Music in Central America

This chapter presents a history of music genres in Central America and chronicles Indigenous music and dance, the arrival of European music, and West African influence. An awareness of music history of the region frames the repertoire within a larger cultural context and can inform how this repertoire is presented to students....

¡Canta Conmigo!

Sing, play, move, create, and experience joy with living musical traditions from Guatemala and Nicaragua. Suitable for use in families, schools, or community centers, this resource contains a playful collection of 90 songs, singing games, chants, and games the author learned from teachers, children, and families while living in several communities in both countries. While the majority of the songs are in Spanish, a few in a Mayan language, Kaqchikel, are included. Field videos, audio recordings, and select song histories are available on the companion website to witness the music in authentic contexts, guide in pronunciation, and trace musical origins. Ethnographic descriptions of locations where songs were learned and personal biographies of a few singers written in Kaqchikel or Spanish and translated to English allow the reader to develop a connection to the land and the musicians. Culturally responsive and sustaining teaching pedagogies are discussed alongside strategies to responsibly include the music in school curriculums. A brief history of Central America and an overview of music genres in the region are included to frame this song collection within historic, cultural, and musical contexts. ¡Ven a cantar y jugar! Come sing and play! The song pages are playfully and thoughtfully illustrated by Sucely Puluc from Guatemala.

Music Network Data Analysis Based on ISOMAP Algorithm Model

The development of music is a tortuous process, and the network relationship between each genre and each artist is intricate. In order to have a better understanding of the history of music, this paper tells the stories hidden in the history of music by means of data processing. Firstly, this paper establishes a model to evaluate the similarity between music by using ISOMAP algorithm. At the same time, the forest evolution model was established to mark the most revolutionary musical characters. Finally, using the Page-Rank algorithm, we get the founders of several music genres. It turns out that the figures who led the development of music don’t coincide with the figures who revolutionized music. Through the analysis of this paper, we can more clearly understand the development of music and the evolution of genres.

Operatic Competition

The impact of the café-concert on the activity of residential opera companies was significant in French towns with significant working-class populations. Among stage-music genres, operetta was also a threat because it was staged by secondary theaters (and by café-concerts in breach of their licenses) and because large numbers of bourgeois patrons preferred it to either Grand Opera or opéra-comique. These forms of competition for licensed managers for opera and spoken theater characterize the 1850s onward, resulting in heated exchanges with all layers of local and national government and debates about how to preserve operatic decorum and status in the face of operetta’s popularity. A notable exception is 1870s Strasbourg, where French operetta acts as a vehicle of resistance. The role of touring companies (often from Paris) as a centralist threat to the resident company from the 1880s, especially, is contrasted with their enrichment of smaller towns; the increase in guest artists (often Parisian too) is discussed as a factor in the longer-term shrinking of permanent opera company personnel. A coda examines the often brutal impact of broadcast technology on opera management and audiences in the 1920s and 1930s.

Hybrid in Form, Socialist in Content: The Formal Politics of Chŏlga in the North Korean Revolutionary Opera Sea of Blood

Kim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

Auto-communicative reconstruction of meaningfulness in musical randomness: reclaiming musical order on Facebook

This article investigates how music-specific communities on Facebook self-organize in and respond to the digital music ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms such as Spotify and their algorithmic restructuring of music. By building on earlier work on digital platforms as archives, we differentiate between the “old” and “new” orders of music cultures. We also utilize Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics and his concepts of semiosphere and auto-communication to make sense of communicative self-ordering and memory work by music-related communities on Facebook in Estonia. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with local music experts, we demonstrate how communities focused on record collecting, specific music genres or music quizzing work auto-communicatively, build shared memories, identities, and self-organize in order to resist the “new musical order” that has resulted from the datafication and platformization of music markets.

Sound sellers: musicians' strategies for marketing to industry gatekeepers

PurposeThe relationship between musicians and the music industry has often been depicted as a dichotomy between creativity and commerce with musicians conflicted between their roles as artists and their roles as marketers of sound. Recently, marketing researchers have problematized this dichotomy and suggested musicians perceive these roles as inevitable and indivisible. However, the processes of how musicians market their sound to the industry gatekeepers remain unclear. This study seeks to find the key industry gatekeepers for musicians and how musicians sell their personal sound to them.Design/methodology/approachUsing an interpretative phenomenological approach, ten interviews with professional musicians across different music genres provided insight into the strategies musicians use to market their sound to industry gatekeepers.FindingsIn total, three key gatekeepers and the five strategies that musicians use to sell their sound are identified. The gatekeepers are record labels, other musicians and consumers. Musicians sell their sound to these gatekeepers through the externally directed strategies of using social media to build relationships, defining their personal sound through genre and creating a unique sound, and through the internally directed strategies of keeping motivated through sound evolution and counting on luck.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are limited by the small number of musicians interviewed and the heterogeneous representation of music genres.Originality/valueThe study contributes to theoretical understandings of how musicians as cultural producers market their sound in a commercial industry.