Cultural Musicology Research Articles

The Tradition of Othuvar in Temples - A Cultural Musicology study based on the Saiva temple tradition in Sri Lanka

The early Siva community identify the Singing is the easiest way to pray to God and reaching his salvation. From the earliest times in the Saiva tradition, the Nayanmars and Alvars who descended from Karaikkalammaiyar, followed this way and dissolved with the power of God not only this, with the help of history of Saiva we can understand, these Nayanmars and Alvars were not only practice this style of praying in their own life, as well as they insist the community to follow this method of their religious life also. In the Saiva tradition, those who greet the Lord with music are known by the special name of 'Oduvars'. This Oduvar tradition, which originated from Karaikkalammaiyar in the history of Sivasim, has continued in Hindu temples in Sri Lanka up to now. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, history has maintained a close relationship with Tamil Nadu for a long time in culture, religion, customs and many other social contexts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that even though Sri Lanka has been under foreign rule for a long time, it is the work of these readers to preserve Sivasim and Tamilism and pass it on to the next generation. This article describes the work done by the Oduvars in Jaffna, the place where Saivism flourished in Sri Lanka.

‘Music and Personality’ A Study of Cultural Musicology Based on the Art of Music in the Socio-Psychological Deck

Music is unique among Arts. From the genesis of humanity, it has a strong history. Beyond the boundaries of Arts, music has certain characteristic capabilities which enable the mankind to develop and modify its intrinsic quality. In the beginning it grew along with emotions of mankind. With the growth of science and mental maturity, it has been restricted into the frame of ‘Art’. Music cherished itself accordingly to the accepting capacity and laws of the society, for ages and operated the doctrine is a fact in the history. This article concentrates through an inter-disciplinary approach on the influence of music in the personality development of human beings as the universal research fields are multi-facet.

Noisy Modernization? On the History and Historicization of Sound

Sound ‘does’ things to places, to people and to time: it can affect change. This collection focuses specifically on the role sound has played as an agent of modernity. How were sound and music used as the material of modernization, how did they help create group identities, how were they mobilized in asserting power? In order to study this active quality of sound and music in the formation of the modern world, the contributors to this collection propose an interdisciplinary approach, including methods from sound studies and cultural musicology, and data from archives as well as record collections and catalogues.

Listening outanddealing with otherness. A postcolonial approach to higher education teaching

Postcolonial pedagogy invites academic teaching staff to create situations, in which hegemonic modes of knowledge production can be critically reflected and one’s own entanglement as disciplinary socialised member of (western) academia experienced. Such a postcolonial approach has been applied to a seminar in the context of cultural musicology and its impact on teaching and learning analysed. In this paper, the findings of the accompanying research are presented and discussed in relation to the concept of Bildung, theories on individual learning (in higher education) and current processes to internationalise the curricula. Throughout the argumentation, I will demonstrate how postcolonial pedagogy may cause the construction of otherness and why this simultaneously constitutes the biggest challenge as well as the profoundest reward when applying such an approach to university teaching. In addition to that, this paper introduces a definition of postcolonial pedagogy and offers recommendations to foster its implementation in higher education contexts.

Noticing Musical Becomings: Deleuzian and Guattarian Approaches to Ethnographic Studies of Musicking

In this article, we expand conceptually upon approaches in cultural musicology and ethnomusicology that conceive of music in terms of shifting textual signs and performances of cultural meaning.1 Our aim is to propose some new ways of considering music in terms of relational events, doing, and becoming. We ask: what if music does more than symbolically mediate and represent worlds? What if music constantly comes into being and does things as part of intrinsically messy realities that consist of relations between a variety of processes and things: vibrations, sounds, sensations and feelings, human bodies and minds, non–human entities, words and meanings, spaces, movements and materialities, (re)arrangements of social organization and power, and more? How might our conceptions of music, on the one hand, and our methodological stances, on the other, reconfigure if we harness this kind of relational and inherently heterogeneous occurring as a starting point? Our questions are inspired by the process thinking of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and by the work of latter–day theorists who develop this thinking, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Rebecca Coleman, Elizabeth Grosz, and Brian Massumi. Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be regarded as an effort to contest transcendent ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari pursue this aim by aspiring to an ontology that is not grounded upon being but upon the processuality or primary dynamism of reality. In his early sole–authored work Difference and Repetition, Deleuze equates being with becoming by stating that identities only emerge from repetition as difference: “Returning is thus the only identity . . . ; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different” (1994, 41). This to say that things—whether human subjects, philosophical ideas, or musical formations—are not founded on an essence. Their being, or identity, consists in their processual, and thereby inevitably varying, situationally actualizing, open–ended existence. Being is the effect of (the return of) difference rather than difference being the effect of being (see, for e.g., Deleuze 1994, 41, 55). The order between being and becoming gets overturned. Better put, the category of being loses explanatory power and dissolves into becoming. It is, indeed, becoming that will figure and be elaborated as the guiding concept of our theoretical reflections in this article, illuminated by examples drawn from our recent ethnographic work. This article is a product of our research project “Deleuzian Music Research,” financed by the Academy of Finland and conducted at the University of Helsinki in 2011–2016 (www. helsinki.fi/deleuzian). We wish to thank the anonymous readers and Kip Pegley for their valuable suggestions, as well as the Swedish Literary Society in Finland for the financial support provided to Moisala’s study. ↵

Creating Space for Where Ancestors Once Walked

Using music and voice to express cultural identity is a tradition inherent in musical communities throughout the world. Today, while traditions can be affected by popular culture and modern technologies, contemporary practices in music production and aesthetics can aid in communicating and sustaining cultural heritage. Taiwan has a diverse cultural makeup being a former colonial territory and now home to descendants of mainland Chinese immigrants together with its own indigenous peoples. This article explores the music of contemporary Taiwanese indigenous singers of Amis heritage. Specifically, the music and production techniques in recordings of two female singer–songwriters, Ado Kaliting Pacidal and Ilid Kaolo, are explored. Pacidal and Kaolo combine the Amis language and themes of aboriginal identity with a range of contemporary musical styles, narratives and production techniques. For our analysis, we draw on cultural musicology in terms of lyrical and musical expression, and focus on how production techniques and aesthetics (including processing and treatment of the voice, effects and mixing) are used to enhance that expression. In doing so, we draw attention to the relationship between contemporary music production and cultural significance. We conclude by determining how space is created for ‘where the ancestors once walked’ ( Pacidal 2012a ).

Music and Urban Geography (review)

and Urban Geography. By Adam Krims. New York: Routledge, 2007. [xli, 203 p. ISBN-10 0415970113; ISBN-13 9780415970112. $95.] Illustra tions, music examples, bibliographic references, index. In and Urban Geography, Adam Krims explores the many ways that music and cities act upon one another now that the economic and cultural realities of globalization are literally reshaping the international urban landscape. Throughout the book, he challenges the common musicological posturing that music of a localized place is independent of, and therefore resistant to, the market forces of mainstream capitalist culture. Furthermore, Krims indicates the musicological necessity to more closely examine the cross marketing of classical music, and demands a reconsideration of the role of Adorno's thought in cultural musicology. Finally, he suggests that spatial explanations of popular musics in particular may provide valuable tools with to interpret urban histories and, using Krims's terminology, the social possibilities therein. The stated purpose of the book, a collection of five essays with an introduction, takes a premise the dramatic changes in the world metropolises over the past few decades, using them as instances for explaining changes in musical culture, and looking toward how the two processes may find a connection in a larger unity, including contributions from music back to urban form (p. xix). One promise of this approach is realized through the variety of musicological discussion thereby enabled, the diverse subject matter of each individual chapter serving here as cases in point: Defining the Urban Ethos, Space, Place, and Popular in Curacao and Else - where, Mourning the Impossible Libidi - nal City in Boogie Nights, Analysis after Adorno, and Music for the Design-Intensive City. These otherwise disparate topics are bound together quite tightly by the author's well developed knowledge of urban geography, and he lucidly offers the reader new tools with to examine the many modes of contemporary musical consumption. Chief among the theories Krims adopts is an economic world-view known as post-Fordism, recognizes a global economy built upon labor and production, vertical disintegration (outsourcing), liberalized trade, the centrality of information in production, and the increased role of regional and urban specialization (p. xxiii). As distinguished from Fordism, the mode of economic production born of Henry Ford's methods of mass production, post-Fordism depends on the process of flexible accumulation, in producers rely on specialized labor and production methods designed to react more quickly and specifically to market changes than would be otherwise possible using Ford's models. The distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism plays heavily into Krims's over-arching critique of what he believes to be cultural musicology's myopic celebration of subaltern cultural practices and their power to challenge the effects of capitalism. In Krims's view, such cultural practices, which profit from challenging or complicating national boundaries, dominant identities, and cultural homogeneities, acquire value precisely for having challenged hegemony-and not coincidentally, for having disrupted the deadening sameness embodied in Adorno's nightmare [the loss of human agency to total capitalism] (p. 104). Krims provides a healthy counter-balance to at least two decades of popular music scholarship, devoting the entirety of chapter 4 to challenging Adorno's own hegemonic status as cultural musicology's Marxist stand-in. If, as he posits, music now exists in a post-Fordist world, the spectral centrality of Adorno's theories to cultural musicology need to be revised, for-at the risk of oversimplification-Adorno lived in a Fordist world. According to Krims, now that the global economy is defined in part by nimbly adjustable design and niche marketing, any discussion of the culture industry of the mid-twentieth century is an anachronism; the potential loss of human agency to the totalizing forces of today's global capitalism becomes at once both more complicated and evasive. …

Border Crossings: A Commentary on Henkjan Honing's "On the Growing Role of Observation, Formalization and Experimental Method in Musicology"

In the early twentieth century which was based on the comparative method, played a prominent role in the discipline: however it was appropriated by the Nazis and fell out of favour after the war. It was replaced by ethnomusicology and structuralist theory, both of which emphasized the individual context (cultural or structural) and eschewed comparison between contexts. Both also developed an epistemology based on the generation of meaning through the act of experiencing and understanding music (Titon 1997: 87): this epistemology, characteristic of cultural musicology and theory (CMT) in general, is quite distinct from that of the cognitive sciences of (CSM). The otherwise confusing variety of musicological practices subsumed under the category systematic musicology, as set out in Honing's article on which this is a commentary, can be usefully seen in terms of two distinct dimensions, those of method and of epistemology. It follows from this that empirical methods are as consistent with, and as potentially valuable to, CMT as they are to CSM, and that EMR has the potential to reach both constituencies.

From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (review)

Reviewed by: From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology Nasser Al-Taee From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. By Derek B. Scott , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [ 258 p. ISBN 0-19-515195-X. $65 (hbk.); 0-19-515196-8. $35 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, index. It does not seem all that long ago that Susan McClary said "when cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology fifteen years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings" (Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], back cover). In her forward to the volumes in the Routledge series Critical and Cultural Musicology, Martha Feldman claimed that "Musicology has undergone a sea change in recent years." Indeed, Derek Scott's book can be seen as a continuation of a growing body of critical musicology dedicated to examining issues that have been marginalized by musicologists such as ideology, identity, gender, and racial representation in Western music. To this end, Scott asserts that musicology is no longer an autonomous field of academic inquiry, but has entered a phase of "postdisciplinarity" (p. 4), and a vibrant intellectual movement in the interdisciplinary field of the arts, sciences, and humanities. Scott embraces the notion that the rise of critical musicology was advanced by the collapse of the binary divide between classical and popular, which broadened the scope of musicological inquiry to topics such as gender, race, identity, sexuality, and narrative. In doing so, Scott is committed to social semiotics advanced by Richard Leppert, Susan McClary, and Lawrence Kramer and puts forth a series of exemplary essays articulated in a rich, engaging, and provocative interdisciplinary style. The book is divided into four parts, each with two chapters. Part 1 concerns gender, sexuality, and musical style rooted in social practices. The first chapter deals with erotic representation from Monteverdi to Mae West. Building on McClary's work on seventeenth-century narrative, Scott analyzes "Pur ti miro" from Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) as a representation of the mutual arousal thought necessary for sexual reproduction in the seventeenth century, to the stereotypes dominating American erotic songs of the 1920s and 1930s in what he refers to as the "predator," Mae West, the "innocent," Helen Kane, and the "prim and proper" Ann Suter (pp. 27-29). The second chapter examines eroticism in the Victorian era. Scott argues for disjunctions in representation rather than universals or constants that can be traced through "evolution" or "progress." The author contends that music can be negotiated, building on conventions rooted in style codes and social practices. Part 2 concerns the working of ideology in relation to popular music. Scott examines representation of the American Indian in popular styles of Western music from the eighteenth century to the present. He thus moves from sexuality to ethnicity in order to show how cultural difference is represented and how shifting perceptions of the Native American can be related to changes [End Page 140] in attitude to the "civilized" and the natural world. Scott traces the appropriation of the Native American from Rameau's harpsichord piece Les sauvages (1725) to J. P. Richardson's pop song "Running Bear" (1960). Here we are confronted with a host of signifiers delineating the "enemy" as alien and whisky drinking or courageous and wise, reflecting shifting political and cultural changes. Scott claims that even films that attempt to depict Native Americans in a more positive image, such as Dances with Wolves (1990), are no less dehumanizing and have a tendency to imply that Native Americans are unable to cope with the grim practicalities of modern life. Throughout the chapter, Scott emphasizes the fact that the construction of the Native American in Western history informs the way white Americans and Europeans build their own sense of identity and reveals little or nothing about the people who are supposedly the subject of those...

The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (review)

African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective. Edited by Ingrid Monsoii. (Critical and Cultural Musicology, 3.) New York: Routledge, 2003. [vii, 366 p. ISBN 0-8153-2382-4. $50 (hbk.); ISBN 04159-6769-4. $19.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, map, bibliography, index. This volume presents eleven musical case studies from diverse regions of the African diaspora, including the African continent, the Caribbean, Latin America, North America, and Europe. contributors intersect their discussions with the topics of race, gender, politics, and nationalism, and address why music claims such pride of place, using examples of the interwoven construct of the local and global, as they are found in the lives of musicians and their audiences. In her introduction, Monson reminds the reader, If the Jewish diaspora was the quintessential example of diaspora before the 1960s, the African diaspora has surely become the paradigmatic case for the closing years of the 20th century (p. 1). Acknowledging a cue from Paul Gilroy in Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Monson identifies the centrality of music as emblematic of transnational identities and global inter sections which constitute the complexity of the African diaspora. remainder of the introduction presents an overview of the book's three sectional themes: Traveling Music and Musicians, Beyond Tradition or Modernity, and Contradictory Moment. Part 1, Traveling Music and Musicians, consists of four essays that explore the globalization of African diasporic musics, paying particular attention to exchanges between African Americans, Europe, and the Black Atlantic. Travis A. Jackson begins this section with Jazz Performance as Ritual: Blues Aesthetic and the African Diaspora. Based on ethnographic research conducted in New York City's vibrant scene, he argues that is driven by both an encompassing blues aesthetic, and a sense of as a sacred ritual of transcendence. Jackson makes the claim for a nonessentialized concept of the blues aesthetic, that privileges interaction, participation, and formal flexibility in the service of transcendence and communication of normative values and cultural (p. 71). In chapter 2, Communities of Style: Musical Figures of Black Diasporic Identity, Veit Erlmann examines Mbube, the South African song classic written and recorded by Solomon Linda in 1939, and its reinterpretations known outside of South Africa as Wimowet, or The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Erlmann introduces the concept of endotropic performance in relation to the multiple versions of this piece that have been recorded over the years, showing that its multiple performances and situated reception exemplify the intraracial construction of identity through a shared experience of style which has emerged under the increasingly globalized and mediated conditions of social life since the late nineteenth century. This is a strange situation in which a person's understanding of himself or herself and their sense of the social world no longer coincide with the in which they take place (p. 76). These reworkings demonstrate the crucial role the autohypnoses and fiction of identity and global order, with all their contradictory intermixtures and mirrored affinities, play in formulating the rudiments of a politics of twenty-first century (p. 99). chapter Jazz on the Global Stage by Jerome Harris, is a wide-ranging insider's view of the history, present state, and future implications of the spreading and flourishing of in locales far from its African American birthplace. Harris, a prominent guitarist and bassist with twenty years of experience on New York's scene, defines an ecology of jazz (pp. 104-5) as a web of interrelationships between art makers, art users (audience), and mediators (broadcasters, record producers, promoters, and managers). …