Investigación-Acción Participativa en el Grupo denominado “Colectribu” de Jóvenes Artistas en situación de Riesgo Social

This research tries to describe the group dynamic that unravels between members of the hip hop artistic collective “Colectribu”, consisting of young people in social risk, exposed to phenomena such as violence, gangs and substance abuse, they attend the “Resistencia Juvenil” program dependent from the La Paz Foundation. It describes a space of artistic development allowing growth of artistic abilities by means of lyricism workshops, musical production and others types of workshops. At the same time the concept of gang reformulates, leaving behind the violent intent to redirect the work from “Colectribu” to creation, social contribution and personal growth. “[Colectribu] is a union of youth who come from different places of La Paz who get together joined by hip hop, it’s a way of expressing to people a new message, that is conscious and reflexive”. An action-participative study was made, as well as a documentary who logs the reality of the members of the group that can be found at https://youtu.be/fiX6eR1FV4A.

Unveiling Musical Production: Strauss, Mahler and Commodity Fetishism in the Late Nineteenth Century

This article locates social relationships within late-nineteenth-century German orchestral music by examining orchestration practices and aesthetics. Wagner's innovations in tone colour, Liszt's use of programmes, and Hanslick's formalism all took attention away from orchestra performers and forged a more direct relationship between audience and composer. This article argues that commercial exchange of serious music displaced social relationships between composer, performer and audience into aesthetic dictums. In particular, the widely agreed upon subordination of orchestration and colour to compositional ‘content’ was a manifestation of the social subordination of performers to composers and resulted in the decreased visibility of performers to consumers. In ultimately breaking from both New German and formalist conventions, Strauss's Don Juan and Mahler's First Symphony brought unwanted attention to orchestration and a renewed focus on performance and performers. In contrast to Wagner's use of doublings, which created timbres without clear instrumental provenance, the orchestration choices of Strauss and Mahler emphasize distinctions between instruments and themes, further highlighting the virtuosic demands they place on performers. Strauss and Mahler made performers into co-producers of their music and raised orchestral colour to the status of content. By employing Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, which Adorno himself largely obscures, this article goes beyond Adorno's and Dahlhaus's analysis of the ‘emancipation of colour’ to show how concert consumption objectified social relations and hierarchies as issues of mere aesthetic form, while compositions themselves became imbued with life-like subjectivity.

Visuelle oder klangliche Spuren?

This article focuses on the emerging ethnographic field 'refugee camp' and the challenges it poses in terms of an "engaged ethnomusicology" inscribed into a larger discussion about "public ethnography" and ethically informed collaborative practices. The prevailing focus of mass media and artists serves as a starting point, as they represent migratory phenomena primarily through the visual lens, through material artefacts, denying their multisensory character, particularly their immaterial and sonic aspects. Taking as examples the artistic work of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and exhibition concepts presented at the documenta 14 and at the Biennale in Venice 2019, the article questions the predominance of the material approach, the inaudibility of migration because of its compatibility with our "museological thinking'" and an abstract idea of "cultural heritage" as promoted by established cultural institutions in Western Europe. The article argues that sound should instead be taken more seriously into consideration. This includes reflecting on the prominent links between human existentiality and suffering, as well as musical production and performance. It is argued that the temporariness of refugee's musical practice is related to their precarious life conditions in camps suspended in time and space. As practical examples from the French camp of Calais demonstrate, music making in this context offers refugees one possible way to counter-act imposed policies of infantilization, passivity and an omnipresent experience of waiting. In a situation where creative space and musical instruments are a limited resource, social media and music apps generate particular forms of musical creativity and assume a fundamental role which should be acknowledged in research to a larger extent. Such conditions influence also largely the ways in which migrated musicians construct their self-image as "refugee musicians". Taking as an example Syrian pianist Aeham Ahmad, the article shows that such self and foreign attributions may be reductive and result in an ethically problematic branding with commercial intentions. The second part of the article presents a collaborative grassroot-music theatre project realized in a German Erstaufnahmeeinrichtung over a span of 4 months. It offers insights into the limitations of "making audible", or "voicing migrants" everyday concerns through artistic practice. It also questions the idea of developing an "artistic agency" and an equal "cultural participation" in a working context characterized by social and power hierarchies, emotional instabilities, and a constant flow of individuals and ideas. In this context the role of the ethnomusicologist as a (cultural) translator with multiple responsibilities is crucial. Not only does he/she balance out different levels of musical professionality or different aesthetic preferences, but he/she also opens up spaces for creativity for disadvantaged or marginalized individuals in the camps. On another level the researcher's responsibility lies in the task to make practices public which originally were self-referential or of local relevance in a socially segregated space. Despite numerous obstacles to make such interventions "culturally sustainable", the article shows the potentiality of producing bottom-up "counter-images" or "counter-soundings', which could generate counter-discourses to the main media narratives on migration.

Why Is(n’t) Ambient so White?

This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations of ambient music, a popular (sub)genre of electronic music and style of EDM, within anglophone EDM scenes and media discourses. It explores how early discourses on ambient implicitly shaped the genre’s aesthetics around idealizations of hip highbrow and high-middlebrow white masculinity. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, these discourses tacitly disregarded the relevance of genres racialized as non-white to ambient’s ideals of aesthetic experimentation, affective detachment, cerebral introspection, and physical ease. EDM-oriented discourses reified the putative whiteness of this formation in the early 1990s by repeatedly attaching the ambient label to the expressions of white men while describing the music, by way of a racialized and gendered mind-body binary, as the “beatless” emanation of disembodied mind(s), rather than of individuals. This history illuminates how popular genres become racialized through feedback loops of musical production and discursive categorization. In the course of tracing this history, the author proposes that a discursive framework of “strategic anti-genre-essentialism,” which positions genres as processes rather than categories, may help to undermine essentialist assumptions about music and race without dismissing them.

Acoustical modelling of a Swedish 13th century church ruin, and its use for musical production.

Visby is an old hanseatic town on the island of Gotland in Sweden. The town has a large number of old church ruins, one of which goes by the name of St. Lars. The church is believed to be a 13-century orthodox church, and abandoned in the 16 century, all that is left today are the stone walls and parts of the inner ceiling vaults. Through collaboration with the local museum, St.Lars has now been measured and 3D-modelled by the author, Sebastian Holm from Efterklang, who is also a part-time musician. The model has been fitted with what is assumed to be an historically accurate ceiling structure and materials as well as windows, doors, various furnishings and a make-up stage. With acoustical modelling and auralisations made in Odeon, various source and receiver positions has been tested for acoustical qualities, and the impulse responses are now used for musical production for the medieval band known as Patrask. The mixing process uses the impulse response from left and right side of the stage to produce a stereo reverb, and the results are compared to auralisations of the music made with Odeon. The overall process is discussed, with links to the music itself.

Taking the trumpet up there: enactment of embodied high pitch in a multimodal body schema

This contribution examines how an expert musician teaches high pitch as an embodied practice in a digital instruction video. Musical meaning-making in this perspective calls for a naturalized phenomenology which deals with the practice of music teaching, which involves a performing body. The notion of high musical pitch in terms of an abstract embodied image schema is challenged in favor of a multidimensional body schema, conceptualized at the interface between multimodal language, i.e. in speech and gesture, and the affordances imposed on musical production by the human body and the instrument artefact. As a result, the traditional metaphorical take on upward verticality, movement and causal force in image schemata becomes a conceptual background which may lead to errors on behalf of the potential student, and needs to be further enriched by natural local corporeal dimensions: immobility, non-vertical change in the lips, mouth and air flow. Such body schemata can be used in teaching more dynamic concepts about enactive knowledge in the body in interactive contexts of knowledge transmission.

"The Cashtro Hop Project" Hip Hop music and an exploration of the construction of artistic self-identity

While Hip Hop culture has regularly been legitimized within academia as a social phenomenon worthy of scholarly attention (witness the growing number of studies and disciplines now taking Hip Hop as object for analysis), this is the first Hip Hop-themed project being completed within the academy. Indeed, academic and critical considerations of one's own Hip Hop-based musical production is a novel venture; this project, as a fusion of theory with practice, has thus been undertaken so as to occupy that gap. The paper's specific concern is with how (independent) Hip Hop recording artists work to construct their own selves and identity (as formed primarily through lyrical content); the aim here is to explore Hip Hop music and the construction of artistic self· presentation. I therefore went about the task of creating my own album - my own Hip Hop themed musical product - in order to place myself in the unique position to examine it critically as cultural artifact, as well as to write commentary and (self-)analyses concerning various aspects of (my) identity formation. The ensuing outlined tripartite theoretical framework is to serve as a model through which other rappers/academics may think about, discuss, and analyze their own musical output, their own identities, their own selves.

"The Cashtro Hop Project" Hip Hop music and an exploration of the construction of artistic self-identity

While Hip Hop culture has regularly been legitimized within academia as a social phenomenon worthy of scholarly attention (witness the growing number of studies and disciplines now taking Hip Hop as object for analysis), this is the first Hip Hop-themed project being completed within the academy. Indeed, academic and critical considerations of one's own Hip Hop-based musical production is a novel venture; this project, as a fusion of theory with practice, has thus been undertaken so as to occupy that gap. The paper's specific concern is with how (independent) Hip Hop recording artists work to construct their own selves and identity (as formed primarily through lyrical content); the aim here is to explore Hip Hop music and the construction of artistic self· presentation. I therefore went about the task of creating my own album - my own Hip Hop themed musical product - in order to place myself in the unique position to examine it critically as cultural artifact, as well as to write commentary and (self-)analyses concerning various aspects of (my) identity formation. The ensuing outlined tripartite theoretical framework is to serve as a model through which other rappers/academics may think about, discuss, and analyze their own musical output, their own identities, their own selves.