Bodies of Music / Songs of Magic

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-199
Author(s):  
Guthrie P. Ramsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
Musical Practices

Rev. John F. Watson published a tract in 1819 meant to discourage black Methodist congregants from musical practices that they obviously enjoyed but that he loathed. Despite Watson’s bias, his words provide modern-day readers with a sense of how the music sounded, its communal nature, and its in-real-time compositional techniques—with striking clarity. Unbeknownst to him, these qualities would constitute foundational principles for future music-making in black communities. Drawing on modern theorists, the Fields’s study of “racecraft,” and Sylvan’s on “the religious dimensions of popular music,” Ramsey examines a range of archival documents and images from the nineteenth century to illustrate how fresh readings can provide useful reinterpretations of what was seen in an earlier era as negative assessments of black artistry

The power to do something

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Socioeconomic Inequality ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Musical Practices

This book has examined human rights, and the development of capability—the “power to do something”—in musical practices. It has explored if (popular) music-making can enhance human rights and capabilities of the poorest of the poor, such as homeless and street-involved people, who feel that music is a “thing” that can never be taken away from them. This conclusion points out how the book defined capabilities in a novel and useful way. When synthesizing the book’s main findings, it describes a causal relationship between developing human capabilities, and strengthening human rights which operate in complex ways musical and cultural moments. Specific human capabilities can be nurtured so as to develop specific human rights. The chapter reflects and elaborates on critiques of human rights pertinent to music in and as culture. With attention to socioeconomic inequality, it offers inspiration for making, and thinking about, musical and cultural efforts to promote human rights and capabilities.

Music as Feminine Capital in Napoleonic France: Nancy Macdonald’s Musical Upbringing

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Women And Music ◽  
French Student ◽  
Musical Activities

Abstract This microhistory situates the musical activities of Nancy Macdonald, a French student at Madame Campan’s National Institute for Young Women and Napoleon Bonaparte’s school for daughters of Legion of Honour Recipients, in broader discourses about women and music in Napoleonic France. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of capital, it eschews a simplistic assessment of music as either constraining or liberating young women, by arguing instead that performance operated as a kind of ‘feminine capital’, accrued and then circulated to achieve tangible socio-economic ends. A feminine-capital framework exposes the paradoxes inherent in female music-making and reveals how values about music were enculturated from girlhood to womanhood in France. This approach contributes to recent scholarship that challenges the rigid binaries previously defining women’s musical labour during the Classical era and inserts France into historiographies of women’s musical practices in the early nineteenth century.

Hawaiian Music in Motion

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Revell Carr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Native Hawaiian ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Sugar Plantations ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Hawaiian Culture

This book explores the performance, reception, transmission, and adaptation of Hawaiian music on board ships and in the islands, revealing the ways both maritime commerce and imperial confrontation facilitated the circulation of popular music in the nineteenth century. The book shows how Hawaiians initially used music and dance to ease tensions with, and spread information about, potentially dangerous foreigners, and then traces the circulation of Hawaiian song and dance worldwide as Hawaiians served aboard American and European ships. Drawing on journals and ships' logs, the book highlights the profound contrasts between Hawaiians' treatment by fellow sailors who appreciated their seamanship and music, versus antagonistic American missionaries determined to keep Hawaiians on local sugar plantations, and looks at how Hawaiians achieved their own ends by capitalizing on Americans' conflicting expectations and fraught discourse around hula and other musical practices. It also examines American minstrelsy in Hawaii, including professional touring minstrel troupes from the mainland, amateur troupes consisting of crew members of visiting ships, and local indigenous troupes of Hawaiian minstrels. In the process he illuminates how a merging of indigenous and foreign elements became the new sound of native Hawaiian culture at the turn of the twentieth century—and made loping rhythms, falsetto yodels, and driving ukuleles indelible parts of American popular music.

scholarly journals Dancing to architecture: Popular music, economic crisis and urban change in 1980s industrial Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
Giacomo Bottà
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Technological Advance ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Musical Practices

This article examines popular music practices in industrial cities during the time of economic downturn and crisis (the early 1980s). In particular it takes into account the birth of alternative DIY musical practices and their use of urban space at the imaginary and material level. The article will start with an introduction to music making and to the effects it has on space / place perception and use. I have examined case studies from industrial cities and compared the way different music scenes developed during times of crisis and achieved relevant cultural expressions. The main interest of this paper is to show how the economic downturn brought to a series of cultural innovations, which were not directly connected to technological advance and resulted out of re-use, recycle or innovative use of available technologies and practices.

Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Computer Music ◽  
Music Composition ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
And Function ◽  
Independent Behavior

The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a computer-driven, interactive & “virtual improvising orchestra” that analyzes an improvisor's performance in real time, generating both complex responses to the musician's playing and independent behavior arising from the program's own internal processes. The author contends that notions about the nature and function of music are embedded in the structure of software-based music systems and that interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them. Thus, Voyager is considered as a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices.

Vamping the Stage

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
New Music ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Modern

Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.

Music Downtown Eastside

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Community Centers ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Therapy Sessions

Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken away of them. It draws on two decades of ethnographic research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Klisala Harrison takes the reader into popular music jams and therapy sessions offered to the poorest of the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. There she analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and how human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated in those musical moments. When doing so, she also offers new and detailed insights on the relationships between music and poverty, a type of social deprivation that diminishes people’s human capabilities and rights. The book contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices. Harrison’s study demonstrates that capabilities and human rights are interrelated. Developing capabilities can be a way to strengthen human rights.

Could There Be Deleuzian Assessment in Music Education?

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Lauren Kapalka Richerme
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Assessment Practices ◽  
Continuous Assessment ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Contemporary Education

Authors of contemporary education and arts education policies tend to emphasize the adoption of formal, summative assessment practices. Poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on ongoing differing and imaginative possibilities may at first glance appear incompatible with these overarching, codified assessments. While Deleuze criticizes the increasing use of ongoing assessments as a form of control, he posits a more nuanced explanation of measurement. This philosophical inquiry examines four measurement-related themes from Deleuze’s writings and explores how they might inform concepts and practices of assessment in various music teaching and learning contexts. The first theme suggests that each group of connective relations, what Deleuze terms a “plane of immanence,” demands its own forms of measurement. Second, Deleuze emphasizes varieties of measurement. Third, those with power, what Deleuze terms the “majority,” always set the standard for measurement. Fourth, Deleuze derides continuous assessment. His writings suggest that music educators might consider that assessments created for one musical practice or style should not transcend their own “plane of immanence,” that a variety of nonstandardized assessments is desirable, that the effect of measurement on “minoritarian” musical practices must be examined carefully, and that it is essential to ponder the potentials of unmeasured music making.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

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