scholarly journals Negotiating ‘His Master’s Voice’: Gramophone Music and Cosmopolitan Modernity in British Malaya in the 1930s and Early 1940s

2013 ◽  
Vol 169 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Recording Technology ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Musical Elements

Abstract The label ‘His Master’s Voice’ (HMV) dominated the recording technology, production and distribution of 78 rpm discs in British Malaya in the 1930s and early 1940s. By analysing the lagu Melayu which formed a large part of the repertoire recorded by HMV, this article shows that musicians were able to decentre colonial hegemony by combining Anglo-American popular music idioms with Malay and other foreign musical elements. The new hybrid music with texts about progress was a vehicle for disseminating a form of national culturalism that advocated vernacular modernity, rooted cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, and a broader sense of Malayness.

Remembering Popular Music, Documentary Style

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 513-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Huber
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
To Come ◽  
Aesthetic Characteristics

Over the past forty years, a growing number of television documentaries have attempted to produce a history of Anglo-American popular music for a wide audience. This article represents an attempt to come to terms with the particularity of the popular music documentary form and the different ways in which these documentaries present themselves as authoritative public texts that circulate understandings about popular music’s past. The argument is inspired by the landmark mid-1970s installment in this tradition: Tony Palmer’s epic seventeen-part narrative, All You Need Is Love. While this series makes strong historical claims—in Palmer’s words, it sets out to tell “nothing less than the entire history and development of popular music”—the author argues that the series is, in fact, based on the tropes and discourses of memory. Through an analysis of some of the particular formal and aesthetic characteristics of the series, this article reveals the ways in which talking and thinking about the past of popular music and its culture necessarily call on an experience of the senses that is simultaneously replayed and refracted as memory.

scholarly journals Drum Groove Corpora

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-123
Author(s):  
Fred Hosken ◽  
Toni Bechtold ◽  
Florian Hoesl ◽  
Lorenz Kilchenmann ◽  
Olivier Senn
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Fair Principles ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Point Of Reference

Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of metered music. The relevance of microtiming to the perception of music has been studied since the 1980s. Most recently, microtiming has been investigated as a cause of groove (i.e., the pleasant urge to move in response to music). The study of microtiming relies on the availability of microtiming data. This report presents three large corpora of onset timings derived from drum kit performances in popular Anglo-American popular music styles. These data are made freely available (CC 4.0 license) to provide a resource for use by analysts and experimenters alike. They offer a common point of reference for future studies into the temporal facets of music performance. The datasets adhere to FAIR principles; they thus facilitate replication of analyses and experimental stimuli.

Un Naw Chwech Wyth

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-305
Author(s):  
Sarah Hill
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Global Motion ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

The politically-oriented Anglo-American popular music of the 1960s was notable for its ability to inspire activism in cultures around the globe. In this paper I focus on the relationship between popular music and political activism in Wales, and suggest that 1968 was but one brief point on a much longer timeline: an arbitrary marker in local political terms, but part of a larger global motion toward radical social change.

scholarly journals Expanding and Contracting Definitions of Syncopation: Commentary on Temperley 2019

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Nat Condit-Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Music Notation ◽  
Statistical Assumptions ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Fourth Position

In the article Second-Position Syncopation in European and American Vocal Music, David Temperley presents an empirical, socio-cultural survey of syncopation in 19th-century Western music. He espouses the following novel ideas about operational definitions of syncopation: 1) that syncopations on the second position of a duple hierarchy are musically, and culturally, distinct from fourth-position syncopations; 2) that more detailed operational definitions of syncopation, what Temperley calls "acute" syncopations, are needed to properly understand syncopation. Following up on Temperley's work, I apply his definitions of syncopation to a corpus of more recent Anglo-American popular music (Gauvin, Condit-Schultz, & Arthur 2017). I discuss how Temperley's definitions must be adapted and expanded to fit this different, more diverse, dataset, proposing several new syncopation definitions of my own. I also discuss some statistical assumptions that ought to be better addressed in future work, and speculate on how inconsistencies of music notation might hinder historical studies like Temperley's.

The origins of syncopation in American popular music

Popular Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-41
Author(s):  
David Temperley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Fourth Position

AbstractThe origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory character. In an earlier study I presented evidence suggesting British roots for second-position syncopation. in contrast, fourth-position syncopation – the focus of the current study – seems to have had no presence in published 19th-century vocal music, British or American. It first appears in notation in ragtime songs and piano music at the very end of the 19th century; it was also used in recordings by African-American singers before it was widely notated.

Step It Up and Go

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Menconi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The State ◽  
College Town ◽  
American Idol ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Many ◽  
Nina Simone

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

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