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

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.

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-198
Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison

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.


Author(s):  
Guthrie P. Ramsey

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


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.


Author(s):  
Klisala Harrison

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.


Author(s):  
Lauren Kapalka Richerme

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.


Author(s):  
Robert H. Woody ◽  
Mark C. Adams

This chapter discusses the innate differences between vernacular music-making cultures and those oriented in Western classical traditions, and suggests students in traditional school music education programs in the United States are not typically afforded opportunities to learn skills used in vernacular and popular music-making cultures. The chapter emphasizes a need to diversify music-making experiences in schools and describes how vernacular musicianship may benefit students’ musical development. It suggests that, in order for substantive change to occur in music education in the United States, teachers will need to advance beyond simply considering how to integrate popular music into their traditional large ensembles—and how preservice music teacher education programs may be the key to help better prepare teachers to be more versatile and philosophically open to teaching a more musically diverse experience in their future classrooms.


2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Richards ◽  
Katie Milestone

This paper explores the experiences of women in small cultural businesses and is based upon interviews with women working in a range of contexts in Manchester's popular music sector. The research seeks to promote wider consideration of women's roles in cultural production and consumption. We argue that it is necessary that experiences of production and consumption be understood as inter-related processes. Each part of this process is imbued with particular gender characteristics that can serve to reinforce existing patterns and hierarchies. We explore the ways in which female leisure and consumption patterns have been marginalised and how this in turn shapes cultural production. This process influences career choices but it is also reinforced through the integration of consumption into the cultural workplace. Practices often associated with the sector, such as the blurring of work and leisure and ‘networking’, appear to be understood and operated in significantly different ways by women. As cultural industries such as popular music are predicated upon the colonisation of urban space we explore the use of the city and the particular character of Manchester's music scene. We conclude that, despite the existence of highly contingent and individualised identities, significant gender power relations remain evident. These are particularly clear in discussion of the performative and sexualised aspects of the job.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loris Vergolini ◽  
Eleonora Vlach

The recent economic downturn has had profound influences on contemporary European societies. This paper analyzes how the Great Recession affected the drop-out rate among university students in Italy, and whether their chosen field of study moderated its effect. To examine the potential long-term effects of this economic downturn on social inequality, we also explore whether students from less-advantaged families who enrolled in prestigious fields were those pushed out from university in disproportionally high numbers. We investigate the interacting influence of the economic crisis, social inequalities and field of study on drop-out rate using data from the Istat “Survey on the educational and occupational paths of high school graduates” in two cohorts of university students (one who attended university prior to and one during the Great Recession). Results obtained from propensity score matching show that the economic crisis had a negative effect on university participation, which was however less strong for Medicine students. Students from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the most remunerative fields of study (those leading to liberal professions), tended to leave university more often than their well-off peers.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-437
Author(s):  
Mohammad Monirul Hasan ◽  
József Tóth

This paper examines the association between controls of corruption and the agricultural production efficiency of 23 European Union Member States during the recent economic crisis. Production efficiency, measured in terms of technical efficiency, is the effectiveness of a given set of inputs that is used to produce an output. Owing to climate and geographical location agriculture in European countries is diverse. The economic downturn led by the financial crisis which started in mid-2007, is still prevailing across European countries. Control of corruption along with the existing economic crisis of the member states are affecting agriculture production efficiency. This study used the national level production data for the period of 2003-2009. It shows that the technical efficiency of most Member States have declined over the years and that it was significantly lower in austere economic crisis time 2007-09 than 2003-06 for all countries. It is also found that the declining trend of technical efficiency is significantly lower for central and eastern European countries than for the western European countries. Study finds that the control of corruption in the presence of high government effectiveness, decreases the technical efficiency of agricultural production in the Member States.Res. Agric., Livest. Fish.2(3): 427-437, December 2015


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