Intro: The Meanings of a Musical Style

Damaged ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Evan Rapport
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Resources

Punk is an extraordinarily meaningful and productive set of musical approaches, and exploring punk rock’s history based on an analysis of its musical style leads to conclusions that are often in conflict with the stories that have been told. This chapter establishes several premises that are investigated in the rest of the book, including punk’s complicated relationship to American whiteness and the suburbs, and punk’s underappreciated basis in African American musical resources.

A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Legg
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Conventional Notation ◽  
Analytical Research ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
And Performance

AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.

On the Scenic Route to Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (1942)

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-497
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Production History ◽  
Form Star

This study of Irving Berlin's Holiday Inn (Paramount, 1942) considers the collaboration of the film's four primary creative figures: Irving Berlin, Mark Sandrich, Bing Crosby, and Fred Astaire. Extracted from a wide array of production materials, the story of the making of Holiday Inn demonstrates how archival research can address questions of broad scholarly interest, such as large-scale form, star personas, musical style, musical-dramatic integration, the representation of blackness and African American characters, and political meaning in popular-culture products. Examining details of the film's production history sheds particular light upon the function of songs and musical routines as quasi-autonomous parts of the whole.

Performing Ethnicity

Island Gospel ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Melvin L. Butler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Generational Difference ◽  
Contemporary Gospel ◽  
At Home

This chapter explores the notion of “religious ethnicity” as a layered mode of self-presentation encompassing Jamaican, Pentecostal, and “black” musical markers of identity. It demonstrates the ways in which believers perform their religious ethnicity through musical style both at home on the island and abroad. Recordings of African American contemporary gospel singers, such as Donnie McClurkin, provide a means for Jamaican youth to perform a modern Pentecostal identity cast as oppositional to the "white-sounding" hymnody preferred in conservative churches. Borrowing from the work of Gerardo Marti, the chapter argues that Pentecostals perform “pan-ethnic,” “ethnic specific,” and “ethnic transcendent” identities. While competing stylistic preferences are sometimes reconciled through discourses of generational difference, many believers choose to live and worship in the complexity of seemingly incompatible musical repertories.

Singing Smoothly

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Gentry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
American Women ◽  
American Press ◽  
Historical Moment

The early R&B vocal group the Orioles are often credited with launching the musical style later known as doo-wop, especially with their 1949 hit “It’s Too Soon to Know” and their last charting number, “Crying in the Chapel” (1953). Their smooth romantic ballads became some of the first crossover hits of the postwar era, and were an alternative to more aggressive masculinities emerging out of the jump blues. This chapter illustrates this choreography of gender through live stage shows, recordings, interviews, and period reviews in the African American press. The short-lived periodical Tan Confessions adds particular nuance, featuring interviews with stars like Sonny Til alongside housewares advertisements targeted at African American women. This masculinity should be understood as a strategy linked with Cold War discourses of consensus and consumption, and the anxieties over masculinity expressed in Franklin Frasier’s Black Bourgeoisie in the historical moment of postwar desegregation.

Rock ’n Roll Dance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Malnig
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The Uk

Rock ’n roll dance was a major American dance form that became prominent in the 1950s and soon thereafter spread to the UK. The dance was performed to a new musical style that was a combination of country, gospel, and rhythm and blues, and was associated with both black and white musicians, including Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley. Rock ’n roll dance was also a cultural phenomenon that galvanised a large, primarily white, youth culture. The dances themselves, which were disseminated nationally through the modern invention of television, were mostly of African-American origin and displayed a new configuration of body movement involving pelvic and hip rotations, greater use of the arms and torso, and call and response patterns. The Twist was one of the most iconic solo dances of the era, while popular line dances included the Madison, Stroll, and Hand Jive.

Jook House

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Templeton
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
American Institution ◽  
Working Classes

The jook house (also juke joint), an African American institution found mainly in semiurban areas in the Southern United States, is an important cultural phenomenon that emerged in the decades after emancipation (1862). While the conditions of slavery in the South made it difficult and often illegal for black men and women to gather without white intervention, during the period of reconstruction, jook houses became a place for newly freed men and women (usually from the lower and working classes) to drink, gamble, listen to music, and dance. While the precise etymology of "jook" is unclear, some scholars suggest the term comes from the Bambara word "dzugu," which means "wicked" or from the Bamana-Kam word "dugu", which means "bad." The jook house as "bad" or "wicked" articulates its covert and subversive qualities, as well as its ability to transgress white codes of conduct and social life. These jook houses gave birth to the musical style of the blues, saw an increased blending of regional African American dance practices, and nurtured an emerging modern black identity.

scholarly journals Music and the 'any-space-whatever': Translating existential chaos into artistic composition

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Scannell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
Paul Gilroy

This paper looks at the importance of rhythmic creativity for the African-American musician as a means of counteracting the inherent “non-space” of diasporic existence. Drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as from the fields of cultural studies and diaspora theory, this paper examines the immanent existential and territorial concerns of the “minor” subject, as might be witnessed in the music of James Brown. Rather than attribute Brown’s African-American identity as the defining characteristic of his musical style, as many previous academic accounts have done, I will instead look at his work as the product of a lack of an identity, and how this idea might be understood in relation to Augé’s “non-places”, the idiosyncratic interpretation of Augé by Deleuze in his Cinema books, and the possible correspondence of this concept of the “non-place”/”any-space-whatever” with the rhizomorphic, post-national. The Black Atlantic subject described by Paul Gilroy. Rather than simply attribute Brown’s music as a reiteration of African diasporic musical legacy, the paper instead attempts to define Brown’s funk as the work of a becoming-subject, where the creativity of the minority in these “any-space-whatevers” is due to being thrown into the creative chaos of an intolerable position.

Political Currents and Black Culture in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Sears
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Community Leader ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Love Story ◽  
American Opera ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This chapter examines politics and black culture in Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, a love story that also lays emphasis on the main character's education and its benefits to her and the plantation folk, as well as the novel idea of a woman as a community leader. Much of Treemonisha's music parallels the Euro-American musical style employed by other American opera composers of the early twentieth century, but also incorporates nineteenth-century African American musical styles. This chapter first considers Treemonisha's African American musical elements before discussing some important musical signifiers of black identity in the opera, along with Joplin's use of language to impart cultural and political messages. It also explores Treemonisha's take on progress and education as well as its political content. It argues that through Treemonisha, Joplin was making a statement about the political, social, and economic status of African Americans in the early twentieth century.

The Hearing Aid Effect in African American and Caucasian Males as Perceived by Female Judges of the Same Race

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Davis ◽  
Rhonda Jackson ◽  
Tina Smith ◽  
William Cooper
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Hearing Aid ◽  
Semantic Differential ◽  
Semantic Differential Scale ◽  
Education Majors ◽  
Female Undergraduate ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
Males And Females

Prior studies have proven the existence of the "hearing aid effect" when photographs of Caucasian males and females wearing a body aid, a post-auricular aid (behind-the-ear), or no hearing aid were judged by lay persons and professionals. This study was performed to determine if African American and Caucasian males, judged by female members of their own race, were likely to be judged in a similar manner on the basis of appearance, personality, assertiveness, and achievement. Sixty female undergraduate education majors (30 African American; 30 Caucasian) used a semantic differential scale to rate slides of preteen African American and Caucasian males, with and without hearing aids. The results of this study showed that female African American and Caucasian judges rated males of their respective races differently. The hearing aid effect was predominant among the Caucasian judges across the dimensions of appearance, personality, assertiveness, and achievement. In contrast, the African American judges only exhibited a hearing aid effect on the appearance dimension.

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