American Folk Music as Tactical Media

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Adam Svec
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Tactical Media ◽  
Writing Machines

American folk music has long presented a problematic conception of authenticity, but the reality of the folk scene, and its relationship to media, is far more complicated. This book draws on the fields of media archaeology, performance studies, and sound studies to explore the various modes of communication that can be uncovered from the long American folk revival. From Alan Lomax's cybernetic visions to Bob Dylan's noisy writing machines, this book retrieves a subterranean discourse on the concept of media that might help us to reimagine the potential of the networks in which we work, play, and sing.

Talking Italian blues: Roberto Leydi, Giovanna Marini and American Influence in the Italian folk revival, 1954–66

Popular Music ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-334
Author(s):  
Rachel E. Love
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Postwar Italy

AbstractThis article examines how Roberto Leydi and Giovanna Marini, two important figures of the Italian ‘folk revival’, negotiated diverse American cultural influences and adapted them to the political context of Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that American musical traditions offered them valuable models even as many Italian intellectuals and artists grew more critical of US society and foreign policy. To explore this phenomenon in greater depth, I take as examples two particular moments of exchange. I first discuss American folklorist Alan Lomax's research in Italy and its impact on Leydi's career. I then examine how Marini employed American talking blues in order to reject US society in her first ballad, Vi parlo dell'America (I Speak to You of America) (1966). These two cases provide specific examples of how American influence worked in postwar Italy and the role of folk music in this process.

scholarly journals Visions of Diversity: Cultural Pluralism and the Nation in the Folk Music Revival Movement of the United States and Canada, 1958–65

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-614 ◽  
Author(s):  
GILLIAN A. M. MITCHELL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
The North ◽  
Folk Music Revival ◽  
Revival Movement ◽  
Excellent Work ◽  
The 1960S

This article focusses on the concept of cultural pluralism in the North American folk music revival of the 1960s. Building on the excellent work of earlier folk revival scholars, the article looks in greater depth at the “vision of diversity” promoted by the folk revival in North America – at the ways in which this vision was constructed, at the reasons for its maintenance and at its ultimate decline and on the consequences of this for anglophone Canadian and American musicians and enthusiasts alike.

A Brief History of the Tarantella Revival

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Incoronata Inserra
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Video Production ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Folk Music Revival ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mainstream Culture

This chapter offers an overview of the post-1990s tarantella revitalization in Italy, particularly of the much-popularized pizzica subgenre from the Salento area, by looking at the local and national festival scene, as well as music and video production, while also exploring the increasing visibility of tarantella within Italian popular and mainstream culture. Moreover, it explores national and international scholarly debates regarding this revitalization phenomenon and situates these debates within the current scholarship on the Italian Southern Question. Finally, the chapter juxtaposes the current revival of Southern Italian folk music with the 1970s folk music revival in Italy, particularly in relation to its left-wing ideology and as a foray into changing revival dynamics at play within Italian folk revival context.

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.

Michael Brocken, The British Folk Revival, 1944–2002 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), ISBN 0 7546 3281 4 (hb), 0 7546 3282 2 (pb)

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-312
Author(s):  
Ian Russell
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Youth Movement ◽  
Brass Bands ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Choral Singing ◽  
Academic History ◽  
Folk Music Revival ◽  
British Culture

For those of us who have lived with and through the second British folk music revival, it seems most apt that this important chapter of our lives should merit a serious academic history. We watched and were part of a radical youth movement that grew phenomenally in the late 1950s, burgeoned in the 60s, stumbled and stagnated through the 70s, but recovered its composure to mature in the late 80s; and now, half a century on, the fruits of this movement have become an established and significant part of the nation’s soundscape, as much a part of British culture as brass bands or choral singing. Much work has been and is being done to document every twist and turn of this revival, meticulously noting the key players, the setting up of clubs and festivals, broadcasting and recording developments, and so on; and, understandably, there is a welter of data on which to draw, including key witnesses to consult. One could argue that such histories are primarily of interest to the insider. But Brocken’s study, by contrast, attempts to take the view of the outsider, analysing the political agenda of the ‘revival’s’ architects and assessing its impact in terms of cultural studies as an aspect of popular music – in itself a most laudable enterprise.

(Micro)Politics of Algorithmic Music

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Cox ◽  
Morton Riis
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Method ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Micro Scale ◽  
Algorithmic Music ◽  
Tactical Media

The chapter explores a shift of emphasis from the macro to micro scale of algorithmic music, by making reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of micropolitics, microtemporality in the work of Wolfgang Ernst, and Shintaro Miyazaki’s concept of algorhythmics. By drawing together tactical media and media archaeology to address the politics of algorithmic music, an argument is developed that ‘tactical media archaeology’ offers an analytical method for developing alternative compositions. By emphasizing more speculative approaches and broader ecologies of practice exemplified by the critical engineering of Martin Howse, the chapter claims that algorithms need to understood as part of temporal, relational, and contingent operations that are sensitive to their conditions and future trajectories.

From here

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 598-616
Author(s):  
Matthew Ord
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Field Recordings ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Construction Of Place ◽  
Music Recordings ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings. Recent shifts in the political context have stimulated renewed interest in English identity within folk music culture. Symbolic struggles over folk’s political significance highlight both the contested nature of English identity and music’s semantic ambiguity, with texts being interpolated into discourses of both ethnic purity and multiculturalism. Following research in popular music, sound studies and multimodal communication this article explores the use of field recording to explore questions of place and Englishness in the work of contemporary folk artists. A multimodal analysis of Stick in the Wheel’s From Here: English Folk Field Recordings (2017) suggests that a multimodal approach to musical texts that attends to the semantic affordances of sound recording can provide insight into folk music’s role in debates over the nature of English identity.

Talking Union

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernie Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Progressive Party ◽  
American Left

Ernie Lieberman grew up in the midst of the folk revival that took place during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This chapter describes how folk music came to be important to the American left, the issues on which they focused (union organizing, racial and gender equality, peace), and Lieberman's own participation in the movement. As a child in the 1930s, he admired Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and sang folk and protest songs at summer camp, Progressive party conventions, and on tours for the Civil Rights Congress. In the 1950s, he performed and recorded albums with the first interracial folk group, and later, as political folk music began to reach a wider audience, became a songwriter.

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