scholarly journals The many faces of everyday musical life: Approaching music history from “below”

Muzikologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Martin Loeser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Georg Philipp Telemann ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Many ◽  
Musical Genres

Is it useful to write history on everyday musical life? And how can we do it? This article introduces a historiographical concept initiated by historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Alf L?dtke and Richard van D?lmen already in the 1970s, in an attempt to renew the writing of history. Instead of the reconstruction and interpretation of grand narratives and deep structures in society, economy and culture, these historians offer close descriptions of ?average citizens? with their daily musical routines, motivations and preferences, and the result is oft en a cluster of fascinating and wide-ranging insights into different forms of contact with music. Following this general approach, I hope to offer a panorama of everyday musical culture in Hamburg in the early eighteenth century. The sources used for this study include different musical genres such as opera, cantata and instrumental ?table music?, as well as books, newspaper reports, subscription lists, diaries, behavioural guides and archival documents. This material permits insights into the uses made of musicians such as Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann and Reinhard Keiser, as well as into the social lives of the Hamburg citizenship.

Yankee Twang

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford R. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Musical Activity ◽  
Live Music ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich

Merging scholarly insight with a professional guitarist's keen sense of the musical life, this book delves into the rich tradition of country and western music that is played and loved in the mill towns and cities of the American northeast. The book draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, interviews, and encounters with recorded and live music to reveal the central role of country and western in the social lives and musical activity of working-class New Englanders. As the book shows, an extraordinary multiculturalism informed by New England's kaleidoscope of ethnic groups created a distinctive country and western music style. But the music also gave—and gives—voice to working-class feeling. Yankee country and western emphasizes the western, reflecting the longing for the mythical cowboy's life of rugged but fulfilling individualism. Indeed, many New Englanders use country and western to comment on economic disenfranchisement and express their resentment of a mass media, government, and Nashville music establishment they believe neither reflects nor understands their life experiences.

“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Lawson ◽  
Jim Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Full Length ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
East Indian ◽  
The Social ◽  
General Elections ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
English Politics

In March 1761 the diarist Horace Walpole complained that “West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals” were attacking every parliamentary borough in the general election. Although it lacked statistical proof, this sour observation became an accepted tenet in political histories of Britain written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the one full-length study of nabobs published in 1926 echoes Walpole's refrain; Holzman depicted them as a group of nouveaux riches “determined to raise their power and position to the level of their credit. This precipitated a fierce class strife, which was signalised [sic.] by changes in the ownership of landed estates and pocket boroughs.” The investigations of the Namierite school have long since demolished the myth of an East Indian onslaught on English politics and society in the mid-eighteenth century. Only a handful of novice MPs were returned to parliament in the general elections of 1761 and 1768, and those elected did not constitute a concentrated and coherent East Indian lobby at Westminster.Yet should Walpole's observation be dismissed so readily? This was an age of ignorance of the nature of the British presence in India, of considerable misgivings over the many effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain, and of a resultant lack of enthusiasm for an Asian empire. The leading historian of the British connection with India in the eighteenth century has recently pointed out that this reluctance derived in part from fears that it would upset not only the social and political, but also the moral underpinnings of established society.

scholarly journals Musik zwischen Nation Building und Internationalität. Italien um 1900

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
National Music ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Different Levels

In this article German contributions to periodicals of the International Musicological Society focussing on Italian musical life in Italy around 1900 are analyzed as testimonies of Italy’s new importance as a music nation at that time. The German perspective on musical culture in the Kingdom of Italy follows hierarchies that are closely linked to political and economic rivalry between the two nations. At different levels (music education, formation of composers and musicians, local repertories, musical genres) well-known concepts of German supremacy can be recognized. Nevertheless, the national music debates include also phenomena which strongly confirm music as art of great potential for international consensus.

Cosmopolitan, National, and Regional Identities in Eighteenth-Century European Musical Life

2011 ◽  
pp. 208-227
Author(s):  
William Weber
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Concert Programs

This article determines how scholars have defined cosmopolitanism. It suggests how this concept can be applied to musical life, and studies how geography is played out with cultural authority. It compares how composers from various regions held concerts in Paris, Vienna, London, and Leipzig during the 1780s by referring to the texts of the concert programs. The discussion shows that concerts were relevant in opera life, and that cosmopolitanism in musical culture should be viewed as a political process.

What Is “Game Music”?

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Noah Kellman
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Music History ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Video Game Music ◽  
Musical Characteristics ◽  
The Many ◽  
Aesthetic Characteristics ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Musical Forms

Game music is an eclectic term, encompassing the many different musical genres that are used in video game scores. This chapter introduces readers to important game music history while seeking to define what musical characteristics are unique to game music. As composers found creative ways to work within the scope of this limited technology, unique challenges led to the conception of a new body of musical work that would later be referred to by the gaming world as “video game music,” or just “game music” for short. This chapter explores the history and development of game music as a genre. It focuses on analyzing how the limitations of previous gaming systems influenced composers to make specific musical choices, while also seeking to define what aesthetic characteristics are unique to video game music and how interactivity has led to new musical forms.

ALLAN RAMSAY, THE IDEA OF ‘SCOTTISH MUSIC’ AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ‘NATIONAL MUSIC’ IN EUROPE

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Gelbart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Scottish Music ◽  
National Music ◽  
Historical Moment

ABSTRACTThis article examines the process of fashioning an idea of ‘national’ music, by considering the social and political conditions that made such an idea possible at a particular historical moment. An early example, Scotland, is the focus here, and helps to show the type of discursive and active work involved in giving meaning to the idea of ‘Scottish music’ in a cultural sense. I argue that the poet and song collector Allan Ramsay played a central role in the years beginning around 1720. Before Ramsay's generation, there was only a limited sense of ethnic identity translating into poetic or musical style. Furthermore, Ramsay himself, in attempting to harness song and music as national cultural capital, also had to contend with the fact that Scotland was ethnically, culturally and linguistically split along the Highland–Lowland divide, and in other ways as well. Through his song collectionA Tea-Table Miscellanyand his follow-up publication of tunes for that collection, as well as through his involvement with Edinburgh's elite musical community, Ramsay helped transform Scotland's musical culture from a manuscript-based milieu organized around specific musical functions and occasions to one in which national origins helped validate music, and printed collections enshrined such groupings. Lastly, in addition to its direct influence, Ramsay's work helped shape the emergent discourse about national song indirectly: an extensive outgrowth of thought rooted partly in Ramsay's own ideas led to his being used as a negative example among collectors of ‘folk’ music from the later eighteenth century onward.

Performance of memory and the making of Pallaki Seva Prabandhamu of Maharaja Sahaji Bhonsale II

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Sushruti Santhanam
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Music History ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Musical Play ◽  
Carnatic Music ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Many

The Pallaki Seva Prabandhamu is a geya nataka (musical play) in lyrical Telugu language composed in the early eighteenth century by Sahaji Bhonsale II (r. 1684‐1712), the Maratha king of the Tamil-speaking region of Thanjavur. Using its most current iteration, the production of a digital album in 2012, as the locus, the article explores the historical vicissitudes of music construction in Carnatic music. The continuous recasting of old repertoire like the Pallaki illuminates the intangible agencies and exigencies of this process of historical record-keeping in southern Indian music. This article showcases the many historical and epistemic locations through which the Pallaki has passed, in the process exposing some critical gaps and misses in historical writing on the southern Indian musical repertoire. It also proposes an alternative, more direct engagement with musical material, in order to write about historical contexts of music and pushes the historian of music to yield more agency to the musician in co-writing the histories of music. The article raises two methodological possibilities: a critical inclusion of ‘performed repertoires’ as an archive of music history; and the inclusion of publishing, notating and other conventional archival of manuscripts within a larger conceptual framework of performance of text.

The weather and diseases : some eighteenth-century contributions to observational meteorology

1952 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-307 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Meteorological Observation ◽  
Instrumental Observations ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Instrumental Records

Students of the history of science are well aware how rapidly ideas were exchanged, remembering the available means of communication, during the years immediately preceding and following the foundation of the Royal Society. This is very evident in regard to meteorological observation and measurement. Robert Hooke’s daily readings of temperature and rainfall in 1664 are well known and he, with Locke soon afterwards, was quick to stress the need for comparable observations in different places. Accordingly, we in England possess some remarkably early series of records ; of temperature, for example, at Wrentham in Suffolk (1673-1674), and, of course, Towneley’s well-known rainfall record near Burnley (1677-1704). Gadbury kept a very useful diary in London (1669-1689) and while his instrumental observations were few, there is a consistency about his daily recording which accords well with the spirit of the age and that consciousness of time which became so evident not only in the social diarists but among the craftsmen such as Tompion with his clocks. Zeal with regard to maintenance of consistent daily observations has always been very variable. For example, in 1694, Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., while on one of his journeys visited Towneley and much admired his work ; but in his diary he enters that he ‘ had a mind to do likewise, but bethought myself of the tediousness of it ’. Thomas Short of Sheffield in 1749 also commented on the many who began a record but were prone to let it lapse. Prolonged maintenance of daily observations demands an odd and uncommon type of enthusiasm which at intervals has been roused into activity. Perusal of our older records leads one to think that the initial impetus died down about 1710 ; for no English instrumental records of a continuous kind survive, as far as we know, for the period 1716-1722.

Claude Le Jeune, Adrian Willaert and the Art of Musical Translation

1994 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 123-148
Author(s):  
Richard Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
French Music ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adrian Willaert ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

In calling for a new history of French music and musical life of the second half of the sixteenth century, Howard Mayer Brown's paper has presented scholars with a number of formidable challenges. It admonishes us to re-examine nearly every facet of what remains largely an enigma of music history. Simultaneously exacting and encyclopedic, it considers in turn each of four themes: the relation of words and music; the means and character of print culture; musical styles and genres; and (perhaps most important of all) the social context of the chanson itself – what Brown called ‘the anthropology of the French chanson’. His essay concerns the problems and perspectives of Renaissance musicology: how we hear and how we explain the music of the past in relation to those who first made and heard it. It thus requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and workings of historical change, the status of canonical styles and those who promoted them, and the very place of music in culture.

scholarly journals Creative activity by G. Kkunkin in the context of the development of the military brass band’s culture of the Chernihiv region

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-100
Author(s):  
Oleg Badalov
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Wind Instruments ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Brass Bands ◽  
Brass Band ◽  
The Social ◽  
Military Aviation ◽  
The Military

The purpose of the article is to study the activities of the military musician, conductor of the brass band of the Chernihiv Higher Military Aviation College of Pilots, one of the founders of the modern orchestral culture of the Chernihiv region, Major Gryhory Borysovych Kunkin (1927–2009) in the context of the development of military music of Chernihiv region, his contribution to the formation of regional cultural space of the second half of 20th century. The author examines the life of G. Kunkin against the background of the development of the military-musical performance of the Chernihiv region. The methodology is based on historical-chronological, source-study, logical-generalizing, and comparative methods for elucidating the chronology of the development of military musical art of Chernihiv region of the 20th century, the study of G. Kunkin's creative biography, and generalization of information about military conductors of Chernihiv region – his contemporaries, memoirs of G. Kunkin's colleagues, identification of factors influencing his work on the development of the cultural space of Chernihiv region. The scientific novelty of the publication lies in the first domestic musicology study of the life of G. Kunkin as one of the prominent figures of the military-musical culture of the Chernihiv region. Conclusions. The results of the study indicate that G. Kunkin during his career as a military conductor had a significant impact on the development of the military and musical culture of the Chernihiv region. With his activity he revived the regional military-musical life, outlined the main directions of its further development, which were realized in the works of military conductors of Chernihiv region at the beginning of the 21 century; G. Kunkin's concert activity of the military brass band popularized the brass art among the population of the region and, as a result, conditioned the social demand for learning to play wind instruments, intensifying the activity in this direction in art schools of Chernihiv region and music college named after L. Revytsky. The successful combination of musical experience, personal qualities, and organizational abilities allowed G. Kunkin to make a significant contribution to the potential of the spiritual culture of the Chernihiv region, which is worthily presented in Ukraine and abroad by military brass bands of the region.

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