What is visual Vaporwave? Vaporwave arts and their history and position in China

By Vaporwave we refer to a digital-born electronic music genre and a trend in visual aesthetics. It emerged in some US-based online communities in the early 2010s, and now its visual expressions are in vogue in Chinese visual media context. In this article, Vaporwave’s aesthetics are discussed through three stages of analysis. In the first part, the paper outlines relevant theories and general features of Vaporwave’s (both visual and musical) aesthetics; next, the paper focuses on Vaporwave's visual characteristics, and, to provide a deeper understanding of its visual aesthetics, I discuss a school of painting derived from early twentieth-century Italy—Metaphysical art. In the second part, the article discusses why and how vaporwave aesthetics are inseparable from some Japanese visual characteristics and how it is represented in China, with particular reference to examples of Japanese comics from the 1980s/early 1990s and one popular Chinese video-focused social media TikTok in recent years. In the third part, the article focuses on illustrating Vaporwave's visual features in the Chinese context in recent years, and several examples are provided.

Composing the Chimera Suite: Grafting the Conventions of Extreme Metal onto a Jazz Orchestra Setting

<p>The Chimera Suite is a five-movement composition for a modern jazz orchestra augmented with timbres derived from extreme metal. Each movement explores how conventions located in extreme metal can be combined with modern jazz orchestra conventions to create a unique multi-movement suite. While each movement is composed discretely and can stand on its own, the Chimera Suite is intended to be experienced in one continuous sitting, as local and global through-composed forms are used to create thematic unity across the entire suite. Chapter 1 examines the global scenes of jazz and extreme metal, as well as the local Wellington jazz scene through Fabian Holt’s popular genre framework of ‘networks’ and ‘conventions’, and identifies the musical aesthetics that I drew from during the Chimera Suite’s compositional process. In Chapter 2, I analyse extreme metal band Between the Buried and Me’s ‘Silent Flight Parliament’ off their album The Parallax II: Future Sequence, jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s ‘The Grid’ and ‘Out of The Grid’, and jazz drummer Dan Weiss’ ‘Annica’. Each of the artists’ works exhibits various musical conventions located in both jazz and extreme metal genres that I observe via the lenses of through-composed form, heaviness, and the dialectic of freedom and control. I analyse my own composition, the Chimera Suite, through the same lenses of through-composed form, heaviness, and the dialectic of freedom and control in Chapter 3, while discussing the ways in which the musical scenes identified in Chapter 1, and the musical inspirations found in Chapter 2, have impact the suite’s conception. Throughout this thesis, I discuss the unique perspectives afforded through this combination of genres that in turn, call into question the defining elements that contribute towards a genre’s identity.</p>

Composing the Chimera Suite: Grafting the Conventions of Extreme Metal onto a Jazz Orchestra Setting

<p>The Chimera Suite is a five-movement composition for a modern jazz orchestra augmented with timbres derived from extreme metal. Each movement explores how conventions located in extreme metal can be combined with modern jazz orchestra conventions to create a unique multi-movement suite. While each movement is composed discretely and can stand on its own, the Chimera Suite is intended to be experienced in one continuous sitting, as local and global through-composed forms are used to create thematic unity across the entire suite. Chapter 1 examines the global scenes of jazz and extreme metal, as well as the local Wellington jazz scene through Fabian Holt’s popular genre framework of ‘networks’ and ‘conventions’, and identifies the musical aesthetics that I drew from during the Chimera Suite’s compositional process. In Chapter 2, I analyse extreme metal band Between the Buried and Me’s ‘Silent Flight Parliament’ off their album The Parallax II: Future Sequence, jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s ‘The Grid’ and ‘Out of The Grid’, and jazz drummer Dan Weiss’ ‘Annica’. Each of the artists’ works exhibits various musical conventions located in both jazz and extreme metal genres that I observe via the lenses of through-composed form, heaviness, and the dialectic of freedom and control. I analyse my own composition, the Chimera Suite, through the same lenses of through-composed form, heaviness, and the dialectic of freedom and control in Chapter 3, while discussing the ways in which the musical scenes identified in Chapter 1, and the musical inspirations found in Chapter 2, have impact the suite’s conception. Throughout this thesis, I discuss the unique perspectives afforded through this combination of genres that in turn, call into question the defining elements that contribute towards a genre’s identity.</p>

Music in the Digital World

Digital technologies have impacted and reshaped almost every aspect of 21st-century life, from communication and commerce, to work and leisure, to education and politics. This bibliography represents a collection of scholarship that seeks to detail how varied and ubiquitous digital technologies have reshaped music, and how music has in turn shaped the digital world. Since the first years of the 21st century, widespread access to digital technologies, including social media, smartphones, and Web 2.0 have fundamentally transformed musical aesthetics, creation, performance, consumption, and reception on a global scale. As of October 2020, there are around 4.66 billion active internet users around the globe, nearly all of whom interact with music in one way or another. This bibliography addresses how this “digital world” is implicated in 21st-century digital regimes, and in the global flows and local assemblages of music’s production, circulation, and consumption. Like the technologies themselves, scholarship on music in the digital world is a rapidly shifting field. Readers are encouraged to understand this bibliography as a fluid network of related topics, with substantial thematic overlap between sections. Except when a subject touches on topics unique to this bibliography, the authors have omitted topics covered extensively in other Oxford Bibliographies, including “Film Music,” “Video Game Music,” “Electronic and Computer Music Instruments,” and “Music Technology.”

Rethinking Affect

This chapter rethinks affect, one of the key constituents of musical aesthetics in Bach’s time. Interrogating the musicological concept of Affektenlehre, it addresses musical affect as a new perspective on what musicology has tended to isolate historically under the umbrella of German Baroque rhetoric. The first paragraphs sketch a historiography of hermeneutic views of the Affektenlehre and address the criticisms that this approach has encountered. Based on a rereading of historical sources, the chapter investigates the ways in which twentieth-century musicologists developed views on affect in German Baroque music, the relation of these views to the historical situation, and their role in Bach studies. Taking into account early modern affect theories as well as the modern philosophies of affect based upon them, the final paragraphs aim to achieve an understanding of affect that is more in line with contemporary musical practice and theory.

The Catholic Church in Republican Musical Aesthetics

Debates concerning the appropriate nature of sacred music in France persisted throughout the nineteenth century. While many figures within the Catholic Church took the more traditional stance in their proclamation of plainchant as the genre of sacred music par excellence, other priests and church musicians insisted that more modern styles of composition were not only appropriate but necessary for French Catholics. This debate was not limited to the confines of the Church: Republican composers, for their part, also contributed their views on the matter, which largely stated that the realms of sacred and secular were not mutually exclusive. This chapter outlines the debate on both sides in order to reveal how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music into their secular constructions of French music. It also reveals the discursive slippages between Catholic denigrations of “modern” religious music and “secular” compositional styles: more often than not, modern religious music was strikingly close to the Catholic ideal, even when it was written by a decidedly secular composer for non-liturgical use. A study of Contes mystiques, a collection of twelve mélodies written by such composers as Gabriel Fauré, Théodore Dubois, Henri Maréchal, and Pauline Viardot, reveals how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music and how this modern music was strikingly similar to the Catholic ideal, even when written by “secular” composers for non-liturgical use.

CULTURAL MEANING OF JAZZ (THROUGH THEODOR ADORNO’S CONCEPTION)

The article examines the patterns of development of one of the important musical trends in the XX and the XXI centuries in terms of its socio-cultural and socio-philosophical characteristics. The analysis takes into account Russian and Western (European and American) trends and assessments. The article captures the methodology of Theodor Adorno’s position, his political and musicological views. Attention is paid to the mechanisms of development of spiritual culture in a post-industrial society. The author substantiates the hypothesis and elaborates the idea of the great potential of jazz as a productive form of development and improvement of culture. The musical trends of the mid-twentieth century demonstrated radical transformations of jazz and rock music under the influence of commercialization, which demanded the simplification of the figurative system and language, active use of technical achievements, and mediation of musical space. The transformation of music and musical space contributed to the restructuring of society’s existence and consciousness, which in turn influenced the change of musical aesthetics and consumerized it.

Getting Freaky with Missy

This article analyzes the music of Black female rapper Missy Elliott in order to consider performative challenges to the politics of visibility and visuality of Black queerness in hip hop. While mainstream media lauds the recent increase in and representation of out Black LGBTQ rappers, scholars such as C. Riley Snorton caution such praise for the unique ways visibility and surveillance are entangled formations that render Black queer communities vulnerable to violence. This article draws on Elliott’s songs “Get Ur Freak on” and “Pussycat” to present alternative ways of navigating the violence of visibility for Black queers and queerness. It argues that Elliott musically inhabits, expresses, and produces queerness through a set of cultural practices that this article calls the “musical aesthetics of impropriety.” The musical aesthetics of impropriety are performative expressions that are developed and deployed at the level of the sound recording, and that exploit the gaps and fissures of what qualifies as proper sexual subjects (e.g., LGBT) and how we come to perceive them as such (i.e., “evidence“) in order to produce alternative sexual and sonic formations. It is, thus, through the musical aesthetics of impropriety that we might imagine and articulate racialized queerness in hip hop differently.

At Peace Finally? Gene Oishi’s Fox Drum Bebop and the Last Memories of Japanese American Internment Camps

Gene Oishi’s autobiographical and episodic novel Fox Drum Bebop (2014) will likely be one of the final novels published by someone who was an internee in the detention camps in which the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans during the Second World War. As such, it presents complicated questions about temporality, rep- resentation, and the processes of trauma. Through focusing on the protagonist Hiroshi Kono (largely, though not restrictively, based on Oishi’s own life experience) and his siblings who have distinct ideological reactions to their ethnic identity and their wartime experience, Oishi explores how internment at once lasted for a determinate period but continues to extend in space and dilate in time for as long as the memories of it endure. The novel uses the musical aesthetics of jazz as a correlate for this discontinuous process- ing of experience. Oishi’s narrative asks if those who suffer oppression and trauma can ever find peace, and how, if at all, having a long life and reflecting upon the past can alter one’s sense of what happened.