Literary Performance of Music and Reading Musical Identity

Author(s):  
Alexandra Lamont

Alexandra Lamont discusses how musical preferences are a way to construct, reconstruct, and communicate a sense of identity, indicating aspects of personality, attitudes, and lifestyle. She reviews recent research demonstrating how musical preferences can provide information about age, gender, and personality. In addition to the social dimension, she also touches on aspects of personal musical identity that are developed through imagination. Lamont furthermore considers our imagined relationships with the music itself and the musicians responsible for creating and performing it, taking a lifespan perspective from childhood and adolescence through to old age.


2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL M. GRIMLEY

Björk’s collaboration with the director Lars von Trier on the film Dancer in the Dark was marked by well-publicized personal and aesthetic differences. Their work nevertheless shares an intense preoccupation with the nature and quality of sound. Björk’s soundtrack systematically explores the boundaries between music and noise, and the title of von Trier’s film itself presupposes a heightened attention to aural detail. This paper proposes a theoretical context for understanding Björk’s music in the light of her work with von Trier. Whereas Björk’s soundtrack responds to the visual and narrative stimuli of von Trier’s film, the use of sound in her album Vespertine thematicizes more familiar Björk subjects: the relationship between music, landscape and the natural world, and Björk’s own (constructed) sense of Nordic musical identity. By placing Vespertine alongside Björk’s music for Dancer in the Dark, the sense of ‘hyperreality’ that defines both also emerges as a primary characteristic of her work.


1992 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 816
Author(s):  
Sheila Post-Lauria ◽  
Stephen Railton

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Evans ◽  
Gary E. McPherson
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Thomas Mathew Pooley

The musical identity of the African continent is sustained in the popular imagination by the idea of its unity. This identity emerges from a constellation of ideas about Africa’s distinctiveness constructed by generations of scholars who have diminished its diversity to substantiate the claim that shared principles of musical structure and function in sub-Saharan cultures can be read as ideal types for the continent as a whole. The idea of a singular “African music” is predicated on the notion that African “traditional” music of precolonial origin in sub-Saharan Africa possesses a set of distinctive features that are essential to its identity. Musical cultures as diverse as Aka, Ewe, Shona, Yoruba, and Zulu are subsumed within a singular frame of reference; others that do not possess these features are, by implication, excluded. To make sense of this myth of a singular “African music” we must reckon with the universalising impulse that sustains it. This means interrogating the discursive formations out of which it has been fashioned. Whose interests does it serve? Taking a decolonial perspective on the power dynamics that structure global south-north relations in the academy, this article points to the ways in which the north perpetuates its authority and dominance over the south by subsuming others within its cultural and intellectual ambit. Decolonising “African music” means dismantling the hegemony of “continental musicology” and the myth of a singular “African music” that is its creation.


2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-266
Author(s):  
Avra Pieridou-Skoutella

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Cypriot elementary school children in urban and rural areas of the Republic of Cyprus, the author describes and analyses the ways in which national musical identity is constructed in and out of school in connection with Cypriot traditional music. Findings reveal the development of fluid and often insecure, ambiguous and contradictory national musical identities as a result of the ideological messages children receive from their musical enculturation contexts. In addition public music education not only fails to assist pupils to become familiar with the tradition's inherent meanings and processes of creation and performance, but enhances children's contradictory ideological understanding and construction of an ambiguous national musical identity.


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