scholarly journals Silencing the Other’s Voice?

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-32
Author(s):  
Heidi Henriikka Haapoja-Mäkelä
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Music Scene

Kalevalaic runosinging is a Baltic-Finnic tradition of metered oral poetry. In Finland, runo singing and the national epic Kalevala based on this tradition are often seen − especially in public speech − as nationally significant symbols of Finnishness. In this article, I examine how the idea of the Finnishness of traditional runo songs has been constructed in the changing paradigms of studying and performing folk music and oral poetry in Finland across the last hundred years, and how the concept of cultural appropriation relates to this. I will concentrate on early Finnish folk music studies as well as on the contemporary Finnish folk music scene; I tie these fields together by following the circulation of an Ingrian runosong theme called Oi daiafter it became part of archived folklore collections in Finland in 1906.

Popular Folk Music Comes of Age, 1955–1956

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
World Peace ◽  
International Understanding ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Harry Belafonte ◽  
The U.S

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1955 to 1956. It discusses the formation of the Hillbilly-Folk Record Collectors' Club and launching of the quarterly Hillbilly-Folk Record Journal in early 1954, in Britain; how the skiffle provided a dramatic boost to the popularity of folk-style music in Britain; the sudden popularity of a different musical hybrid, calypso, in the U.S.; how folk music was linked with the developing countercultural movement—poetry, films, novels, comic books, jazz, comedy—spreading across the U.S. in the mid-1950s; the emergence of Harry Belafonte; and the rising popularity of international music in the U.S., spurred by people's search for international understanding and world peace during the harsh years of the Cold War.

Controlling the Liminal Power of Performance: Hungarian Scholars and Romani Musicians in the Hungarian Folk Revival

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
LYNN HOOKER
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Fixed Boundaries ◽  
Hungarian Folk Music

AbstractIn the Hungarian folk revival, Hungarian Roma (Gypsies) serve as both privileged informants and exotic Others. The musicians of the revival known as the táncház (dance-house) movement rely heavily on rural Rom musicians, especially those from Transylvania, as authentic sources of traditional Hungarian repertoire and style. Táncház rhetoric centres on the trope of localized authenticity; but the authority wielded by rural Rom musicians, who carry music both between villages and around the world, complicates the fixed boundaries that various powerful stakeholders would place on the tradition. Drawing on media sources and on fieldwork in Hungary and Romania, I examine how authenticity and ‘Gypsiness’ are presented and controlled by the scholars, musicians, and administrators who lead the táncház movement, in particular in the context of camps and workshops dedicated to Hungarian folk music and dance. Organizers often erect clear boundaries of status, genre, and gender roles through such events, which, among other things, address the anxiety raised by Rom musicians’ power in liminal spaces. In addition, I look at how Rom musicians both negotiate with the táncház’s aesthetic of authenticity and challenge it musically. Finally, I discuss how musicians and the crowds that gather to hear and dance to their music together create a carnival atmosphere, breaking down some of the boundaries that organizers work so hard to create. Throughout, I demonstrate that liminality is an extraordinarily pertinent lens through which to view Roma participation in the Hungarian folk music scene.

Facilitate This! Reflections from Disabled Women in Popular Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Anthea Skinner ◽  
Jess Kapuscinski-Evans
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Education Careers ◽  
Disabled Women ◽  
The Impact

This article is a reflection by the authors on the impact that their identities as disabled women have had on their ongoing music careers. Skinner and Kapuscinski-Evans make up two-thirds of the Australian crip-folk trio, the Bearbrass Asylum Orchestra (the term “crip” is a cultural reappropriation of “cripple”). The Bearbrass Asylum Orchestra is a band that performs as part of the Disability Music Scene in Melbourne, Australia, using folk music to portray their experiences as people with disabilities. In this article Skinner and Kapuscinski-Evans discuss the formation of and philosophy behind the band, as well as the impact that growing up as disabled women had on their musical education, careers, and influences.

The Weavers and the Resurgence of Folk Music, 1950–1953

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The U.S

This chapter discusses the folk music scene from 1950 to 1953. It begins by describing the formation and rise of the Weavers into one of the most popular musical groups in the U.S. by early 1951. Their song “On Top of Old Smoky,” landed on the charts in April, reached number 2 for two months, and remained for a total of twenty-three weeks. The group also began appearing at the country's most lavish nightclubs, including Ciro's in Hollywood. The remainder of the chapter details Alan Lomax's move to England where he began an energetic broadcasting, collecting, performing, and traveling career as well as other happenings in the folk music scene.

Subjunctive pleasure: the odd hour in the boeremusiek museum

Popular Music ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Willemien Froneman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
20Th Century History ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
White Innocence

AbstractThis paper introduces the subjunctive as a modality of engaging in musical life, in this instance the contemporary white folk music scene of boeremusiek in South Africa. The genre has repeatedly been portrayed as forever vanishing – a discourse that still characterises contemporary events put up by the largest boeremusiek organisation in South Africa, the Boeremusiekgilde (Boeremusiek Guild). The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of discourses of nostalgia and salvage on participants' experiences of liveness in the present. It is shown how a deep dissatisfaction for live performance developed throughout the genre's 20th-century history. The repeated framing of present enjoyment in terms of past models of nationalist duty cast the actual actions of participants in the mode of subjunctive possibility, it is argued. As rituals of mourning, boeremusiek events bemoan personal histories fundamentally tainted by political transgression: the loss of intimate spaces of white innocence.

The Decade Ends, 1959–1960

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Political Connections ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Lost City ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Radio Programs

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1959 to 1960. Topics covered include Alan Lomax's efforts to capture the complex nature of popular music in 1959; the Kingston Trio's continued popularity; Britain's flourishing folk music scene despite the decline of skiffle; increasing popularity of folk music in America as its boundaries disappeared in the flood of new recordings, books, magazines, newsletters, radio programs, and TV shows; the release of the New Lost City Ramblers's album The New Lost City Ramblers; and the folk revival's musical and activist political connections in the South, personified by Guy Carawan's work at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, and then Knoxville, Tennessee, even before songs became a vital part of the developing civil rights movement.

Further Developments, 1957–1958

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The Village

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1957 to 1958. It discusses the emergence of the Kingston Trio that energized the folk revival; folk festivals and recordings; the continued popularity of skiffle in Great Britain; magazines the covered the folk music scene, including Sing Out! and Caravan; and Alan Lomax's return to the United States after seven years of folk-song collecting across Europe. According to Greenwich Village musician Dave Van Ronk, “the last years of the 1950s were a great time to be in the Village.” “It was not too crazy yet, but there was an exhilarating sense of something big right around the corner. As for the folk scene, it was beginning to look as if it might have a future, and me with it.” What was happening in Greenwich Village was rapidly spreading around the country. Folk music, broadly defined, appeared to have a bright future, while spanning the Atlantic Ocean.

Experiment role in the world music (based on the «The Road» album of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band)

2018 ◽  
pp. 215-227
Author(s):  
Iia Fedorova
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
The Road ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Musical Practices

The main objective of this study is the substantiation of experiment as one of the key features of the world music in Ukraine. Based on the creative works of the brightest world music representatives in Ukraine, «Dakha Brakha» band, the experiment is regarded as a kind of creative setting. Methodology and scientific approaches. The methodology was based on the music practice theory by T. Cherednychenko. The author distinguishes four binary oppositions, which can describe the musical practice. According to one of these oppositions («observance of the canon or violation of the canon»), the musical practices, to which the Ukrainian musicology usually classifies the world music («folk music» and «minstrel music»), are compared with the creative work of «Dakha Brakha» band. Study findings. A lack of the setting to experiment in the musical practices of the «folk music» and «minstrel music» separates the world music musical practice from them. Therefore, the world music is a separate type of musical practice in which the experiment is crucial. The study analyzed several scientific articles of Ukrainian musicologists on the world music; examined the history of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band; presented a list of the folk songs used in the fifth album «The Road» by «Dakha Brakha» band; and showed the degree of the source transformation by musicians based on the example of the «Monk» song. The study findings can be used to form a comprehensive understanding of the world music musical practice. The further studies may be related to clarification of the other parameters of the world music musical practice, and to determination of the experiment role in creative works of the other world music representatives, both Ukrainian and foreign. The practical study value is the ability to use its key provisions in the course of modern music in higher artistic schools of Ukraine. Originality / value. So far, the Ukrainian musicology did not consider the experiment role as the key one in the world music.

University Geographies and Folk Music Landscapes

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Blake
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Distant Object ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The University

By examining folk music activities connecting students and local musicians during the early 1960s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this article demonstrates how university geographies and musical landscapes influence musical activities in college towns. The geography of the University of Illinois, a rural Midwestern location with a mostly urban, middle-class student population, created an unusual combination of privileged students in a primarily working-class area. This combination of geography and landscape framed interactions between students and local musicians in Urbana-Champaign, stimulating and complicating the traversal of sociocultural differences through traditional music. Members of the University of Illinois Campus Folksong Club considered traditional music as a high cultural form distinct from mass-culture artists, aligning their interests with then-dominant scholarly approaches in folklore and film studies departments. Yet students also interrogated the impropriety of folksong presentation on campus, and community folksingers projected their own discomfort with students’ liberal politics. In hosting concerts by rural musicians such as Frank Proffitt and producing a record of local Urbana-Champaign folksingers called Green Fields of Illinois (1963), the folksong club attempted to suture these differences by highlighting the aesthetic, domestic, historical, and educational aspects of local folk music, while avoiding contemporary socioeconomic, commercial, and political concerns. This depoliticized conception of folk music bridged students and local folksingers, but also represented local music via a nineteenth-century rural landscape that converted contemporaneous lived practice into a temporally distant object of aesthetic study. Students’ study of folk music thus reinforced the power structures of university culture—but engaging local folksinging as an educational subject remained for them the most ethical solution for questioning, and potentially traversing, larger problems of inequality and difference.

Bartók and Scarlatti: A study of motives and influence

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Balázs Mikusi
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Human Emotions

The long-held notion that Bartók’s style represents a unique synthesis of features derived from folk music, from the works of his best contemporaries, as well as from the great classical masters has resulted in a certain asymmetry in Bartók studies. This article provides a short overview of the debate concerning the “Bartókian synthesis,” and presents a case study to illuminate how an ostensibly “lesser” historical figure like Domenico Scarlatti could have proved important for Bartók in several respects. I suggest that it must almost certainly have been Sándor Kovács who called Scarlatti’s music to Bartók’s attention around 1910, and so Kovács’s 1912 essay on the Italian composer may tell us much about Bartók’s Scarlatti reception as well. I argue that, while Scarlatti’s musical style may indeed have appealed to Bartók in more respects than one, he may also have identified with Scarlatti the man, who (in Kovács’s interpretation) developed a thoroughly ironic style in response to the unavoidable loneliness that results from the impossibility of communicating human emotions (an idea that must have intrigued Bartók right around the time he composed his Duke Bluebeard’s Castle ). In conclusion I propose that Scarlatti’s Sonata in E major (L21/K162), which Bartók performed on stage and also edited for an instructive publication, may have inspired the curious structural model that found its most clear-cut realization in Bartók’s Third Quartet.

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