The Multiple Politics of Henry Cow

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Cutler ◽  
Benjamin Piekut
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Rock Group ◽  
Science Group ◽  
Musical Genres

Chris Cutler is a percussionist, composer, lyricist, and writer. He was a member of avant-rock group Henry Cow between 1971 and 1978, after which he co-founded international groups including Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, and The Science Group. He founded and runs the independent label and distribution service ReR/Recommended. This chapter recounts the evolution of political concerns within Henry Cow, as manifested in (amongst other things) the group's relationship to the record industry, its attitude to the different musical genres on which it drew, and its aspiration to collective forms of organisation and musical practice. The band's experience of playing for events organised by leftist groups (including the Italian Communist Party) are described, as are the alternative performance circuits established by Cutler in the later 1970s.

Re-examining the concept of the ‘independent’ record company: the case of Wax Trax! records

Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Lee
Keyword(s):  
Economic Impact ◽  
Small Companies ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Record Company

In the American record industry, independent record companies have long held a cultural status that far exceeds the actual economic impact they have in the market-place. Independent record companies, or ‘indies’, have become understood as innovative and creative oases for new or unconventional musicians in the midst of a capital-driven and profit-oriented record business. The development of a wide range of musical genres and styles – from rhythm and blues and soul to punk and industrial – are often attributed to the small companies that operated outside of the control of the larger ‘major’ labels.

scholarly journals Music and the materialization of identities

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Born
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Mutual Interference ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Social Mediation ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Identity Formations

How does music materialize identities? This article argues that music is instructive in conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives on issues of materiality, mediation and affect. These perspectives are intimately related in turn to music’s plural socialities, which necessitate a novel approach to theorizing the social. Music, it is proposed, demands an analytics that encompasses four planes of social mediation; while these socialities, with other forms of music’s mediation, together produce a constellation of mediations – an assemblage. All four planes of social mediation enter into the musical assemblage: the first two amount to socialities engendered by musical practice and experience; the last two amount to social and institutional conditions that afford certain kinds of musical practice. The four are irreducible to one another and are articulated in contingent ways through relations of synergy, affordance, conditioning or causality. By adopting the topological metaphor of the plane to stand for distinctive socialities mediated by music, the intention is to highlight both their autonomy and their mutual interference. The second half turns to genre theory to suggest that analysing genre in terms of the mutual mediation between two self-organizing historical entities illuminates both how social identity formations may be refracted in music, and how musical genres can entangle themselves in evolving social formations. Finally, with reference to music’s capacity to create aggregations of the affected, the article considers the efflorescence of theories of affect, association and entrainment. While such theories illuminate the generative nature of the mutual mediation between musical formations and social formations, they are limited by lack of awareness of the four distinctive planes of music’s social mediation, as well as the significance of their autonomy and their contingent interrelations for understanding how music materializes identities.

Key Questions of Antagonist Music-Making

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianmario Borio
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Free Improvisation ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Key Questions

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a politicization across different musical genres. The discourse of intellectuals and artists was significantly influenced by the writings of the founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, and in turn led the PCI of the early 1970s to an unambiguous commitment to resist ‘any impulse to identify with any specific “poetics” or “tendency”,...to ignore the great variety of creative experiences’ (Giorgio Napolitano), whilst affirming a faith in innovation and renewal as the vehicle for oppositional sentiment. This chapter examines this complex cultural network as it manifested itself in the distinct musical terrains of folk music, rock, jazz, and free improvisation, and avant-garde music theatre.

scholarly journals Song Form and the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 93-135
Author(s):  
Ben Duinker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
21St Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Musical Genres

Song form in North American hip-hop music has evolved along the genre’s journey from its origins as a live musical practice, through its commercial ascent in the 1980s and 1990s, to its dominance of mainstream popular music in the 21st century. This paper explores the nature and evolution of song form in hip-hop music and uses them as a musical lens to view the gradual and ongoing mainstreaming of this genre. With the help of a corpus of 160 hip-hop songs released since 1979, I describe and unpack section types common to hip-hop music­—verses, hooks, and instrumentals—illustrating how these sections combine in different formal paradigms, such as strophic and verse-hook. I evaluate the extent to which formal structures in hip-hop music can be understood as products of the genre’s live performance culture; one with roots in African American oral vernacular traditions such as toasting. Finally, I discuss how form in hip-hop music has increasingly foregrounded the hook (chorus): the emergence of the verse-hook song form, an increase in sung hooks (often by singers outside the hip-hop genre), the earlier arrival of hook sections in songs, and the greater share of a song’s duration occupied by hooks. Viewing hip-hop music’s evolution through this increasing importance of the hook provides a clear representation of the genre’s roots outside of, and assimilation into, mainstream popular music; one of many Black musical genres to have traversed this path (George, 1988).

Musical Practice and Memory on the Edge of Two Worlds: Kalymnian Tsambouna and Song Repertoire in the Family of Nikitas Tsimouris 1

2018 ◽  
pp. 216-262
Author(s):  
Anna Lomax Wood
Keyword(s):  
Song Repertoire ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Fictive Kinship ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Musical Genres

Over a century ago, hundreds of sponge fishermen and their families settled in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Their large numbers combined with continuing immigration to create a community that has preserved much of its culture. Anna Lomax Chairetakis Wood recorded the music of Kalymnian tsambouna player and National Heritage Fellow NikitasTsimouris and his family, with whom she shared bonds of friendship and fictive kinship. "Musical Practice and Memory on the Edge of Two Worlds: Kalymnian Tsambouna and Song Repertoire in the Family of Nikitas Tsimouris,” is a sensitive and carefully delineated contextual exploration of the social, lyrical, and ethnomusical dimensions of an increasingly rare musical tradition. The author covers such diverse topics as transmission and performance practice; singing styles; song function; repertoire; Kalymnian musical genres such as table songs, poetic duels (pismatika), dance songs, task songs, and ritual songs.

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.

The Japanese Factor in the Making of North Korean Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ernest Ming-Tak Leung
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Stepping Stone ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Juche Ideology

This article explores a commonly ignored aspect of Japan–North Korean relations: the Japanese factor in the making of Korean socialism. Korea was indirectly influenced by the Japanese Jiyuminken Movement, in the 1910s–1920s serving as a stepping-stone for the creation of a Japanese Communist Party. Wartime mobilization policies under Japanese rule were continued and expanded beyond the colonial era. The Juche ideology built on tendencies first exhibited in the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Conference in Japan, and in the 1970s some Japanese leftists viewed Juche as a humanist Marxism. Trade between Japan and North Korea expanded from 1961 onwards, culminating in North Korea’s default in 1976, from which point on relations soured between the two countries. Yet leaders with direct experience of colonial rule governed North Korea through to the late 1990s.

Popular Politics and Electioneering between the Wars

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Political Extremism ◽  
Mass Democracy

Disruption and rowdyism at political meetingswas a feature of Victorian and Edwardian electioneering. The advent of mass democracy, and the rise of Communism in Europe, ensured that such behaviour came to be portrayed as evidence of political extremism and a threat to political stability. As a result, Labour candidates, keen to position their party as one capable of governing for the nation as a whole, distanced themselves from popular electoral traditions now synonymous with a confrontational, and unacceptable, politics of class. Heckling, rowdyism and disruption came, by the 1930s, to be associated primarily with the Communist Party.

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