck in 1909, and the fear and desire for revenge after the 1921 debacle of Annual. By inverting the vantage point, resistance emerges where homogeneous support was assumed, inviting exploration to discover if the unpopularity of the twentieth-century conflicts favoured Spanish de-nationalization and the awakening of other national consciences. This attempt to discern real attitudes concerning the wars that altered the course of Spanish history involves looking at how ways of knowing have evolved regarding what happened across the Straits of Gibraltar.


Author(s):  
Tina K. Ramnarine

This book highlights the unique insights that Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor (op. 47) offers into the composer’s musical imagination, violin virtuosity, and connections between violin-playing traditions. It discusses the concerto’s cultural contexts, performers who are connected with its early history, and recordings of the work. Beginning with Sibelius’s early training as a violinist and his aspirations to be a virtuoso player, the book traces the composition of the concerto at a dramatic political moment in Finnish history. This concerto was composed when Finland, as an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, was going through a period of intense struggle for self-determination and protest against Russian imperial policies. Taking the concerto’s historical context into consideration leads to a new paradigm of the twentieth-century virtuoso as a political figure, which replaces nineteenth-century representations of the virtuoso as a magical figure. The book explores this paradigm by analyzing twentieth-century violin virtuosity in terms of labor, recording technology, and gender politics, especially the new possibilities for women aiming to develop musical careers. Ultimately, the book moves away from the compositional context of the concerto and a reading of the virtuoso as a political figure to reveal how Sibelius’s musical imagination prompts thinking about the long ecological histories of musical transmission and virtuosity.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds

Biography and reception of Charles Brockden Brown since the mid-twentieth century was marked by efforts to canonize him and to recover primary and related texts. The first generation of this era typically practiced formalist readings and focused primarily on Brown’s first four novels. Often psychobiographical, these studies created a “Gothic” and proto-Romantic Brown. Later generations have expanded the canon to include Brown’s work over his lifetime, including the many genres he worked in; have practiced more cultural and poststructuralist methodologies with an eye to gender and sexuality, geography, race, and class; have placed Brown in a more global context; and have brought Brown studies into the era of digital humanities.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:


2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Minoo Derayeh

This book examines the construction of gender and patriarchy in Iran duringthe onset of modernity, the Islamic revolution of 1979, and the post-revolutionera. Among the many works published by prominent scholars of Islamand Iranian women’s studies, Minoo Moallem’s investigation of the constructionof gender by neo-colonial modernity and political movements of anationalist or fundamentalist orientation deserves special attention.Inspired by Michel Foucault as well as Caren Kaplan and InderpalGrewal, Moallem incorporates a post-modern and a transnational feministapproach by arguing that post-modernity should be used as a framework tostudy the growth of modernity (p. 20). Challenging the popular belief thatfundamentalism is a return to the roots and early periods of a tradition or aculture, she finds it “in dialogue with modernity” (p. 13) and thus arguesthat the Islamic fundamentalism observed in the twentieth century is a postmodernizationphenomenon; in her words, “a by-product of the process ofmodernization” (ibid.). Nevertheless, she does not actually consider fundamentalismto be a truly post-modern phenomenon, since it does not respectthe “concept of difference,” as is the case with nationalism.Moallem questions the stereotypes presented by the travelers and foreigndiplomats of the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth centuries concerningthe harem, the veil, women, and so on. She challenges their vantage point increating “otherness” and portraying Islam as barbaric. Although manyworks deal with women, patriarchy, and the construction of gender under thePahlavis, the author offers a new reading and shows how the two rulers’forceful steps in the name of modernization and progress led to the establishmentof a nation-state in which each individual – man or woman – wassocialized to perform his/her role according to the “natural and social divisionof labour” (p. 74).Her work is timely, especially now when Islamic fundamentalism isdefined and analyzed by the politics of power through the global media. Inthe case or jihad, for instance, the author states that for fundamentalists, andmore specifically in Ayatullah Khomeini’s view, there are two types of jihad: ...


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Marius Aareskjold

Presentation given at UiT Digital Humanities Conference 2017


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