scholarly journals Contemporary urban folk music in the Balkans: Possibilities for regional music history

Muzikologija ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 91-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Dumnic-Vilotijevic
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Music History ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
Regional Music ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Landmark Study

Starting with Maria Todorova?s landmark study Imagining the Balkans (Todorova 1997), numerous authors have raised their voices against stereotypical images of the Balkans. Over twenty years after the publication of this book, the term ?the Balkans? seems to have lost some of its negative connotations related to wars in favour of characteristics with positive overtones, such as the Balkan peoples? joie-de-vivre and entertainment strongly related to music. The areal ethnomusicology drawing from fieldwork throughout the Balkan peninsula has been a fruitful topic for numerous local and foreign ethnomusicologists and the very term ?the Balkans? has raised a special interest in the ethnomusicological research of ?outsiders?, as well as in the music industry. This paper is written from the perspective of an ?insider? ethnomusicologist from the Balkans. I raise the question of the definition of the ?Balkan? popular music label and discuss its main structural characteristics. I offer a new possibility of (re)considering a specific musical genre of the region based on the research of urban folk music practices. I present characteristics of urban folk music practices from the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in the countries of the Balkans, with special attention paid to their common aspects. Also, contemporary urban folk music, which is often criticized as a specific popular music form, is considered.

scholarly journals The Balkans of the Balkans: The Meaning of Autobalkanism in Regional Popular Music

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Dumnić Vilotijević
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Applied Music ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The People ◽  
Musical Characteristics

In this article, I discuss the use of the term “Balkan” in the regional popular music. In this context, Balkan popular music is contemporary popular folk music produced in the countries of the Balkans and intended for the Balkan markets (specifically, the people in the Western Balkans and diaspora communities). After the global success of “Balkan music” in the world music scene, this term influenced the cultures in the Balkans itself; however, interestingly, in the Balkans themselves “Balkan music” does not only refer to the musical characteristics of this genre—namely, it can also be applied music that derives from the genre of the “newly-composed folk music”, which is well known in the Western Balkans. The most important legacy of “Balkan” world music is the discourse on Balkan stereotypes, hence this article will reveal new aspects of autobalkanism in music. This research starts from several questions: where is “the Balkans” which is mentioned in these songs actually situated; what is the meaning of the term “Balkan” used for the audience from the Balkans; and, what are musical characteristics of the genre called trepfolk? Special focus will be on the post-Yugoslav market in the twenty-first century, with particular examples in Serbian language (as well as Bosnian and Croatian).

Lazzari felici: Neapolitan song and/as nostalgia

Popular Music ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
GOFFREDO PLASTINO
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Styles

AbstractAlthough the canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song) is the best-known Italian popular music in the world, it is also the most misunderstood. It is mostly associated with operatic or quasi-operatic vocal styles, but all the other Neapolitan popular voices, the performance features and even the history of this musical genre are less well known. This essay in particular considers how the porous Neapolitan voice is a ‘space’ for complex negotiations between different musical styles, and how through this voice (that admits within itself the existence of other vocal styles) Neapolitan composers, musicians and singers articulate different relationships between music, history and nostalgia.

Bomba: The Sound of Puerto Rico’s African Heritage

2021 ◽  
pp. 104837132199066
Author(s):  
Vimari Colón-León
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
West African ◽  
Learning Sequence ◽  
Significant Evidence ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Main Components

Bomba is an emblematic Puerto Rican musical genre that emerged 400 years ago from the colonial plantations where West African slaves and their descendants worked. It remains one of the most popular forms of folk music on the island and serves as significant evidence of its rich African heritage. This article explores the main components of bomba by making them more accessible to those that have not experienced it from an insider’s perspective. The material presented in this article provides a learning sequence that could take the form of several lessons, or even a curricular unit. Transcriptions of rhythms typically learned aurally are also included.

What Makes It Sound ’80s?

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 73-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Lavengood
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Music History ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Popular Music History ◽  
Cultural Positioning ◽  
The Web

Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a “sound” that is somehow unified and generalizable. The ’80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Not only was this preset (E. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent—heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986—but the timbre of E. PIANO 1 also encapsulates two crucial aspects of a distinctly ’80s sound in microcosm: one, technological associations with digital FM synthesis and the Yamaha DX7 as a groundbreaking ’80s synthesizer; and two, cultural positioning in a greater lineage of popular music history. This article analyzes the timbre of E. PIANO 1 by combining ethnographic study of musician language with visual analysis of spectrograms, a novel combination of techniques that links acoustic specificity with social context. The web of connections created by the use and re-use of DX7 presets like E. PIANO 1, among hundreds or maybe thousands of different tracks and across genres, is something that allows modern listeners to abstract a unified notion of the “’80s sound” from a diverse and eclectic repertoire of songs produced in the 1980s.

scholarly journals Trends in Folklore Studies Development in the Research and Education Space at Ukrainian and Foreign Universities

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
Myroslava Vovk
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Academic Science ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Multicultural Personality ◽  
Folklore Studies ◽  
Research And Education ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Foreign Universities

AbstractTrends in development of folklore studies in the research and education space at Ukrainian and foreign universities have been analyzed. They are fundamentalization, synthesis of academic science and educational practice, professionalization, institutionalization, humanitarization, anthropoligization, interdisciplinarity. It has been defined that in Ukrainian and foreign folkloristic discourse of the 20th – the beginning of the 21th centuries, folklore is studied through the prism of functional, communicative, anthropological, context-based approaches that is partially realized in the official definition of folklore according to the 1989 UNESCO Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore. It has been found out that while structuring the content of folkloristic disciplines as well as directing future specialists’ researches the multivectoring of folklore studies allows instructors to use the achievements of folkloristic directions that were formed in historical retrospective and actively developed at the modern stage: linguofolkloristics, ethnomusicology, folk therapy (folk music therapy, fairytale therapy, folk dance therapy), etc. It has been justified that folklore studies in Ukrainian and foreign research and education space is being developed as an interdisciplinary science based on the historical and pedagogical experience and taking into account modern integration processes that define the problematics of the content of folkloristic, culturological training of future pedagogue-researcher who is to be educated as a man of culture, nationally aware and, at the same time, multicultural personality.

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