American Music Research Articles

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation

Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland

Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland is a written history of a people that normally do not have histories written about them: small-town teenage and twenty-something misfits forging a musical and cultural scene despite the societal forces that would rather they did not exist. It is the kind of history that is archived in bedroom closets and passed down in conversation and local lore.This book is as close to a primary document as a book of its type could be. Most of its twenty-four pages of references are personal correspondence and conversations with the people who lived the scene between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. One of its authors is a figure in the book, and the pictures that accompany its pages were dug up from the personal collections of those involved. The authors do a good job, however, of positioning the happenings in Peoria within the broader political and musical culture of the time. Punks in Peoria is written from the inside, by those who were part of it, so the voice is sincere, sympathetic, and positive with enough retrospective clarity to be critical and honest when necessary. The authors are aware of the dynamics of race and gender within the culture and acknowledge those realities while taking a clear feminist, anti-racist, and gender-affirming stance.While few of the bands or figures in the book could be described as central to anything outside of central Illinois, some did go on to storied musical careers rooted in the quirky Peoria scene. But more importantly, this book, through a deeply detailed case study, tells the story of the musical culture that most amateur musicians lived in the punk rock scene across the country and has captured this moment in American history in a heartfelt snapshot.It often felt like reading the story of any American city. The specifics are less important than the process, the culture, the piece of life they represent and encapsulate. It is an important account of the mechanisms of countercultural movement in music and in general in the years preceding widespread access to the Internet: like the origins and transmission of local slang, and how social cliques and personal identity interacted with music before social media, which makes this work so timely.Significantly, this book is a monument to how youth can come together through punk music to create a world that they want to belong to from scratch. Most readers will come away reminded of someone they knew in high school or shows they attended in college; and, for anyone that had a band of friends that booked DIY shows in ill-suited community spaces to create music of questionable sound quality while also making great memories, moments of this book will read like a personal memoir.For those who did not live this time in Peoria, it can be hard to grasp the long lists of band names and subgenres of punk rock. Such unfamiliarity is significantly ameliorated by the online resources created by the authors and others. Jonathan Wright has a YouTube channel that includes video of the Jesus Lizard's concert detailed in chapter 12. Punks in Peoria has a YouTube channel of its own that includes several recording compilations of hard-to-find material. There are also two extensive compilations of Peoria punk music on the MixCloud station Cities and Signs Radio, and an accompanying record available from Alona's Dream Records. Punks in Peoria has a Linktree page that can direct you to many of these and other resources.For Peoria locals who grew up in this period, this must be a remarkable narrative that both rekindles old memories and helps clarify them in context. If only every city could have an account like this of the growth of its musical cultures. Until then, we will have to live vicariously through the contributions of Wright and Barrett in Punks in Peoria.

About the Authors

Other| April 01 2022 About the Authors Music and the Moving Image (2022) 15 (1): 67. https://doi.org/10.5406/19407610.15.1.04 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation About the Authors. Music and the Moving Image 1 January 2022; 15 (1): 67. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19407610.15.1.04 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMusic and the Moving Image Search Advanced Search katie beisel hollenbach holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on popular music, fan club cultures, and audience reception. Hollenbach has presented her research at the annual conferences of the Society for American Music, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Museum of Pop Culture, and the American Musicological Society. Her work has recently been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Hollenbach is currently a lecturer and assistant director for admissions, recruitment, and community outreach at the University of Washington School of Music.daniel trocmé-latter is Associate Professor in music at Homerton College and an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. His research interests include the role of music in liturgy and ceremony, especially in the sixteenth century; he has published one monograph on the music of the European Reformation, with another forthcoming. A... You do not currently have access to this content.

Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones

Book Review| April 01 2022 Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha LolaJones. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. viii, 346 pp. Birgitta J. Johnson Birgitta J. Johnson BIRGITTA J. JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music and the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include music in African American churches, change and identity in Black popular music, and gospel archiving. She has published articles in the Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology Forum, Liturgy, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, and The Grove Dictionary of American Music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (1): 163–167. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.163 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Birgitta J. Johnson; Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance, by Alisha Lola Jones. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2022; 75 (1): 163–167. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.1.163 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance is an innovative contribution to contemporary Black sacred music and religious life scholarship. Jones uses multi-sited ethnographic research to anchor her analysis of the layered nuances of race, sexuality, gender, and gender presentation in Black Pentecostal religious communities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The diverse settings for musical and rhetorical performances of Black masculinity, gender, and sexuality that Jones traverses in Flaming? are timely additions to an emerging area of Black music research in America. Throughout the book’s eight chapters, she uses insightful case studies to center the spoken and unspoken sentiments of Black male Christian musicians living and working in a society in which their humanity has been historically and violently contested. At the same time, these men are members of a religious community in which Black masculinity is often lionized in overtly... You do not currently have access to this content.

Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker

Reviewed by: Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century by Vaughn A. Booker Alisha Lola Jones Vaughn A. Booker, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York: New York University Press, 2020) Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century, by religion and African American studies scholar Vaughn A. Booker, incisively challenges assumptions about African American jazz musicians’ performance of race, personal belief, and socio-cultural hardwiring toward or against Afro-Protestantism in the popular imagination. Booker’s titular pun—Lift Every Voice and Swing—follows a tide of publications over the last decade on anthems (see Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora [2013]) and particularly on “the Negro National Anthem”—J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—profiled in Imani Perry’s May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018). Further, Lift Every Voice and Swing hearkens to the primacy of vocality and swing as prized organizing components and commoditized principles in religio- cultural performance practices that set apart popular African American musicians in the twentieth-century mediascape. After all, to echo Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington’s signature 1931 composition, “It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing. ” [End Page 131] With a keen awareness of the African philosophical worldview that there is no bifurcation of the “sacred” and “secular,” Booker confirms that for many African American jazz and other musicians there is only a continuum between the religious and non-religious in the artistic discourses accessible to them. To illuminate this observation, he explores the extent to which four jazz tastemakers’ (networks’) commentary and performances influenced religious expression in multi-faith/transdenominational liturgy and popular religio-cultural portrayals: Cab Calloway, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams. In the introduction, Booker establishes the parameters of “sacred” Afro-Protestant aesthetics, offering insight on the “swing concept” of vibraphonist and convert from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science Lionel Hampton. Hampton asserted that it was sacrilege for bands to swing (Negro) spirituals, especially in cinematic portrayals, presumably because of the sultry and sensuous musical associations that swinging prompts: “Sacred African American music was a cultural possession of Hampton and other African Americans, and, in his view, to transform it into a festive or entertaining commodity was to commit sacrilege and racial offense” (1). Hampton’s commentary reveals the extent to which Afro-Protestant religious expression is culture among African Americans, regardless of one’s personal belief. The first part of the book, entitled “Representations of Religion and Race,” comprises four chapters. Readers will note that Booker places taste-makers Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald into the conversation by innovative means, tapping into often overlooked autobiographical material about Calloway, and, and taking alternative measures for Fitzgerald, who rarely interviewed and never produced an autobiography. The first chapter introduces a group of religious race professionals beyond male clergy who are middle-class leaders of Afro-Protestant denominations, organizations, and churches. In the second chapter, Booker concentrates on maestro Cab Calloway’s early jazz career and the extent to which, as a person who did not participate in institutional religion, he deploys religious humor to push the limits. Instead of typically centering Black male musicians within Bebop jazz discourse, the third chapter centers on the vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s efforts to fashion her raced, gendered, and (non-)religious identity. Racial and religious reverence are investigated in the fourth chapter through Duke Ellington’s musical compositions in which he explores biblical and historical African civilizations. [End Page 132] Part two, “Missions and Legacies,” spans five chapters. The fifth chapter attends to Duke Ellington who was influential in religious literature while maintaining core conversation partners who were not formed in Christianity. We learn in the sixth chapter about Ellington’s theology through his recorded private thoughts in relation to his compositional practice. Composer Mary Lou Williams is featured in the seventh chapter, which examines her religious thoughts following her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Following Williams through her business archives...

A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band: Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy

A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band:Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy Jedediah Kuhn (bio) Redbone is one of the most successful Native American bands in the history of rock 'n' roll. They emerged onto the U.S. music scene in 1970 with music that spoke directly to the burgeoning Red Power movement.1 Hits such as "Come and Get Your Love" and "The Witch-Queen of New Orleans" topped the charts in the United States, Canada, and Europe and still receive regular airplay today.2 Brothers Patrick (Pat) and Candido (Lolly) Vegas founded the band and served as its core members. In his memoir, Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present), Pat Vegas traces his and Lolly's ascent to rock stardom. Vegas also reveals something perhaps unexpected in the memoir of a Native American musician: in addition to being Native, Pat Vegas is Mexican American. In fact, several of the band's members are both Native and Mexican American, and Vegas's memoir as well as the band's music, albums, and performances point to continual intimacies between Native Americans and Mexican Americans.3 Pat Vegas's Mexican American heritage as well as that of Redbone's other band members rub against both popular and scholarly notions of "authentic" Native American and Indigenous identity and presents a new vantage point from which to think about Native American-Chicanx relationality. Whereas scholars have examined the numerous overlaps between these groups in the nineteenth century and earlier, work examining the twentieth century often focuses on one group or the other. Further, in the few places where scholars do examine relations between these groups, they focus on analyzing the Chicano Movement's claim of Indigenous status, a claim many scholars, especially those [End Page 11] working under the rubric of critical Latinx indigeneities and critical ethnic studies, have problematized as perpetuating the marginalization of Indigenous peoples on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, in the interest of supporting Indigenous rights in the United States and Mexico, this study agrees with this emerging scholarship that it is important not to conflate Indigenous status—which pertains to a political category designating the first peoples within settler states—and Indigenous descent in the way that the Chicano Movement has done in the past. What this study problematizes, however, is the collapsing of all discussion of Native-Chicanx relationality into the question of the Chicano Movement's (mis)uses of indigeneity. Instead, this essay turns to intimacy as a framework to rethink Native American-Chicanx relations. I argue that the case of Redbone reveals glimpses of a long, continual history of intimacy between Native Americans and Mexican Americans as well as the oppressive demands for authenticity that delimit Native American identity and render such intimacies illegible. This study explores traces of intimacy between Native Americans and Chicanxs through an analysis of a sampling of cultural texts produced by Redbone and Pat Vegas during the band's 1970s heyday, including music, lyrics, performances, and visual representation on album covers as well as Pat Vegas's 2017 self-published memoir Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present). Vegas's memoir moves chronologically, tracing his and Lolly's early years and family life, their time as backing musicians in Los Angeles, and their rise (and fall) as members of Redbone. The memoir emphasizes these early years, covering the post-1970s period, including Lolly's passing in 2010, in one brief chapter. The final portion of the book includes appendices written by friends and former band members, such as Pete DePoe and Butch Rillera, and argues explicitly for the band's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Scholars have long turned to popular culture, popular music in particular, as a critical site where marginalized groups articulate difference to resist the dominant national culture's attempts to assimilate them.4 Redbone is particularly appropriate for this study because, as a prominent Native American band emerging at the height of the Red Power movement, they can easily be read as articulating Native American resistance to U.S. oppression; however, they also gesture to something more...

Wary and StrangeCast-Iron Pansexual

When I was invited to write an album review for this issue, I perused several volumes of JAS media reviews. Many thoughtful and well-written reviews highlighted albums readily legible as “Appalachian” through repertoire, style, and genre. Reflecting on this issue's focus on queerness, I decided to cover the work of two artists whose work invites audiences to listen carefully to the subtleties and nuances of queerness in and from the region. Yet both, in their own ways, also elide, bend, and “queer” canonic styles, genres, and aesthetics commonly associated with Appalachia and Appalachian studies.Over the past decade, Amythyst Kiah's work has implicitly centered the sounds and voices of African American musicians elided in canonic “Appalachian” music, while subtly opening space for queer performance and listening. Born in Chattanooga and an alumnus of East Tennessee State University's Bluegrass program and Old-Time Pride Band, Kiah's debut acoustic album Dig (self-released 2012) curated a “southern gothic” aesthetic that spanned traditional Appalachian ballads to songs by Dink Roberts and Son House. Here, Kiah's covers of these songs and her original tunes frequently invite queer readings through ambiguous representations of gender and narratives that subtly avoid heteronormative tropes. Her second album, Amythyst Kiah & Her Chest of Glass (Soul Step Records 2017), pushes these avenues further, using an electric blues and rock and roll sound (inspired by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) to re-invigorate tunes by Veera Hall (for example, “Troubles So Hard”), and less opaquely queer lyrics in Kiah's original songs like “Wildebeest.”An album comprised of original material, Wary and Strange (2021) more stridently articulates these intersectional priorities through new facets of Kiah's genre-bending sound. Kiah's Grammy nominated “Black Myself” signals the album's bolder songwriting through an anthem of black feminist resilience, liberation, and solidarity. Originally written and recorded for the acoustic roots Songs of Our Native Daughters project (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 2019), Kiah's electrified and pop-produced version on Wary and Strange infuses the anthem with new energy and urgency. These political overtones resonate with more subtle songs that critique empty political rhetoric (“Soapbox”) as well as complacency in contemporary Western culture (“Fancy Drones [Fracture Me]”). However, Kiah continues to open space for queerness in narratives about relationships through including a country-influenced song about unrequited love (“Ballad of the Lost”) and rock ballads that address the difficulties of ending a fraught relationship (“Sleeping Queen” and “Opaque”). In these songs and others (“Firewater” and “Wild Turkey”), Kiah squarely addresses the importance of attending to mental health, particularly unresolved trauma.A self-proclaimed non-binary country singer based in northeast Tennessee, Adeem the Artist's 2021 album Cast-Iron Pansexual presents a similar queer ethic and politics. As an experienced singer-songwriter whose recorded output spans a decade and nearly as many styles, Cast-Iron Pansexual represents a more recent turn toward queerness in their work. Adeem explains in the album's visually and poetically beautiful lyric ’zine that they wrote the songs while reading gender theory, reflecting on their sexuality, and exploring their “divine femininity” in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, 1). This led to their coming out as non-binary and “drifting with the waters pace towards wholeness” (Adeem 2021, 1).In this spirit, most songs on Cast-Iron Pansexual work through unacknowledged and unarticulated queer experiences and desires. The album's lead track “I Never Came Out” describes not having words to say you're “not straight or gay” in order to reflect on recognizing and overcoming internalized misogyny. While personal, inward-facing reflections on gender and sexuality permeate the album (“Apartment,” “Honeysuckle Hipbilly Homoerotica”), Adeem's songs leverage commentaries on social, cultural, and political norms in contemporary Appalachia and the South. Sentiments about religion and spirituality range from ambivalence and gender-bending re-imagination (“Fervent for the Hunger”) to slapstick queer humor (“Going to Heaven”). “I Wish You Would've Been a Cowboy” moves beyond the parody the title implies, to launch a critique of masculinity and nationalism in both Toby Keith's music and the politics of early 2000s commercial country music. The album's titular track delivers the most direct political statement within an already queer Appalachian world replete with interdimensional pansexuals, Marxists, a restaurant where you don't pay anything, tarot readings, and plenty of barbeque and cornbread. However, accompanied by pithy banjo picking, the song's final verse calls for a “radical movement towards equity (and justice) to dismantle white supremacy entirely, brick by brick, by hand, together.”The works of Amythyst Kiah and Adeem the Artist stand out for constructing musically compelling spaces that call listeners to imagine and build intersectional queer solidarities, healing, community, and activism. Their albums also implicitly ask us to listen to the numerous queer musicians and performers in the region who work within and against narrow definitions of Appalachia and, in so doing, re-imagine queerness more expansively.

Students' Perception of Online Learning During COVID-19: A U.S.-Based Music Therapy Survey.

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic affected music therapy education, with many university programs instantly shifting from in-person to remote online teaching. As literature related to various aspects of COVID-19 is emerging, none has yet examined music therapy students' responses to the sudden modification of teaching modalities. The aim of this study was to understand how the music therapy learning environment changed during the COVID-19 pandemic; students' experiences with unexpected remote learning, clinical training, and examination; and their perception of barriers and benefits of online learning. American Music Therapy Association students attending courses from Spring 2020 through Spring 2021 were invited to participate in this national survey. In total, 230 music therapy students across seven regions responded to the 26-item questionnaire through Qualtrics®. Seven questions were further explored with a student focus group. Results indicated that courses were mainly altered to synchronous lectures, clinical training changed to varied telepractice experiences, and examination was modified across universities. Students spent about the same time in remote learning and found synchronous lectures mostly engaging. Commonly perceived barriers included screen fatigue, physical isolation from peers, and poor internet connection. Safety during COVID-19, no traveling time, and being more comfortable at home were noted as key benefits. In conclusion, online learning allowed the continuation of music therapy education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving forward, the development of effective online courses and research-based guidelines for tele-interventions is desirable to improve the music therapy educational landscape during future crises and to prepare students for competent services in a digital world.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Auditory and visual category learning in musicians and nonmusicians.

Across three experiments, we compare the ability of amateur musicians and nonmusicians in learning artificial auditory and visual categories that can be described as either rule-based (RB) or information-integration (II) category structures. RB categories are optimally learned using a reflective reasoning process, whereas II categories are optimally learned by integrating information from two stimulus dimensions at a reflexive, predecisional processing stage. We found that musicians have selective advantages for learning auditory RB categories, specifically when they are instructed about the dimensions that define the categories. In Experiment 1, musicians enrolled in a music college demonstrated advantages over nonmusicians in learning auditory RB categories defined on frequency and duration dimensions but did not demonstrate differences in learning auditory II categories or either visual RB or II categories. In Experiment 2, a broader online sample of musicians who were not instructed about the dimensions did not demonstrate any advantage in auditory or visual learning. In Experiment 3, an online sample of musicians when given dimension instructions demonstrated early advantages over nonmusicians for auditory RB but not visual RB categories. Musicians do not demonstrate a global categorization advantage. Musicians' category learning advantage is limited to their modality of expertise, is enhanced with dimension instructions, and is specific to categories that can be described with verbalizable rules. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Emergence of Interactive Music: The Vision and Presence of Joel Chadabe

The Emergence of Interactive Music: The Vision and Presence of Joel Chadabe

Stylistic Duality in Gabriel Fauré's Music for Pauline Viardot's Salon

When Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) became a ‘regular’ at the Parisian salon of opera legend Pauline Viardot in 1871, he encountered businessmen and politicians in addition to aristocrats and socialites, plus artists and authors as well as amateur musicians and professional peers. Encouraged by Madame Viardot and inspired by her ‘artistic salon’, Fauré produced sophisticated works with stylistic duality: music that appealed to and satisfied both intuitive and analytic listeners.This essay examines three of Fauré's compositions that feature stylistic duality, each dedicated to a member of the Viardot family. These include two early mélodies, ‘Chanson du pêcheur (Lamento)’ (1872) and ‘Au bord de l'eau’ (1875), plus the Romance pour violon (1877). It demonstrates that these pieces, which sought to engage a diverse audience and involve each member in an individualized and interactive aesthetic experience, reveal considerable sophistication below their immediately attractive surfaces. This article also avers that abandonment of misconceptions and prejudices is essential to full appreciation of Gabriel Fauré's refined and innovative art.

Methods of Practice Piano for Music Pedagogical Students at Thanh Hoa University of Culture Sports and Tourism

The piano plays an important role, being the most popular musical instrument with the largest number of learners not only in Vietnam but also in the world. With a rich and varied expression, the piano can perform independently without any other instrument support and still achieve high artistic efficiency. Not only that, but due to its multi-vocal nature, the piano can be used as an orchestral instrument or as an accompaniment for vocals and other musical instruments. Therefore, the piano is a common and essential instrument for both professional and amateur musicians. Mastering the skill of playing the piano well will be the basis for the formation and development of creative thinking, in addition, it will help expand knowledge and create favorable conditions for all those who are studying music. general, or other musical instruments in particular. At the Thanh Hoa University of Culture, Sports and Tourism, students of Music pedagogy are now equipped with basic knowledge and skills to play the piano to ensure good accompaniment for their future work.

Coronavirus vaccination rates in cultural areas in Germany.

Vaccination is a significant preventive measure to contain the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Vaccination rates can provide useful information on the potential spread of infection in a given population. In this study, vaccination rates and attitudes towards vaccination in cultural sectors, specifically the music sector, have been investigated. In total, 4341 persons in four different areas, including visitors to performances of classical music and musicals, as well as professional and amateur musicians, have participated in this survey. Results show rates of 86% recovered from the COVID-19 virus or vaccinated at least once, with 54.5% fully vaccinated. These vaccination rates were considerably higher compared to the general population. An attitude of hesitation towards vaccination found in 6.4% of those sampled was half that of the general population. These findings drawn from a large sample indicate that in the field of music a high vaccination rate is to be found, as well as a low rejection rate of vaccination on the part of the audience and performers. The results can be used to provide insights into the vaccination status to be found at cultural events and, importantly, to assist in consideration of whether cultural events should be permitted to continue under pandemic circumstances.

David Lang’s Postminimalist Musical Theater

The article explores issues of the American musical theater of the nineteenth century, fruitfully developing on the basis of postminimalism. Among the brightest representatives of this style is the composer David Lang (1957), a member of the group “Bang on a Can”. His theatrical projects of the last two decades demonstrate a new phase in the development of postminimalist theater, the foundation of which was laid by his older contemporaries, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams. Using the example of stage works — “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” (2002), “Prisoner of the State” (2019), and “Anatomy Theater” (2016) — the author identifies the main features of Lang’s musical and theatrical style and traces a close relationship with the operas of his predecessors. They are brought closer by the appeal to postmodern dramaturgy (fragmentation, discreteness, commentarity), social problems, the desire for genre uniqueness of each performance, repetitive methods of organizing musical facture. In his theatrical work, Lang relies on postminimalism and repetitive technique, which manifests itself at different levels — dramatic, verbal (repetition of syllables, words, phrases in the libretto) and musical. A characteristic feature of Lang’s stage opuses is the synthesis of academic opera traditions and non-academic genres and directions (Musical, jazz, rap), which allows us to draw analogies with the art of crossovers. The Musical in some cases acts as the genre basis of the work (non-academic vocals, dances, a speech episodes). Lang’s theater is a chamber theater, it assumes a small composition of participants, placement of vocalists and orchestra members on the stage, laconic timing of plays. All these factors allow us to make an assumption about the formation in Lang’s musical and theatrical work of the next phase of the evolution of postminimalism, which can be characterized as postpostminimalism.

МУЗИЦИРОВАНИЕ И ПЕНИЕ В ПОВЕСТИ АРКАДИЯ ГАЙДАРА «ТИМУР И ЕГО КОМАНДА»

The article deals with the motif of singing and music-making in the story “Timur and his team” (1940) by Arkady Gaidar. The author analyses 18 episodes in which the characters of the story sing or play music: a musical amateur performance (staging an opera), home and amateur music-making, Red Army chorus, trumpeter’s signals, performing a “novelty romance” and ditties accompanied by a fight, shouts of a milkmaid, improvised orchestra concert by children playing on “bottles, cans, bottles and sticks”, use of musical toys and so on. The musical texture of the novel is placed in the context of the mass musical culture of the 1930s and in the tradition of Russian classical music. The functions of this motif in the text of the story are revealed: the creation of an atmosphere of a dacha village near Moscow, allusions, and characterization of adult heroes. The article shows how the irony of the author is expressed through scenes of singing and music-making, and how the author’s accents are placed in the depiction and evaluation of characters. The analysis of this motif allows us to propose new interpretations of the world of children and adults depicted in A. Gaidar’s story; the relevant categories which distinguish children and adults in the story are original/secondary, natural/artificial, and improvisation/performance.

Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells

Reviewed by: Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry by Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells Robert Willey Historical Dictionary of the American Music Industry. By Keith Hatschek and Veronica A. Wells. (Historical Dictionaries of Professions and Industries.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. [xxiii, 360 p. ISBN 9781538111437 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9781538111444 (e-book), price varies.] Acronyms and abbreviations, chronology, appendixes, bibliography. [End Page 434] This reference book gives a broad overview of how the popular-music industry has evolved in the United States in the last 250 years and includes entries covering the practices, terminology, concepts, careers, and representative pioneers who have created music and brought it to the public. One in a series of historical dictionaries published by Rowman & Littlefield, this volume follows the same format as the Historical Dictionary of Librarianship, presenting subject terms in bold while indicating where to find synonyms or related terms, which makes it easy to scan the pages and locate what is of interest. This cross referencing is of special value. For example, the reader is directed to see “DJ” for information about “Deejays”, and to also read about the “First Sale Doctrine” in the entry on “Copyright.” The conciseness of the entries makes it a valuable supplement to textbooks on the subject, where indexes help locate pages that include terms, but which can then be slow to find the references providing the information that is desired. Readers have become used to searching for information on the internet, but this book saves time by collecting consistently high-quality results that won’t become outdated. While the book is intended to be a dictionary on individual subjects, the fact that the authors have also incorporated many interesting facts that are not covered elsewhere makes it enjoyable to read it in spurts from start to end. Like others in the series, this Dictionary begins with four pages of abbreviations and acronyms, which would be helpful for deciphering the language in contracts, for example. This is followed by a nine-page chronology of developments over a wide range of topics, including technology (radio, records, television, portable systems, networks), advertisers, festivals, and investors. I was happy to find many facts that a reader is unlikely to be aware of even if they are familiar with the field—for example, that the first commercial radio was installed in an automobile in 1930 and that the cast of Hair (which opened on Broadway in 1968) performed at the March on Washington. This timeline often reveals the synchronicity between multiple events in the same year. The next section is a thirty-two-page condensed history that provides an excellent overview of the music industry. A slower reading pace is required, since it packed with information, and many facts are delivered in succession without a lot of transitional passages. The authors begin with the colonial era and proceed through minstrelsy (where the pattern of cultural appropriation in American popular music of African American culture began), vaudeville, and how advances in printing, the expansion of the postal service, and affordable sheet music led to the rise of Tin Pan Alley publishers. Printed scores became less important as radio became popular, and the teen market created by baby boomers and advertising fueled the birth of rock and roll. Music popular with teenagers in the 1960s became mainstream; later festivals and corporations made it more of a commodity, and video made it a more visual medium. The drop in record sales in the last twenty years made live-performance revenue more important. The book was released just before the COVID-19 pandemic, making it a useful snapshot of the industry just before it began to increasingly shift to online experiences. The bulk of the work rests in the more than five hundred entries. The authors achieved a good balance between presenting information on individuals responsible for music and those instrumental for how it is sold. Readers on the outside of the industry will be more familiar with the names of artists and bands than those of record-label executives, managers, talent agents, [End Page 435] producers, inventors, promoters, and DJs who work behind the scenes. The focus is on the popular-music industry...

Inventing Latin American Music - The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History. By Pablo Palomino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 260. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $99.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.

Inventing Latin American Music - The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History. By Pablo Palomino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 260. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 35.00 paper. - Volume 79 Issue 1

Defining the Therapeutic Singing Voice: Further Examination of the Everyday Singing Practices of Music Therapists

Abstract Twelve music therapists were observed working clinically in 3 to 5 of their music therapy sessions and subsequently interviewed about their clinical work in order to further examine and define the essential characteristics of therapeutic singing in music therapy clinical practice. Observational and interview data were analyzed separately using procedures consistent with qualitative content analysis and then integrated to provide a comprehensive picture of these singing practices. Analysis of these data revealed 3 interrelated dimensions of therapeutic singing that were integrated into the larger realization of therapeutic singing: (1) foundational vocal skills, (2) vocal engagement, and (3) authenticity. Implications for the education and training of music therapy students, vocal health, and a reevaluation of the American Music Therapy Association’s competencies contextualize these findings for the profession as a whole.

Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

Reviewed by: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Sooyoung Chung (bio) Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020), pp. ix + 321, $37.50 paperback. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical examines the Broadway musical’s creative and critical engagement with Victorian literature and culture. Weltman focuses on the intertextual network surrounding Broadway adaptations and their Victorian sources and explores other adaptations including plays, films, and illustrations. Beginning with the musical theater adaptations of Victorian literature produced in the “Golden Age of Broadway” in the 1940s, Weltman follows the chronological development of American musical theater, from musical comedy to integrated musical to the megamusical (4). This chronological organization allows Weltman to analyze each Broadway musical adaptation in the historical and cultural context of both Victorian literature and American musical theater. [End Page 662] Weltman’s extensive research bolsters her analyses of the literary and musical texts, helping the reader gain “reciprocal insights” to both texts (227). The strength of Victorians on Broadway lies in its attempt to understand Broadway adaptations of Victorian literature within a larger network of texts and contexts. The first chapter sets the stage for Weltman’s intertextual exploration of Broadway adaptations by providing a history of the American musical theater; a historiography of Victorian studies with reference to scholars such as Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, Kathleen Tillotson, Walter E. Houghton, Lytton Strachey, and Richard Altick; and an overview of the twentieth century’s reception of Victorian literature and culture. Weltman examines One Touch of Venus (1943) in this larger context and argues that the musical “is a precursor and an outlier, illustrating an important conjunction of intellectual and aesthetic changes occurring simultaneously in the 1940s and 1950s” (53–54). Chapters 2 and 3, examining The King and I (1951) and Oliver! (1968) respectively, illustrate how these musicals negotiate each Victorian source text’s commentary on race, gender, and class for its American audience in the mid-twentieth century. “In The King and I’s mythologized Victorian milieu,” Weltman argues, “the white British governess represents in part an idealized United States” (56). Weltman’s claim that these musicals “use their Victorian lenses to refract contemporary American concerns” is more clearly demonstrated in Oliver! (56). Oliver! carefully downplayed the Jewishness of Fagin to address concerns of post–World War II audiences and recreated him, “a virulent anti-Semitic stereotype, in a way that makes the character likable while still utterly recognizable” (92). Weltman rightly acknowledges that this is a great example of an adaptation affecting the public view of its source text. At the heart of Weltman’s argument is the contention that Broadway’s perception of the Victorian equals Dickensian. She not only discusses the musicals adapted directly from Charles Dickens’s works, Oliver! and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), but more interestingly finds influences of Dickens in other musicals based on Victorian texts, such as Sweeney Todd (1979) and Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical (1997). In chapter 4, Weltman provides insight into Sweeney Todd’s relation to Victorian cultural contexts based on her personal interview with the creator, Stephen Sondheim. When asked about his idea of Victorian literature and culture, Sondheim pointed to Dickens—both the novels and their film adaptations (109). Weltman also examines how Sweeney Todd enjoyed a successful afterlife in opera and film, which also employed Dickensian features to ensure their Victorianism. In chapter 5, Weltman examines Rupert Holmes’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, adapted from Dickens’s unfinished novel of the same title. She pays particular attention to the show’s metatheatricality, in which “Dickens, Holmes, the performers, and the audience as well as the [End Page 663] characters all seem to participate” (134). The musical actively engages with the unfinished state of the novel’s narrative and offers a do-it-yourself ending where the audience votes for a desired conclusion. This meta theatricality illuminates the inherent musical theatricality in Dickens’s novel, Weltman argues, supporting her central claim that “adaptations indelibly affect our understanding of Victorian literature and...