Glam “Heroines”. Gaps in Glam Historicisation from Black Self-Feminised Musicians to the Herstory of Glam Rock

The narration of glam music, especially glam rock, as queer is countered by a canonisation of male white icons in pop musicology, which is illuminated and expanded in this article. Early glam performances by self-feminised Black musicians (Ward 1998) as well as the music making of female agents of glam rock are at the center of this exploration. Firstly, an outline of the current gender and race specific remembrance of glam rock is given. Secondly, the “glamorous” origins of glam music are questioned with Ward; musical canon of glam is also re-arranged regarding the category of gender by adding the basic biographies of two further female heroines, Bobbie McGee and Cherrie Vangelder-Smith. They are present in digital (DIY) media within practices of affective archiving (Baker 2015), which enable lyrics interpretation in this paper.

Representations in Vocal Repertoire

This paper seeks to understand representations in repertoire diversity found in audition selections for Carnegie Mellon University, the National Student Auditions hosted by the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the Wolf Trap Opera Company summer program auditions, and the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. Various forms of data collection and the ubiquitous use of social media have highlighted equity disparities in the treatment of minority groups. The singing community, like all music-makers, must reconcile past inequalities and adapt current practices based on inclusion rather than exclusion. Analysis of these selections is compared with demographic data from members of the National Association of Schools of Music and the U.S. Census Bureau. By amalgamating these various forms of evidence combined with interdisciplinary framing, this paper: 1) provides a framework of systematic issues facing minorities in vocal studies and performance; 2) develops a theoretical understanding of the musical canon; 3) evaluates the current content of the vocal musical canon; 4) displays representational disparities between canonic vocal works and the populations singing them, and; 5) highlights the need for change in current practice to remain equitable for future generations of singers. While systematic choices in repertoire selection may seem insignificant in the short term studies have shown that minority students viewing representations of themselves in positions of power have positive impacts on their growth and the likelihood of entering and studying in the field. Shifts in current practice are critically necessary for vocal studies to remain relevant and inclusive for future generations.

Music Appreciation Through Animation: Percy Scholes’s ‘AudioGraphic’ Piano Rolls

From 1925-30, British music educator Percy A. Scholes spearheaded an initiative for music appreciation by means of the player piano. The series “AudioGraphic Music” featured select works from the musical canon on the Aeolian Company’s piano rolls. In addition to their function as sound recordings, Scholes prepared the rolls as visual artefacts with introductory texts, pictures, and analytical commentary. This video article explores the analytical and pedagogical potential of these rolls as tools for music listeners and highlights how they foreshadowed recent innovation in musical animation.

Gender

This chapter introduces musicological and philosophical treatments of gender, and their relation to broader critiques of ideology. After introducing the ways that different musicological traditions have examined gender in relation to music, it clarifies the political quality of different philosophical approaches to the question of gender in music. It closes by offering a reconsideration of the role of the musical canon, and its central figure Beethoven, in shaping understandings of music and gender.

Hearing Perfection

This chapter examines the formation of a particular rhetoric and constellation of values surrounding the violin through the lens of comparative tests between new and old violins. Since the nineteenth century, new violins have consistently won out over old ones. This is part of an ongoing process of mutual calibration between old and new violins: the old violins are updated to meet new playing needs; new violins are made as copies of older instruments. The continual blurring of distinctions between new and old produces what this chapter calls mendacious technology: an instrument that lies about its own historicity. Mendacious technology performs a productive, even essential, role within musical history. The violin itself has undergone many significant, though underplayed, technological alterations, but what has endured is the very notion that the instrument has endured. The musical canon—and meaningful access to it—depends on this careful obfuscating of technological history.

Martin Luther: music and mission

This article seeks to demonstrate Martin Luther's often-overlooked credentials as a musician. Luther was convinced that music was the viva voce evangelii (living voice of the gospel), and unlike other more radical Reformation movements, he encouraged the use of choral and congregational singing in worship. Some of his familiar hymns – Nun freut euch, Ein’ feste Burg and Aus tiefer Not – offer insights into his ambitions to embed congregational singing into his vision of reformed worship, which went hand in hand with liturgical reform. Luther's Formula Missae and the vernacular Deutsche Messe lay the groundwork for Lutheran worship, which restructured the service around the centrality of the gospel proclamation. Luther's musical tradition reached its zenith in the work of J. S. Bach, which continues to echo in the Western musical canon, leaving Luther with a lasting musical legacy.

Exnominating Turk, Hypernominating çingene

The dramatic political shift from the Ottoman Imperial polity to that of an ethnonational state was implemented by creating the “Turk” as the singular subject citizen of the new Republic. To shore up a new national identity through contrast against non-Turkish others, culture power holders deployed musical discourses that effectively folded in qualities and attributes of “non-Turkish others” into the representations of çingene and negative evaluations of Romani musical labor. This strategy enabled “others” to disappear on the one hand and to hypermark çingene as the epitome of alterity against which Turkish music could be positively valued. This complex set of processes enabled the creation of Turkish folk and classical genres as legitimated categories, which formed the basis of a national musical canon. Against these structural political and cultural transformations, a critical reading of biographies and melancholy reminiscences about Romani artists Nasip Hanım and Tahsin Bey discloses the extraordinary and yet everyday contributions of professional Romani musicians. These artists mediated class and ethnic differences while maintaining musical practices that were undergoing dramatic cultural management.

Performing Lieder, Hearing Race: Debating Blackness, Whiteness, and German Identity in Interwar Central Europe

When African American concert singers began to perform German lieder in central Europe in the 1920s, white German and Austrian listeners were astounded by the veracity and conviction of their performances. How had they managed to sing like Germans? This article argues that black performances of German music challenged audiences' definitions of blackness, whiteness, and German music during the transatlantic Jazz Age in interwar central Europe. Upon hearing black performers masterfully sing lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others, audiences were compelled to consider whether German national identity was contingent upon whiteness. Some listeners chose to call black concert singers “Negroes with white souls,” associating German music with whiteness by extension. Others insisted that the singer had sounded black and therefore un-German. Race was ultimately the filter through which people interpreted these performances of the Austro-German musical canon. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and when audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Simultaneously, it offers a musicological intervention in contemporary discourses that still operate under the assumption that it is impossible to be both black and German.

Mokranjac on repeat: Reaffirming musical canon through sound recordings (PGP-RTB/RTS discography)

Starting with the hypothesis that sound recordings published by the Serbian/ Yugoslav record label PGP-RTB/RTS dominated programmes of the Radio Television Belgrade/Radio Television Serbia during most of the twentieth century (while declining in this century), and that decisions made within the label on which composers? works were going to be (repeatedly) present in its catalogue consequently had significant impact on overall music and media culture in Serbia/Yugoslavia, our goal was to examine how the central composer figure of Serbian music, Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac, was represented in this catalogue. Research methods were based primarily on analysis of archive material gathered in documentation of the label itself, data on recordings available via online music databases, and recordings themselves, while relying on theoretical notions of canon in music, with the accent on the performing canon.