Drum Groove Corpora

Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of metered music. The relevance of microtiming to the perception of music has been studied since the 1980s. Most recently, microtiming has been investigated as a cause of groove (i.e., the pleasant urge to move in response to music). The study of microtiming relies on the availability of microtiming data. This report presents three large corpora of onset timings derived from drum kit performances in popular Anglo-American popular music styles. These data are made freely available (CC 4.0 license) to provide a resource for use by analysts and experimenters alike. They offer a common point of reference for future studies into the temporal facets of music performance. The datasets adhere to FAIR principles; they thus facilitate replication of analyses and experimental stimuli.

Pākehā Practice: Music and National Identity in Postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand

<p>National discourses specific to Aotearoa/New Zealand — for example, biculturalism, which reimagines Māori-Pākehā relations as a partnership based on the Treaty of Waitangi — help to construct, express, and articulate connections between music and New Zealand identity. Yet unquestioned nationalisms — however benign or ‘official’ they seem — can marginalize some ways of being, knowing, organizing, and music-making, through their capacity to advance and reinforce undisclosed social values and political agendas. In this way, nationalism often disguises the consequences of those values and agendas. This thesis demonstrates how, by unproblematically invoking nationalisms for various purposes, significant New Zealand music-related institutions inadvertently reproduce Eurocentric national identity narratives which overlook the social, cultural, economic and political inequities of Aotearoa/NZ’s postcolonial present. Such narratives normalize conceptions of ‘New Zealand music’ dominated by historic and evolving cultural and economic connections between New Zealand society and the broader postcolonial Anglosphere. Consequently, identifications of ‘New Zealand’ culture and music often reflect dominant Pākehā norms, against which other musical traditions are contrasted. Several prominent ‘national’ institutions involved with music are examined through three cases studies. The first considers how state-supported music policies and agencies construct and legitimize economic, artistic and democratic ideologies as national values, and explores the consequences of a frequent failure to distinguish between a cultural identity, based on dominant Pākehā norms and values, and a culturally plural civic-based national identity. The second case study examines events during and surrounding two major music awards ceremonies, the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards and the Silver Scroll Awards, showing how these ceremonies construct and reinforce a prestige hierarchy of ‘New Zealand music’ in which Anglo-American popular music styles are privileged over other musical expressions. The consequences for cultural representation in relation to New Zealand identity are considered. The final case study analyses the New Zealand popular music heritage presented at Auckland Museum’s exhibition, Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa. Volume’s displays and stories, contextualized and informed by Auckland Museum and prominent entities in New Zealand’s music industry, are shown to reinforce a dominant New Zealand music ‘Kiwiana’, neglecting divergent cultural perspectives and political positions. The thesis draws on comparative analyses of qualitative interviews conducted by the author, documents and reports, press media and journalism, audiovisual broadcasts and recordings, promotional material and museum visits. These primary materials are contextualized in wider literatures — particularly on nationalism, postcolonialism and music — to provide critical perspectives on historic social, political and cultural issues regarding New Zealand national identity and its relationship to music.</p>

Pākehā Practice: Music and National Identity in Postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand

<p>National discourses specific to Aotearoa/New Zealand — for example, biculturalism, which reimagines Māori-Pākehā relations as a partnership based on the Treaty of Waitangi — help to construct, express, and articulate connections between music and New Zealand identity. Yet unquestioned nationalisms — however benign or ‘official’ they seem — can marginalize some ways of being, knowing, organizing, and music-making, through their capacity to advance and reinforce undisclosed social values and political agendas. In this way, nationalism often disguises the consequences of those values and agendas. This thesis demonstrates how, by unproblematically invoking nationalisms for various purposes, significant New Zealand music-related institutions inadvertently reproduce Eurocentric national identity narratives which overlook the social, cultural, economic and political inequities of Aotearoa/NZ’s postcolonial present. Such narratives normalize conceptions of ‘New Zealand music’ dominated by historic and evolving cultural and economic connections between New Zealand society and the broader postcolonial Anglosphere. Consequently, identifications of ‘New Zealand’ culture and music often reflect dominant Pākehā norms, against which other musical traditions are contrasted. Several prominent ‘national’ institutions involved with music are examined through three cases studies. The first considers how state-supported music policies and agencies construct and legitimize economic, artistic and democratic ideologies as national values, and explores the consequences of a frequent failure to distinguish between a cultural identity, based on dominant Pākehā norms and values, and a culturally plural civic-based national identity. The second case study examines events during and surrounding two major music awards ceremonies, the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards and the Silver Scroll Awards, showing how these ceremonies construct and reinforce a prestige hierarchy of ‘New Zealand music’ in which Anglo-American popular music styles are privileged over other musical expressions. The consequences for cultural representation in relation to New Zealand identity are considered. The final case study analyses the New Zealand popular music heritage presented at Auckland Museum’s exhibition, Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa. Volume’s displays and stories, contextualized and informed by Auckland Museum and prominent entities in New Zealand’s music industry, are shown to reinforce a dominant New Zealand music ‘Kiwiana’, neglecting divergent cultural perspectives and political positions. The thesis draws on comparative analyses of qualitative interviews conducted by the author, documents and reports, press media and journalism, audiovisual broadcasts and recordings, promotional material and museum visits. These primary materials are contextualized in wider literatures — particularly on nationalism, postcolonialism and music — to provide critical perspectives on historic social, political and cultural issues regarding New Zealand national identity and its relationship to music.</p>

Matrices of ‘Love and Theft’: Joan Baez Imitates Bob Dylan

This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.

Songbooks

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

The origins of syncopation in American popular music

The origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory character. In an earlier study I presented evidence suggesting British roots for second-position syncopation. in contrast, fourth-position syncopation – the focus of the current study – seems to have had no presence in published 19th-century vocal music, British or American. It first appears in notation in ragtime songs and piano music at the very end of the 19th century; it was also used in recordings by African-American singers before it was widely notated.