Instructional Plans: Grades K–2

Chapter 5 presents three instructional plans that are geared toward grades K–2. Instructional plans consist of planning necessities, standard alignment, alignment to philosophies approached in earlier chapters, as well as instructional procedures and assessments. Adaptations for other grade-level bands as well as potential extensions are available for each plan. This chapter includes the following instructional plans: Shapes of Electric Guitars, Sound Amplification and Speaker Building, and Measuring Length and Pitch. In Shapes of Electric Guitars, students will design guitar bodies and perform on them using available technology. In Sound Amplification, students will analyze and experiment with sound waves, eventually building their own small speaker. In Measuring Length and Pitch, students will measure pitched tubes to determine the mathematical relationship between pitches.

Musicalizing the Heart Sutra: Buddhism, Sound, and Media in Contemporary Japan

In Japan, explicitly religious content is not commonly found in popular music. Against this mainstream tendency, since approximately 2008, ecclesiastic and non-ecclesiastic actors alike have made musical arrangements of the Heart Sutra. What do these musical arrangements help us to understand about the formation of Buddhist religiosity in contemporary Japan? In order to answer these questions, I analyze the circulation of these musical arrangements on online media platforms. I pursue the claim that they exhibit significant resonances with traditional Japanese Buddhist practices and concepts, while also developing novel sensibilities, behaviors, and understandings of Buddhist religiosity that are articulated by global trends in secularism, popular music, and ‘spirituality’. I suggest that they show institutionally marginal but publicly significant transformations in affective relationships with Buddhist religious content in Japan through the mediation of musical sound, which I interpret as indicative of an emerging “structure of feeling”. Overall, this essay demonstrates how articulating the rite of sutra recitation with modern music technologies, including samplers, electric guitars, and Vocaloid software, can generate novel, sonorous ways to experience and propagate Buddhism.

Queen’s Idiolect

This chapter documents the key characteristics of Queen’s idiolect as pertaining to harmonic gestures and structure, textural layers and the sound-box, and arrangement gestures. It is argued that the harmonic structures of Queen’s songs are defined through their consistent movement between tonic and dominant chords, which is embellished through rich chromatic gestures. The textures of Queen’s songs sit in one of five archetypal combinations involving piano, electric guitars, bass guitar, and drums, which are enhanced through vocals, lead guitars, synthesisers, and non-rock instruments. Queen’s sound-box structures are timbrally balanced and often present some form of dynamic movement of sounds in a virtual space. The different idiolect traits allow one to understand most of Queen’s songs either in terms of articulating a common compositional strategy (akin to a form of musical logic) or presenting sonic patterns that are like musical fingerprints.

Classics and Mass Media Music in the Works of Sergey Slonimsky

Статья посвящена актуальной в ХХ–ХХI веках проблеме диалога элитарной и массовой культур. Теоретическую базу работы составляют труды видных современных ученых: О. Астафьевой, А. Костиной, Н. Кирилловой и других. В ее основу положена методология культурологического исследования, включающая комплексный, междисциплинарный и историко-сравнительный подходы, а также методы культурологической интерпретации и музыковедческого анализа. На примере творчества выдающегося русского композитора петербургской школы Сергея Слонимского — представителя поколения «шестидесятников» — исследуются его взгляды на конфликт «двух музык» — «серьезной» и «легкой», а также способы преодоления их противоречий (на примере Первой, Второй, Тридцать четвертой симфоний, Концерта для симфонического оркестра, трех электрогитар и солирующих инструментов, балета «Волшебный орех», вокальных сочинений, фортепианных пьес). В результате исследования делается вывод о двух путях, по которым шел композитор в решении данной проблемы: активного противостояния «музычке» масс-медиа и всей продукции псевдокультуры и органичного взаимодействия классических традиций и жанров массовой музыкальной культуры, поднимающего бытовую массовую стилистику на высочайший художественный уровень. The article is devoted to the problem of the dialogue between elite and mass cultures, in its own way manifested in music, which was topical in the XX and early XXI centuries. The theoretical foundation of the article is the culturological works of prominent modern scientists: O. Astafieva, A. Kostina, N. Kirillova, etc. It is based on the methodology of culturological research, including complex, interdisciplinary and historical-comparative approaches, as well as methods of cultural interpretation and musicological analysis. Using the example of the work of the outstanding Russian composer of the St. Petersburg school Sergey Slonimsky — a representative of the generation of the “sixties” — his views on the conflict of the “two musics”, “serious” and “light”, are investigated, as well as the ways of overcoming their contradictions (on the example of the First, Second, Thirty-fourth symphonies, the Concerto for a symphony orchestra, three electric guitars and solo instruments, “The Magic Nut” ballet, vocal compositions, piano pieces). As a result of the study, it is concluded that the composer follows two paths in solving this problem: the path of active opposition to the poppy “music” of the mass media and all the products of pseudoculture and the path of organic interaction of classical traditions and genres of mass musical culture, which raises the everyday mass stylistics to the highest artistic level.

Timber to Timbre

The Gibson Les Paul is one of the most iconic electric guitars ever made. Although there is a vibrant scholarly literature surrounding the Les Paul’s symbolic entanglements with issues of race, gender, and class, few have considered the ecopolitical entanglements involved in producing a key material dimension of that guitar’s signature sound: Honduran mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla). Fiji is one of the main harvesting sites of Honduran mahogany, and this chapter charts the social and environmental transformations that occurred following this wood’s introduction to Fiji in the 1880s, considering especially the increasing demand for mahogany as it has been driven by the popularization of the Les Paul since the mid-twentieth century—an issue that, to this day, continues to define forestry in the region. By examining the global commodity chains and infrastructures underlying Les Paul production, this chapter focuses on the role that Honduran mahogany, or the “White Man’s timber,” as it is called by some locals, has played in reconfiguring Fijian landowners’ definitions of what constitutes a forest, sustainability, and justice. In doing so, the chapter interrogates the power relations and ontological politics in which different actors, species, and things are enmeshed. Ultimately, the chapter shows that the aesthetic investments of musicians in particular timbres are rooted in broader legacies of timber-driven colonialism and plantation capitalism.

Music for One World: Moroccan Musical Experience of Diversity, Fusion, Happiness, Healing, and Peace

Although steeped in Islamic religion and culture, Morocco is a land of varying influences and histories, including those of the native Berbers, the Moors and Jews driven out of Spain, those who follow the pious Sufi culture of Islamic spiritualism, and the Gnawa slaves who were brought into southern Morocco by Arabs. The music, customs, values, and everyday lives of these disparate peoples continue to not only blend with each other’s but also to fuse Moroccan music and culture with those of Europe, Africa, and America. The influence of Moroccan music continues to play a vital role in shaping contemporary music, especially in the study of rhythm. Music that was once heard by voices, flutes, oboes, strings, bagpipes, auxiliary percussion, and drums—symbolic of Moroccan cultural identity--may now be heard on electric guitars, keyboards, and amplified voices in popular and modern music styles that reflect Morocco’s continuing efforts to be active players in the international community.

Anatomy and mechanical properties of woods used in electric guitars

ABSTRACT Many endangered tropical hardwoods are commonly used in electric guitars. In order to find alternative woods, the current electric guitar woods need to be studied and classified as most research in this field has focused on acoustic instruments. Classification was done based on luthier literature, woods used in commercially available electric guitars, commercially available tonewoods and by interviewing Finnish luthiers. Here, the electric guitar woods are divided into three distinct classes based on how they are used in the guitar: low-density wood used in the body only (alder, poplar, basswood, ash), medium-density wood used in the body and neck (maple and mahogany), and high-density wood used in the fretboard only (rosewood and ebony). Together, these three classes span a wide range of anatomical and mechanical properties, but each class itself is limited to a relatively narrow parameter space. Statistically significant differences between these classes and the average hardwoods exist in the wood anatomy (size and organization of vessels, fibres, rays and axial parenchyma), in the mechanical properties (density, elastic modulus, Janka hardness, etc.) and in the average price per volume. In order to find substitute woods for a certain guitar wood class, density and elastic modulus can already be used to rule out most wood species. Based on principal component analysis of the elastomechanical and anatomical properties of commercially available hardwoods, few species are similar to the low- and high-density class woods. However, for all of the three electric guitar wood classes, non-endangered wood species are already commercially available from tonewood retailers that match the class characteristics presented here.