From Religious Eulogy to War Anthem

This article looks to two songs, “Layla Said” and “Mammad, You Weren't There to See,” to examine the politics of representation, race, religion, and nationalism in late twentieth-century Iran. “Layla Said,” a religious eulogy sung by Jahanbakhsh Kurdizadeh, would serve as inspiration for the most popular song of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in terms of melody, rhythm, and lyrics. Kurdizadeh, a visibly Black Iranian, is not popularly remembered as the source of the eulogy, an omission that compounds many of the politics of Black representation in Iran. Through an investigation of film, aural recordings, photographs, and more, this article follows the many mutations of the eulogy-turned-anthem to identify the various ways ethnography and documentary works frame blackness in Iran. Kurdizadeh's life and marginalized legacy highlights the tacit erasure of blackness on the national stage in Iran.

How the Titles of Popular Songs have Changed over the Last 60 Years

Billboard magazine has been keeping track of the 100 hottest (most popular) songs of the year since 1958. Lists of the Hot 100 titles from 1960 to 2019 (6001 titles) were used to study the way in which popular song titles changed over time. Based on significant polynomial regression trends and significant results from a discriminant function analysis, it is concluded that there were three main phases in titles (early, middle, and late) and that these phases differ in predictable manners in terms of stylistic features such as length, abstraction, activity, and the use of the word “love”. Early phase titles are longer, more concrete, more passive, and they do not use the word “love” often; middle phase titles are of medium length, more abstract, of medium activation, and use the word “love” frequently. Titles of the last phase are shorter, more concrete, more active, and do not often employ the word love. A possible factor contributing to these differences is the rise in popularity of rock and roll and hip-hop respectively and their different periods of ascendency.

Dravidian poem translated into Pali? Apadana-atthakatha/Visuddhajanavilasini |(534 13-537 28, vv 12–48)

This article examines a poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana which expands on the poem attributed to Kaludayitthera in the Theragatha; the poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana did not make it into the final canon. The hypothesis of this paper is that the poem may be a popular Dravidian song adapted to Buddhist use and translated into Pali, and this is the primary reason it was excluded from the canon. This conclusion is based on several factors. 1) The author of the Pali poem was not well versed in the Pali language and made constant mistakes in translation. 2) Gratuitous repetition; the poem itself is not very good poetry, containing the kind of needless repetition one associates with a popular song. 3) 13.4% of the words in the poem are direct lifts from Dravidian words; this compares to only 3.9% of the words in the Theragatha poem itself, of which this poem is an extension. While this does not prove that the source was a Dravidian poem, it raises the probability quite significantly. In addition, this kind of literature—making lists of biota in the natural world for comparison, personification and poetic effect— is common in Dravidian Sangam literature. 4) The poem contains wrong or awkward phrases in Pali which can be better understood as Dravidian imports, and 5) an extensive and growing body of linguistic evidence shows that the adoption of Dravidian terminology into Buddhist thought and practice was not an uncommon occurrence. It has long been assumed that the Buddha spoke more than just Indic languages, and that his oral teachings in Dravidian or Munda languages were lost. Although this poem is probably not in itself a teaching of the Buddha, but a popular Dravidian song adapted for Buddhist purposes, its analysis is the first attempt to show that some Pali transmissions may be adaptations or translations of indigenous languages; the ramifications and conclusions of such a hypothesis, if proven, open up a whole new area of Buddhist studies, i.e., the transmission of the Buddha’s teachings through indigenous, non Indo-Aryan (non-IA) languages.

Music and Baseball Talks at Cooperstown

This chapter summarizes seven public music theory presentations at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Topics include Charles Ives’s sketches and completed music about baseball and ballplayers, the popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a seminar on historical and contemporary baseball music, Casey at the Bat for band and narrator, major league walk-up and entrance music, and branding ball clubs through music. The chapter describes ways to draw musical meaning from music analysis as a fulfilling way for music theorists to connect their work with public audiences through engagement with music from specific social and cultural contexts. These approaches involve both concert music and contemporary popular music and include music that illustrates or celebrates baseball situations as well as music heard at ballparks.

Chinese urban emotional Slm — a Taste of life in lyrics

The Chinese film industry began in the early twentieth century. Chinese urban emotional film has become more and more popular with the Chinese people in recent years, so urban working youth emotional film also appears more and more often on the screen. An urban emotional film takes the city as a theme, takes urban life as a backdrop, takes urban family, friendship and love as the main clue for plot development, and takes the artistic expression of emotions as the main point of note. The combination of cinema and music is an independent cultural product generated by the film industry. Music plays a leading role in the film, especially in order to emphasize the theme and convey the inner connection of the characters. Je combination of cinematography and music is an essential element in the development of cinema. Chinese people love Chinese urban emotional movies, and most of them depend on processing good songs from movies. Therefore, a good movie and a good episode of the movie, in the audience’s understanding and expectation, are equally important things. Successful Chinese urban emotional films often have more than one popular song that can be passed on to the general public as their cinematic song, and the song’s value orientation is determined by the connotation of the text. Therefore, the creation of song lyrics can be described as the pursuit of excellence, which should not be underestimated.

The power of visual analytics and language processing to explore the underlying trend of highly popular song lyrics

The number of songs are increasing at a very high rate around the globe. Out of the songs released every year, only the top few songs make it to the billboard hit charts .The lyrics of the songs place an important role in making them big hits combined with various other factors like loudness, liveness, speech ness, pop, etc. The artists are faced with the problem of finding the most desired topics to create song lyrics on. This problem is further amplified in selecting the most unique, catchy words which if added, could create more powerful lyrics for the songs. We propose a solution of finding the bag of unique evergreen words using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) technique of natural language processing. The words from this bag of unique evergreen words could be added in the lyrics of the songs to create more powerful lyrics in the future.

The Musical World(s) of Queen

This chapter begins from the premise that’s Queen idiolect or ‘sound’ was distinct in popular music. Using the concept of ‘style planets’, the idiolect characteristics are connected to numerous and varied stylistic sources including 1970s hard rock, 1970s Baroque pop, 1960s pop, soul, and pre-WWII American popular song. These influences are identified in the textural structures, performance gestures, and harmonic choices. Using the concept of ‘musical worlding’, it is suggested that a hypothetical listener might regard Queen’s idiolect as predominantly placed within the world of hard rock, but made to sound distinct and unique because of the integration of seemingly incongruous style influences within their songs. This analysis is conducted with primary reference to ‘We Are the Champions’

Giving Voice to a Foxtrot from Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum preserves a number of manuscripts of popular songs arranged by members of the Auschwitz I Men’s Orchestra. These songs, written with great care in black ink on Beethoven Papier brand music paper, often bear highly ironic, but also tragically relevant titles, such as “Letters That Never Arrived,” “Hours That One Can Never Forget,” “Sing a Song When You’re Sad.” In this article I describe the complex process of realizing a 2018 concert performance and recording of one of these songs, “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens” (The Most Beautiful Time of Life), based on a manuscript deposited in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1975. Originally a 1941 popular song composed by the German film composer Franz Grothe with a text by Willi Dehmel, and scored for a jazz ensemble, it was arranged by the Auschwitz I prisoners for four first violins, five second violins, a viola, two clarinets, a trombone and a tuba. Through this dramatic change in orchestration, errors were occasionally introduced; in this article, I detail the analytical processes involved in correcting these errors and making “micro-interventions” in the score.