French classical music and Brazil: Beyond Franco-German rivalry

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 349-356
Author(s):  
Marcos Câmara de Castro
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Belle Époque ◽  
Cultural Choices

One of the consequences of any colonisation is the emergence in the colonies of a dominant consular class, one of whose characteristics is cultural snobbery. This snobbery is manifested mainly in cultural choices that ignore local music or include it in an ensemble of strategies to participate in an alleged metropolitan cultural universalism. In Brazil, Villa-Lobos, the Batutas orchestra or the dancer known as Duque, who all enchanted France during the belle époque and who still arouse interest all over the world, were only the tip of an iceberg of popular music. This paper aims to demonstrate how the music and writings of Debussy and Ravel can be helpful in establishing the construction of a true history of classical music in Brazil, beyond the historical Franco-German rivalry.

Notation and identity in contemporary popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Stith Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Term Changes ◽  
Western European ◽  
Rock N Roll

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

The paradoxes of urbanization: Belgian socialism and society in the belle epoque

Urban History ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 82-96
Author(s):  
Carl Strikwerda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
Belgian Society ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Western European ◽  
Belle Époque

Although small and consequently often overlooked, Belgium none the less provides historians with an interesting case study for comparing social and economic trends among Western European countries. Belgian society in the nineteenth century was transformed by the same forces as its close neighbours – Britain, France and Germany. Indeed, Belgium was the second country in the world to industrialize and it has long been one of the most heavily urbanized societies as well. Yet urbanization and industrialization affected Belgium in some significantly different ways than they did other Western European countries.

Learning Old Music in a New Age of Digital Reproduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 311-324
Author(s):  
Robert O. Gjerdingen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
New Age ◽  
Good Alternative ◽  
Recent Immigrants ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Reproduction ◽  
Rich History

There are over four hundred genres of popular music known in North America, and many more if one includes the favourite musics of recent immigrants. Which of these should be singled out and taught to children? There is no good answer to that question. Classical European music is a good alternative, one that has a rich history and is known, at least a little, all over the world. But instead of teaching children just to reproduce what is written on a page of music, why don’t we teach them to make classical music—to improvise and compose it. The rediscovery of the lessons from the old conservatories shows us how improvisation and composition can be taught to ordinary children, leading to extraordinary results.

Music in the Francophone Caribbean

Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Camal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Anglophone Caribbean ◽  
French Antilles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Saint Lucia ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Roots Music

The Francophone Caribbean is a complex region: while it shares a history of French colonialism, it is also marked by divergent political trajectories and profound economic disparities. On one hand, there is Haiti, the first independent postcolonial Black nation; on the other, the overseas French départements of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guiana. This combination of a shared history of colonial violence (including the genocide of indigenous populations and the enslavement of African people) as well as the diversity of modes and means of resistance against it has made of the Francophone Caribbean a crucible for a rich intellectual, artistic, and musical life. Indigénisme, négritude, marvelous realism, Antillanité, créolité are as many intellectual and artistic movements that have emerged from this crucible to impact intellectual life beyond the Caribbean. Likewise, biguine, konpa, and zouk are just a few of the musical genres whose aesthetic and commercial reach has far exceeded their islands of origin. For all of this musical richness, it is surprising that scholarly literature on music in the Francophone Caribbean has a rather limited scope. In Haiti, it has largely been focused on those practices associated with Vodou (ritual drumming and singing as well as the songs and music of rara) and, in the realm of popular music, with konpa and, to a lesser degree, mizik rasin (roots music) and classical music. Coverage in the French Antilles and Guiana is even more uneven. Guiana has received near to no attention. If scholars have written extensively about gwoka, the Guadeloupean drumming tradition, its Martinican counterpart, bèlè, has received less attention. And if there was a veritable craze for zouk in the 1990s, scholars have not followed Antillean audiences as their musical tastes evolved toward other styles of popular music in the new millennium. Likewise, biguine remains understudied given its transnational circulation in the 1930s. The various sections in this entry reflect these imbalances. If the current entry focuses on Haiti, the French Antilles (Martinique and Guadeloupe), and French Guiana, it should be noted that Dominica and Saint Lucia share the same Creole language, and contribute to the circulation of people, goods, and music in the Lesser Antilles. This being said, because the Oxford Bibliographies entry on music in the Anglophone Caribbean already covers Dominica and Saint Lucia, they have been left out of this overview.

scholarly journals The Landscape of Sound in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUDOVIC TOURNÈS
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
French Music ◽  
History Of

Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 359 pp., €8.69 (pb), ISBN 2080814532.Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night. Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 598 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 0520231589.Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French. Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 266 pp., $21.95 (pb), ISBN 0822331373.Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 388 pp., $55.00 (hb), ISBN 0226287351.David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 254 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 1859736319.Though undoubtedly thriving, the history of music is still a somewhat peripheral area of research which many historians dismiss as secondary. For many years publication in the subject remained the domain of two kinds of researchers, either musicologists – ‘insiders’ au fait with the technical vocabulary – or sociologists and practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ – ‘outsiders’ chiefly interested in the reception of musical phenomena and their role in the constitution of individual and collective identities. This division has become very blurred over the last few years, which have seen the emergence of a number of works with an interdisciplinary approach. But for most historians the history of music remains a largely unfamiliar theme which they struggle to include in any global social or cultural analysis. This struggle is apparent at two levels: first, the difficulty of developing guidelines to the historicity of musical events and, second, the difficulty of escaping the chronology of classical music, which is predicated on a succession of styles and composers. Based on these two points, this article will attempt to develop, through a transverse reading of certain recent works, some working hypotheses centring on the notion of a ‘landscape of sound’ or paysage sonore, as proposed some ten years ago by Alain Corbin, a notion which, it seems to me, may make a valuable contribution to rejuvenating the history of music.

scholarly journals Five centuries of Latin American income inequality

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey G. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Growth Performance ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Rent Seeking ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
Latin American Economy ◽  
The World ◽  
Belle Époque ◽  
American Economy ◽  
Very High

AbstractMost analysts of the modern Latin American economy believe that it has always had very high levels of inequality. Indeed, some have argued that high inequality appeared very early in the post-conquest Americas, and that this fact supported rent-seeking and anti-growth institutions that help explain the disappointing growth performance we observe there even today. This paper argues to the contrary. Compared with the rest of the world, Latin American inequality wasnothigh either in pre-conquest 1491 or in the post-conquest decades following 1492. Indeed, it wasnoteven high in the mid-19thcentury just before Latin America’sbelle époque. It only became high thereafter. Historical persistence in Latin American inequality is a myth.

Medicine Goes to the Opera: Vocal Health and Remedies for Professional Singers of the Belle Époque

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Kimberly Francis ◽  
Sofie Lachapelle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
Vocal Health ◽  
Professional Singers ◽  
The World ◽  
Belle Époque ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In July 1892, Dr. Arthur Chervin (1850–1921), director of the Institut des bègues de Paris, was named physician of the Opéra, thus joining the group of health specialists tasked with the care of artists. A recognized specialist of vocal physiology and speech afflictions, Chervin was also the recent founder and editor of La Voix parlée et chantée, a periodical that straddled the worlds of medicine and lyrical performance. Vocal health and medicine, he and his community argued, were key to the execution of vocal prowess and the successful pursuit of lyrical ambitions for singers. This article explores the relationship of medicine and the burgeoning field of laryngology to the world of lyrical training and performance of the Belle Époque. In particular, we focus on the many roles played by laryngologists and physicians at the Opéra and the Conservatoire as well as in the pages of Chervin’s leading medical-musical journal. We argue that concerns driving the medical innovations of the increasingly sophisticated subfield of laryngology evolved in synergy with concerns about how to meet the demands of the changing world of the second half of nineteenth-century Parisian operatic performance. In so doing, we claim for medicine a key position in Paris’s vibrant world of lyrical performance during the Belle Époque.

Affective Rhetorics of Contagion

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Alice Heeren
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Belle Epoque ◽  
History Of ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Belle Époque ◽  
America Latina ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
The City

This article focuses on the photographs of Augusto Malta, the official photographer of the city of Rio de Janeiro, made between 1904 and 1929. It departs from the work of Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, and Anna Gibbs on affect theory to argue that Malta's images were responsible for supporting a rhetoric of contagion used to justify the violent biopolitical policies of the Brazilian republican government. Furthermore, I assert that this rhetoric depended on the mobilization by Malta of affects widely circulated in the popular media of the period. This study aims to bring affect theory into dialog with the vast body of existing historical, visual, and sociological literature on the so-called Brazilian Belle Époque. This period in the history of Brazil, and especially of Rio de Janeiro, has been amply studied by scholars from diverse disciplines. Nevertheless, engagement with theories of affectivity and the work of Malta, especially in English-speaking scholarship, remains limited. This article speaks to the implication of photography, architecture, and urban planning in medical and biopolitical discourses, contributing to the study of the mechanisms that produce and reproduce myths of progress and the emancipating power of reason in early twentieth-century Latin America. Este artículo se centra en las fotografías de Augusto Malta—el fotógrafo oficial de la ciudad de Río de Janeiro—realizadas entre 1904 y 1929. Toma distancia con respecto al trabajo sobre la teoría del afecto de Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed y Anna Gibbs para argumentar que las imágenes de Malta brindaron un apoyo efectivo a una retórica de contagio utilizada para justificar las violentas medidas biopolíticas del gobierno republicano de Brasil. Además, afirmo que esta retórica dependía de la movilización por parte de Malta de los afectos ampliamente difundidos en los medios populares de la época. Este estudio tiene como objetivo poner la teoría del afecto en diálogo con el vasto corpus de literatura histórica, visual y sociológica existente sobre la llamada Belle Époque brasileña. Este período en la historia de Brasil, y especialmente de Río de Janeiro, ha sido ampliamente estudiado por académicos de diversas disciplinas. Sin embargo, especialmente en la academia de habla inglesa, hay pocos trabajos que estudien la obra de Malta a la luz de las teorías de la afectividad. Este artículo habla de la implicación de la fotografía, la arquitectura y la planificación urbana en los discursos médicos y biopolíticos, contribuyendo así al estudio de los mecanismos que producen y reproducen mitos del progreso y el poder emancipador de la razón en la América Latina de principios del siglo XX. Este artigo se foca nas fotografias de Augusto Malta, o fotógrafo oficial da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, realizadas entre 1904 e 1908. Partindo do trabalho de Sara Ahmed e Anna Gibbs sobre a teoria do afeto, argumenta-se que as imagens de Malta serviram para apoiar uma retórica do contágio usada para justificar políticas biopolíticas violentas do governo brasileiro republicano. Ademais, eu afirmo que esta retórica dependeu da mobilização por Malta de afetos largamente circulados na mídia popular daquele período. O objetivo desse estudo é colocar a teoria do afeto em diálogo com o vasto corpo de literatura histórica, visual e sociológica existente sobre a dita Belle Époque brasileira. Esse período da história do Brasil, e especialmente do Rio de Janeiro, tem sido amplamente estudado por acadêmicos de diversas disciplinas. No entanto, o envolvimento com as teorias da afetividade e o trabalho de Malta, especialmente na produção acadêmica em inglês, permanece limitado. Este artigo endereça a implicação da fotografia, da arquitetura e do planejamento urbano em discursos médicos e biopoliticos, contribuindo para o estudo de mecanismos que produzem e reproduzem mitos de progresso e do poder emancipatório da razão na América Latina do início do século XX.

Beating up the classics: aspects of a compact discourse

Popular Music ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Symes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
Extensive Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Integral Element

Although much has been written about the changes wrought to art in the age of mechanical reproduction, these same changes as they have impacted on music through the phenomenon of the phonograph have not received equivalent attention or, if they have, then their discussion has been restricted to particular sectors of the music industry. This failure to address an important facet of contemporary music practice derives from a continuing tendency to abstract musical questions from their context and to obscure the material contributions that technology makes to such practice (Shepherd 1977, 1991; Scott 1990). With some musics this is more apparent than others. For instance, while there has been an extensive analysis of the degree to which the recording industry has influenced and been an integral element in the development of popular music, there has not been an equivalent analysis of its influence on classical music. This is because in the case of the former the links between the two have been somewhat more dramatic. The recording industry, particularly through its links with radio and television stations, has in large measure facilitated the spread of popular music across the world as a dominant element of a globalised culture, as one of its master codes.

Reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from Indian music in popular music and jazz

Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Indian Music ◽  
Reflecting Surfaces

In this article I explore the manner in which elements from a non-Western music appear in pop music and jazz. The music under discussion is that of the Indian subcontinent and the classical music of North India in particular. The essay covers references to Indian music in pop, rock and jazz from the sixties to the present day but concentrates mainly on the sixties and seventies, and, in the world of pop, on the music of the Beatles. The influence of orientalism on Western music is not a recent phenomena, as Reck (1985) notes, but its appearance in pop during the sixties meant that it reached a larger audience than ever before.

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