Aural Tradition Research Articles

Spinning ancient straw into contemporary gold: transforming folklore into supernatural crime fiction

ABSTRACT Folktales inspire me, as a reader, an academic and as a novelist. That the story has come from an aural tradition makes me wonder about its hidden truths. My creative practice is concerned with the question of how to balance supernaturalism with realism in the contemporary thriller, when adapting a folktale, in this case, ‘The Mermaid Wife’, a Selkie tale from the isle of Unst. My artistic process begins by extrapolating from the not-said, finding chinks in the perspective and narration of the original tale in order to form the basis of the questions posed by my novel. In both of the folktales I have novelised, I began with the assumption that the male point of view was dominant, whereas in both of my novels I choose to shift the perspective to the feminist. I argue here that by doing this, the supernatural aspects – or even magic – in the original tales form part of their rational, pre-scientific worldview. In my novel, by contrast, the supernatural is transformed into a metaphor for the female experience. I recognise, nonetheless, that my reading of the folktale as ‘male’ and the novels as ‘female’ raises some troubling and difficult questions.

Medical and surgical devices in the emergency and trauma patient: what the radiologist should know, and how they can add value.

A variety of different external and internal medical devices are used in the acute setting to maintain life support and manage severely injured and unstable trauma or emergency patients. These devices are inserted into the acutely ill patient with the specific purpose of improving outcome, but misplacement can cause additional morbidity and mortality. Consequently, meaningful interpretation of the position of devices can affect acute management. Some devices such as nasopharyngeal, nasogastric and endotracheal tubes and chest and surgical drains are well known to most clinicians, however, little formal training exists for radiologists in composing their report on the imaging of these devices. The novice radiologist often relies on tips and phrases handed down in an aural tradition or resorts to phrases such as: "position as shown". Furthermore, radiologists with limited experience in trauma might not be familiar with the radiological appearance of other more specific devices. This review will focus on the most common medical devices used in acute trauma patients, indications, radiological appearance and their correct and suboptimal positioning.

The role of architectural acoustics in advancing the aural tradition during the Safavid era

The role of architectural acoustics in advancing the aural tradition during the Safavid era

Folia and Baile de Rabecada: Aural Narratives in a Brazilian Quilombo


 
 
 This article describes the music of baile de rabecada and folia da bandeira from the perspective of two rabeca players who are leaders in a rural Afro- Brazilian community. Their narratives rely on repertoire and music examples that are part of the aural tradition of these practices in the quilombo. Adopting as its focus specific music pieces, this study reveals that baile de rabecada features rhythmic patterns indicating a mixture of Iberian and Afro-Brazilian aspects, to a much greater extent than literature suggests. My ethnographic work on these two rabeca players highlights the association between their music practices and the socio-economic networks of the rural economy. The baile and the popular Catholic folia da bandeira are associated with an agrarian traditional system and territorial relations that form a cultural setting that operates as agency, which has enabled the communities in Vale do Ribeira to reclaim the historical meaning of the quilombo (maroon community), and carry out a political campaign for the recognition of their land rights. As a result of broad social changes, community leaders acknowledge that they do not perform the tradition as it was once practised and are now concerned with the extent to which future generations will maintain the rituals that characterize these rural Afro-Brazilian communities.
 
 

Mathematical music theory of embodied acoustics of Ikoro music using beat-class theory

Through mathematical representation (beat-class theory) of embodied acoustics (psychoacoustics) the predominance of the musical tradition of the Ikoro drum with the Igbo’s can be traced from the past, into the present and forecasted into the future. The Ikoro music tradition has been viewed as an integral and indispensable part of Igbo culture at large (Onwubiko and Neilsen, 2019). The major musical instruments that accompany most Igbo music are percussional, such as, ichaka (beaded-gourd rattle), okpokolo (wooden claves), and igba (membrane drum) and are characterized by successions of rhythmic interchange unlimited to interesting pitch, timbre, rhythm and meter by employing shifted accents, non-accented rhythms and syncopations. In order to understand Ikoro music located in the listener’s experience (embodied psychoacoustics), we demonstrate how mathematical music theory (beat-class theory) provides the means to articulate the “mind and body” response to the stimulus of sound. By examining the aural tradition of Ikoro music of the Igbo’s through visualizations and sonifications of beat-class theory using ski-hill graphs and circular cyclic graphs, “hidden” musical structures are revealed which possess significant cultural significance.

A Manifesto on African American Prison Literature

A Manifesto on African American Prison Literature Davu Seru (bio) The radical confession “I am a sick man...a spiteful man” could be Aesop without the fabulist’s mask—Augustine the unconverted, a shameless Marquis de Sade, an organic Antonio Gramsci. Jean Genet on his knees fighting capitalism. But it is, of course, Dostoevsky in another voice and flesh that bares the soul, illustrating a problem through its psychic consequences—Dostoevsky warning of a threat to a nation—nation’s metonymic everyman whose imagined, unsympathetic audience would warn “[t]alk about yourself and your own miseries in your stinking hole, but don’t you dare say all of us.” Etheridge Knight’s early poem from Indiana State Prison, “On Universalism,” is a problem echo: No universal lawsOf human miseryCreate a common causeOr common historyThat ease black people’s painsNor break black people’s chains. The disagreement issues, of course, from the language of race in the United States and a peculiar institution, one instigating what would eventually claim Black writing for Black-bottomed readers. This would be the politics of blaxploitation. But history demonstrates the seeming boundlessness of the White gaze and the ultimate failure to claim Black literary production as Black-owned property. What, then, of the Black body and soul? When we talk about African American “prison literature” we usually revisit widely-distributed prose narrative by Black writers published in the wake of Johnson’s Great Society (1964) and the Kerner Commission Report (1967). And perhaps then we are reminded of Robert Beck’s debt to the exilic Chester Himes. Attractive to patricidal White audiences primed by the modernist and postmodernist trouble of alienation and authenticity, and imprisoned and ghettoized Blacks likewise desiring soul-recognition, the works are, however, not the first examples in the racial canon. Robert Reed’s 1858 memoir The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict offers the earliest known example and literal illustration that northern, antebellum Negroes could be prisoners but not slaves, at the same time that our impulse to trace a genealogy of prison writing leads us to fugitive slave narratives. And so, we do better from a broad-narrow view—a view of the genre that can bear the weight of contradictions present in the world from which it issues. Poised against both scientific objectivity and narrow claims to experience, we seek a definition of the genre broad enough to be useful—a breaking with (as opposed to a reform of) the constraints that imprison, whether they be literary or literal. The sick man could be Wheatley, as property (and thus the additional burden of repressing spite), speaking of diabolic stains and their contrary, angelic trains. Yes, Frederick Douglass’s fight, flight, and oratorical fire provide a pattern that Bigger Thomas and his fate would help cement in our minds, but with a difference, as would the epic return down south of Ralph Ellison’s nameless invisible man. Detroit Red, the man who goes by many names, but who speaks to many as Malcolm, Eldridge Cleaver writing as the rapist that everyone assumed Bigger to be, the reformed pimp Robert Beck writing as the amanuensis of Otis Tilson reads like the confessions of an imprisoned queer, as do many of his Oedipus blues numbers. Donald Goines, beckoning unilaterally toward the end-times—the revolutionary passion of Fanon inflicted on his body. To speak is to live for the other and, therefore, to indict the self. But also Harriet Jacobs speaking the unspeakable and of being holed-up to the Cult of True Womanhood, revealing a lie that we often consent to, the lie that this is all about Black Macho. So too in Bessie’s blues, that antiphonal Black feminist thought sung-back in perfect pitch by Michelle Wallace and Angela Davis. Gayl Jones’s Eva speaking from a madhouse of having bitten and assimilated her man. An aural tradition set to tune by Archie Shepp and the New Breed translating the avant-garde moans of the Attica blues to the people. Black Norfolk speaking for itself. And, no less, Lomaxian man hitting playback from Southampton, Parchman Farm and post-racial America still on its...

LINDA PHYLLIS AUSTERN, KARI BOYD MCBRIDE, and DAVID L. ORVIS (eds), Psalms in the Early Modern World

ACCORDING to its dust jacket, ‘Psalms in the Early Modern World is the first book to explore the use, interpretation, development, translation, and influence of the Psalms in the Atlantic world, 1400–1800’. As the editors observe, the Psalms were ubiquitous across early modern Europe and its colonies, part of a textual and aural tradition which lay at the foundations of religious experience. To explore so many aspects of such an all-encompassing tradition is a tall order—comparable, say, to writing a reception history of the Iliad or of the Pentateuch—and Psalms in the Early Modern World should be praised for what it has accomplished, though such praise should come with the recognition that it has only begun to map one small province of a much larger continent. Despite its expansive title, Psalms is essentially a story about England and the English colonies, with only four of the thirteen chapters focusing exclusively on material outside the Anglo-American ambit. This is acknowledged by the editors in a ‘Prefatory Note’ dedicated to elucidating ‘English Reformation Terminology’. This note, however, is one of the more puzzling aspects of the text. The editors define four key terms (‘Catholic’, ‘Protestant’, ‘Puritan’, and ‘Anglican’), which they recognize as being ‘hotly disputed’, but then proceed to define three of these four terms simply by quoting the relevant entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Why, if this was all that was needed, is it the subject of a separate prefatory section?

Between Sound and Sight: Framing the Exotic in Roysten Abel's The Manganiyar Seduction

Roysten Abel's The Manganiyar Seduction is perhaps the most popular performance of Indian folk music on the global festival market today. This performance of Rajasthani folk music is an apt exemplification of an auto-exoticism framed as cultural commodity. Its mise en scène of musicians framed, literally, by illuminated red square boxes ‘theatricalizes’ Rajasthan's folk culture of orality and gives the performance a quality of strangeness that borders on theatre and music, contemporary and traditional. The ‘dazzling’ union of the Manganiyars' music and the scenography of Amsterdam's red-light district engendered an exotic seduction that garnered rave reviews on its global tour. This paper examines the production's performative interstices: the in-betweenness of sound and sight where aural tradition is ‘spectacularized’. It will also analyse the shifting convergences of tradition and cultural consumption and further interrogates the role of reception in the construction of such ‘exotic’ spectacles.

An Aural Tradition with a Pause Button? The Role of Recording Technology in a North East English Folk Session

F scholars of “folk” or “traditional” music, an understanding of the processes by which material is disseminated has been a central and definitive concern since the earliest identifications of the genre. Attempts to discover or list universal features shared by musics thus categorized have now largely given way to a widespread recognition that the terms’ meanings are multiple and context specific.1 Despite this recognition, however, the concept of oral transmission is one of few characteristics still regularly cited as a common (although, of course, not universal) feature of folk and traditional musics. Whether as an exclusive means to a music’s transmission (as implied by Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “Folk music . . . is transmitted orally from generation to generation”; Hanks 1998:713) or to a music’s evolution (as in the International Folk Music Council’s Sao Paulo resolution: “the product of a musical tradition that has evolved through the process of oral transmission”; IFMC 1955:23), orality (or aurality, in the case of instrumental traditions) has in some cases played a significant role in musicians’ conceptualization of their music and culture. This is likely to be particularly significant where that music culture is identified in necessary contradistinction to a dominant performance culture that is based on notation literacy. The importance of an unwritten transmissive mode in distinguishing folk musics from art music in Euro-American society is a strong case in point. In this article, I shall examine the case of instrumental folk music sessions in North East England as an example of a music culture where the ongoing development of a musical tradition has involved

The Curious Case of ϰύριέ μου ϰύριε in 2 Kingdoms 7:18—29

Many redaction-critical analyses of David’s Prayer (2 Sam 7:18–29) attribute it—in varying degrees—to the primary Deuteronomistic Historian. But the use of the divine נepithet אדני יהוה throughout the prayer suggests a non-Deuteronomistic hand at work. Adding to the unexpected use of the epithet is the uniform but curious Greek translation of it in this isolated passage—ϰύριέ μου ϰύριε. The translation probably reflects an association with “my lord the king” or “my lord PN,” which is a common way of addressing royalty in DtrH. Such a mode of address fits naturally with the speaker’s frequent use of “your servant” as a self-referent in the prayer. Upon further reflection one can argue that the surprising use of this epithet points to a common aural tradition that predates the development of variant textual traditions and that the name itself most likely stems from a pre-Deuteronomistic redactional layer.

The Curious Case of κύριέ μου κύριε in 2 Kingdoms 7: 18–29

Many redaction-critical analyses of David’s Prayer (2 Sam 7:18–29) attribute it—in varying degrees—to the primary Deuteronomistic Historian. But the use of the divine epithet [inline-graphic 01] throughout the prayer suggests a non-Deuteronomistic hand at work. Adding to the unexpected use of the epithet is the uniform but curious Greek translation of it in this isolated passage—κύριέ μου κύριe. The translation probably reflects an association with “my lord the king” or “my lord PN,” which is a common way of addressing royalty in DtrH. Such a mode of address fits naturally with the speaker’s frequent use of “your servant” as a self-referent in the prayer. Upon further reflection one can argue that the surprising use of this epithet points to a common aural tradition that predates the development of variant textual traditions and that the name itself most likely stems from a pre-Deuteronomistic redactional layer.

Antagonism and Mutual Dependency. Critial Models of Performance and “Piano Interpretation Schools”

To polarize and, coincidently, intersect two different concepts, in terms of a distinction/analogy between “piano interpretation schools” and “critical models” is the aim of this paper. The former, with its prior connotations of both empiricism and dogmatism and not directly shaped by aesthetic criteria or interpretational ideals, depends mainly on the aural and oral tradition as well the teacher-student legacy; the latter employs ideally the generic criteria of interpretativeness, which can be measured in accordance to an aesthetic formula and can include features such as non-obviousness, inferentially, lack of consensus, concern with meaning or significance, concern with structure or design, etc. The relative autonomy of the former is a challenge to the latter, which embraces the range of perspectives available in the horizon of the history of ideas about music and interpretation. The effort of recognizing models of criticism within musical interpretation creates the vehicle for new understandings of the nature and the historical development of Western classical piano performance, promoting also the production of quality critical argument and the communication of key performance tendencies and styles.

IText Reconfigured: The Rise of the Podcast

The podcast is a unique configuration of IText precisely because it foregrounds sound in the current cultural moment of secondary orality. This return to an oral—aural tradition offers several unique benefits. Podcasts adapt well to today’s unstructured work spaces. Moreover, podcasts blur boundaries between virtual and face-to-face communication and virtual and physical spaces. Finally, podcasts are fragmented, reflecting the fluidity of previous ITexts; yet, unlike ITexts, podcasts mostly exist as complete, scripted texts. This article raises questions concerning what the podcast contributes to overall knowledge of how texts are mediated through evolving information technologies.

'Songs for the Millions': Chartist Music and Popular Aural Tradition

Songs and singing, and music making more generally, are a neglected aspect of the social culture of Chartism. Many of the Chartist musings that have been treated as poetry by scholars were, in fact, lyrics for songs with identifiable melodies which drew on a rich aural tradition in popular culture. Chartist rituals almost invariably involved music as well as speech; the ranks of the movement were filled with musicians. The music they made, in its many and varied forms, has not received full attention. This article forms part of a larger joint project examining the music — lyrics and melody — of popular politics in the long nineteenth century. It argues that music was a central part of the social culture of radicalism and an important, if neglected, element in the repertoire of politics.

The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington's Suites: The Case of "Togo Brava"

One of the most controversial aspects of all the critiques of Ellington concerns the aesthetic value of his great works; from Creole Rhapsody onward, his suites have been the subject of a lively debate that ultimately addresses the very definition and nature of jazz. Seldom have Ellington's suites met with the approval of the critics, who have raised two mutually interdependent objection to them: 1. they betray the most authentic, profound nature of jazz; 2. they have no structural unity, no coherence of motive, and are weakened by the composer's inability to control large forms. The first of these objections dates back to the early thirties, to the publication of Reminiscing in Tempo, which unleashed a violent debate (see Hammond 1935; Archetti 1936). To modern ears, that diatribe sounds outdated. We have since understood that the idea of jazz is subject to mutation, to continuous redefinition; it evolves with the transformations in the relationship that the musicians, the public, and the critics have always had with jazz music (DeVeaux 1991). Unlike the first, however, the second objection--the one about structural unity--is still very widespread and is propounded by some very authoritative critics and scholars (a good example is the position adopted by Max Harrison [1964]). This objection is voiced against practically all of Ellington's suites (with the typical exception of Reminiscing in Tempo), essentially accusing the composer of being incapable of giving his longer works a real unity of theme, of not knowing how to manage the development of a motive, and of having composed--especially after the Second World War--suites that are no more than strings of separate pieces. These separate pieces, the argument continues, are held together not by any profound relationship between the pieces themselves but by criteria outside the music, at times explicitly descriptive, at other times abstract (such as literary dedications or dedications to a given country, continent, city, etc.). Ultimately, Ellington is accused of being unable to master the techniques of composing for large forms, a weakness that only underscores the fact that he was not familiar with such composers as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schumann. However, it is a mistake to base an understanding and appreciation of Ellington's suites on the aesthetic criteria used to judge European classical music, especially European music of the classical-romantic period. The question of the success or failure of Ellington's larger compositions needs to be addressed from a completely different viewpoint. Writing about vernacular music, Thomas Brothers (1997, 170) succinctly defined the role played by aural transmission and transcription: Vernacular music may be written down at any time, for one purpose or another, and one genre or another may even give rise to tradition that is conceived and disseminated in writing. But, substantially, vernacular music evolves independently of notation. This is exactly how jazz has developed. It is music based on an aural tradition, it has evolved against an urban industrial background, and it has spread in no small part by means of secondary aurality (Ong 1982) such as the radio, the record, and the video. Aural traditions have their own unique ways of transmitting knowledge, both on the level of how they work on their phrases and on formulas and the level of the overall form. (1) Because sound is not permanent, but fleeting and volatile, and writing is not the most important way in which it is transmitted, music and poetry based on aural tradition rely on our memory for their survival. In terms of content, the most effective way of fixing the information for posterity is by repetition, which leads to elaborations on the formula of the material. Because it is notoriously difficult to manage large forms in terms of memory alone, aural cultures are incapable of organizing forms constructed of organic relationships: forms that make use of developments and elaborate cross-references with internal transformations that refer both forward and backward within the composition. …

Traditional and Modern Methods of Learning and Teaching Music in Bulgaria

This ethnographic study of music education in the domain of Bulgarian traditional music examines the relationship between music, music education, and culture and makes some hypotheses about cognitive processes in music learning in aural tradition. It demonstrates how music education was embedded in larger cultural processes in the pre-communist and communist (1944-1989) periods and documents the continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern methods of learning and teaching. Participant-observation of traditional methods provides the basis for hypotheses about the order in which musical concepts are acquired when they are learned but not taught.

Concept and Treatment in Javanese Gamelan Music, with Reference to the Gambang

In Javanese gamelan performance, the gambang (xylophone) part is not completely fixed. The part one performer plays on the gambang for a certain composition may differ in detail or even broad outline from that of another performer, though both will be characterized by steady rapid figuration, played mostly in octaves and spanning several octaves in range. To a lesser extent, two performances of the same composition by the same performer will show some differences. For gambang, and indeed many of the other parts, it is the rhythmic density, melodic style, and texture rather than the precise melodic content that are fixed by tradition. Gambang playing-and Javanese gamelan playing in general--operates essentially within an oral (aural) tradition. Notation systems may function as reminders to gamelan players but are not normally used in performance.