Promoting Social Change Through Audio Repetition1

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
B. Lee Cooper

The development of contemporary American music is clearly reflected in the integration of black composers, performers, and their songs into mainstream popular record charts. Between 1953 and 1978 a fascinating role reversal occurred. During that quarter century black artists shifted from creators to revivalists. The same role reversal did not apply to white artists, who tended to evolve along a more consistent audience-acceptance continuum. How can this 25-year cycle of social change best be illustrated? What particular elements of black music dramatically entered the pop spectrum during the fifties, and later gained dominance by the end of the sixties? Why did black artists become more and more conservative during the late seventies? A careful examination of audio repetition – cover recordings and song revivals – offers a great deal of revealing information about changes in social, economic and artistic life in America after 1953.

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Robert Sacré

This chapter discusses the history of African American Music. Many of the roots of black American music lie in Africa more than four hundred years ago at the start of the slave trade. It is essential to realize that the importance given to music and dance in Africa was reflected among black people in America in the songs they sang, in their dancing, and at their folk gatherings. As such, every aspect of jazz, blues, and gospel music is African to some degree. Work songs and the related prison songs are precursors of the blues. One can assume that primitive forms of pre-blues appeared around 1885, mostly in the Deep South and predominantly in the state of Mississippi. However, it was several more years before the famous AAB twelve-bar structure appeared, and when it did, one of its leading practitioners was Charley Patton.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACQUELINE COGDELL DJEDJE

AbstractDuring the early twentieth century, research on African American music focused primarily on spirituals and jazz. Investigations on the secular music of blacks living in rural areas were nonexistent except for the work of folklorists researching blues. Researchers and record companies avoided black fiddling because many viewed it not only as a relic of the past, but also a tradition identified with whites. In the second half of the twentieth century, rural-based musical traditions continued to be ignored because researchers tended to be music historians who relied almost exclusively on print or sound materials for analyses. Because rural black musicians who performed secular music rarely had an opportunity to record and few print data were available, sources were lacking. Thus, much of what we know about twentieth-century black secular music is based on styles created and performed by African Americans living in urban areas. And it is these styles that are often represented as the musical creations for all black people, in spite of the fact that other traditions were preferred and performed. This article explores how the (mis)representation of African American music has affected our understanding of black music generally and the development of black fiddling specifically.


Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-379
Author(s):  
David Horn

Eileen Southern, who died in Florida in October 2002, was widely recognised as a pre-eminent figure in the study of African-American music. Her seminal history, The Music of Black Americans, first published in New York in 1971, was the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music – from the congregational singing of slaves to all-black Broadway musicals, from blues and jazz to experimental composers – and was hugely influential. Resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced, it did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book. It had its genesis in a course which Dr Southern (who had a Ph.D. in Renaissance music from Harvard) developed in the late 1960s at Brooklyn College. She herself later described how she was put under pressure to devise the course by a college administration somewhat desperate to find ways to meet the demands of black students for the inclusion of Black Studies in the curriculum. The idea met with disbelief among colleagues in the music department, and the particular scorn of an unnamed Englishman, holder of a Ph.D. in musicology from Oxford, who opined that a course in black music presented ‘nothing of substance to deal with’. Declaring ‘I'll show them’, a furious Eileen Southern was determined to design a course that demonstrated the range of black music. The result turned out to be so rich that a more sympathetic colleague suggested one day to Dr Southern that she turn the course into a book – and The Music of Black Americans was the result (Standifer, n.d.).


Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder

This chapter examines Harry T. Burleigh's legacy in African American music. Burleigh retired in 1946 from his position as baritone soloist at St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church, marking the end of an exceptional public career. He died of cardiac failure on September 12, 1949. All too soon after the influx of laudatory obituaries, the press got wind of the conflict over Burleigh's estate. This chapter first considers the trial involving Burleigh's two wills, both of which were challenged by Louise Alston Burleigh and their son Alston because they suspected his longtime housekeeper, Thelma Hall—a recipient of the second will together with her son James—of exerting undue influence on Burleigh. It also looks at various tributes made in Burleigh's honor, including one from Will Marion Cook, and concludes with an emphasis on the importance of black music to the Harlem Renaissance, Burleigh's mastery in arranging African American spirituals, and the newfound respect for his art songs.


Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder

Harry T. Burleigh (1866–1949) played a leading role in American music, and African American music in particular, in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. This book traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with Antonín Dvořák, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other American luminaries. The book provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.


1982 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Metz

A quarter-centuryafter its inception, the diversity within ‘African socialism’ remains astonishing. This category now includes development strategies which range from traditional capitalism with limited sectoral planning to collective forms of national autarky. Although it is generally agreed that none of the forms of African socialism incorporates an ‘orthodox’ type of Marxism, the tremendous intellectual impact which Marx and Lenin have had on all aspects of social, economic, and political thought means that it is impossible to construct a theory of socialism which is totally outside their shadows. In effect, Marxist orthodoxy inevitably serves as a tool for the evaluation of socialist theory.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Khusnul Khoimah

Abstract: The results of this study show that tarekat (congregations) should aim to increase the degree of Ihsan with various rituals that accompany it, in order to improve the moral and spiritual perfection. But in the era of globalization, many people think is not responsive to the advancement of age (anti-progress). In fact, the congregation became a place for salik to avoid the bustle of the world lives. Tarekat should hold social change and must be explained in three aspects, religious, social and even political. However, such an assumption does not occur in the Naqshbandi Kholidiyah Sokaraja Banyumas. This congregation is to have a social doctrine that affect the social behavior of his followers, both in the fields of religion, social, economic and political as explored in this study. Keywords: Doctrine, Naqshbandi Kholidiyah Sokaraja, Social Behavior


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hujsa

         This paper explores how two African American composers, Scott Joplin (c. 1868-1917) and Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954), advocated for Black Advancement and uplift ideology through their syncretic operas in the early 1900s. What is presented here however is the introductory content of a larger work.         Joplin and Freeman were intimately conscious and supportive of national debates for Black Advancement, propelled especially by W.E.B. DuBois, and both employed rhetorical strategies paradigmatic of the movement. They were both interested in showing White and Black Americans alike that African American music, such as gospel, spiritual, and ragtime, could be held to the same high esteem as music of the Western canon, just as Black academics often endeavored to prove their intellectual prowess to their White counterparts. To this end, Joplin and Freeman combined “Black” music and classical styles in their operas to declare the equality and richness of an integrated sound.          The thematic content of these operas, Treemonisha and Voodoo, respectively, interact with the Black Advancement movement’s drive for progress and education as well. They present Black Americans’ struggle for modernity as a conflict between the “superstitious” West African religious customs still ingrained in emancipated communities and Christianity. However, Joplin and Freeman’s works diverge aesthetically and ideologically from this point forward. Joplin’s aesthetic considerations derived chiefly from ragtime, a modern African American musical form genre, while Freeman took inspiration not only from African ethnic music but Africa itself. Joplin’s form of uplift was found in the education of small Black communities, while Freeman framed his work in a nationalistic and pan-Africanist context. These distinct choices, though crafted with the same aim, help reveal subtle divergences in argumentation within the Black Advancement movement.    


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