Ethnomusicological Analysis Research Articles

How Johnny Cash Influences Popular Music: Taking Man in Black as an Example

Johnny Cash, an illustrious figure in the realm of popular music, etched an indelible imprint upon the cultural vista. This inquiry delves into the profound sway exerted by Johnny Cash on the tapestry of popular culture, anchored by his seminal composition, Man in Black. The study’s aim is to unveil how this melodic opus, with its enduring reverberations, transcended the confines of mere musicality, metamorphosing into an indispensable facet of our cultural discourse. The exploration employs a multifaceted methodology encompassing qualitative, historical, and ethnomusicological paradigms. Through a qualitative scrutinization, the study unearths personal revelations and contextual intricacies that have forged the genesis of Man in Black. Historical scholarship situates the opus within its epoch, delving into its resonance with the socio-cultural zeitgeist. Ethnomusicological analysis plumbs the opus’s thematic motifs and harmonious constituents, unveiling its far-reaching influence across a kaleidoscope of cultural milieus. The revelations illumine Johnny Cash’s role as an avant-garde trailblazer, a cultural nexus-builder through synergistic endeavours, and an artisan who harnessed music as a pulpit for societal commentary. The perennial reverberations of Man in Black underscore the timeless essence inherent in certain musical compositions, while Cash’s metamorphosis from a musical luminary into a cultural maven signifies the broader cultural ramifications that artists can effectuate.

Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano: The Songbook of 1968 in Italy

Abstract This article examines how the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI) – a leftist collective founded in Milan in 1962 by Gianni Bosio and Roberto Leydi – used their journal to theorize oral cultures as instruments of class consciousness. By doing so, they contributed to the political movements of the 1960s in Italy. The NCI worked to construct a culture of protest through recorded albums, live performances and field research into oral practices. Despite their prominence as the ‘music of 1968’ in Italy, the NCI first came together as a journal. The ten issues of the group’s journal, Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, published between 1962 and 1968, provided materialist and ethnomusicological analysis of oral cultures, as well as the repertoires of rural singers like Giovanna Daffini, and nourished the work of young songwriters. I argue that this journal fostered new militant approaches to culture, documented the artistic vitality of the labouring classes and helped foment the revolutionary sentiments of 1968.

Unveiling the melodic traditions of Mahzani: an ethnomusicological investigation of Tombulu music in Indonesia's Minahasa region

This research explores the Mahzani ethnic music tradition, which holds significance among the Tombulu sub-ethnic group of the Minahasa region. As an expression of their cultural identity, Mahzani encapsulates the richness of Tombulu music, encompassing artistic diversity, spiritual values, and the philosophy of life cherished by the Tombulu people. The aim of this study is to analyze the distinctive musical elements that contribute to the unique atmosphere of the Mahzani tradition. This study uses an ethnomusicological approach. This approach collects and analyzes data, namely the melodies of traditional Mahzani music in the cultural context of the Tombulu people as the owners of the music. The ethnomusicological analysis is carried out by analyzing the physical and non-physical forms of Mahzani music to reveal its melodic richness and its aesthetic and philosophical meanings. This comprehensive approach ensures a thorough examination of the musical elements and their cultural implications within the context of the Mahzani tradition. In the end, the result of this research is that the combination of poetry and melody in a single unit of Mahzani's expression at the time has unveiled a unique and mystical atmosphere. At this level, the Tombulu people believe that music has vibrations that are connected to nature and the creator. Music is no longer just a medium for expressing itself, but it is the intention of the expression of human life in relation to their living environment.

Signed Music in the Deaf Community

In the spring of 2019, the first signed musical stage production was performed at Festival Clin d’Oeil—the world’s largest deaf arts festival that brings thousands to Reims, France, biennially. Surrounded by visual and performing arts, an invited delegation from Canada debuted the musical The Black Drum internationally, incorporating physical theater, signed music, projection, and dance. Signed music is an inter-performance art that demonstrates musical elements by culturally deaf individuals who have explored creating musical performances with their hands and bodies. These performances operate according to a distinct artistic style, incorporating elements of signed languages; rhythmic hand, facial, and/or body motions; and media video arts. This article offers insight into the performers’ process and development of a deaf-created signed musical for an international audience, the ways signed music galvanizes community and identity through self-expression, and the impact of The Black Drum on an international audience at Festival Clin d’Oeil. Through ethnomusicological analysis and reflection with perspectives as insider-outsider-mediator, signed music has been researched by the authors and observed throughout the development of The Black Drum in preparation for its Canadian and European premieres. The festival setting is a place where new types of performances are welcomed and evaluated for their acceptance into the community. Responses from audience members and performers revealed that signed music is an emerging genre of its own.

Introduction

Introduction

Outside the house, there are no laws: musical practice and ritual dynamics at Shona kurova guva ceremonies

ABSTRACT In Zimbabwe, the ceremony known as kurova guva is widely held by Shona speakers in order to reintegrate deceased family members within the patrilineage as ancestral spirits, or vadzimu. Conducted a year after burial, kurova guva involves a heterogeneous musical environment that distinguishes it from other ritual events described in the literature on Zimbabwean music. Held by traditionalists and members of several Christian denominations, the ceremony also offers a potent reminder that indigenous ritual remains a vibrant part of the contemporary Zimbabwean experience. I illustrate how music is a central mode of ritual practice at kurova guva, where it is considered ritually efficacious in enabling participants to reclaim the spirit of the deceased as a lineage ancestor. At the same time, I suggest that musical practice also participates in the continual renegotiation, articulation, and social production of the ritual contours of kurova guva. Through the negotiation of music’s spatial and temporal dimensions, I illustrate how participants at kurova guva express the structured ambiguity at the heart of ritual process. My analysis suggests that the gap between discursive expectations and actualised musical experience constitutes a productive site for ethnomusicological analysis.

Musical culture and Art of China: an anthropological and ethnomusicological analysis

Musical culture and Art of China: an anthropological and ethnomusicological analysis

Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond ed. by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind

Reviewed by: Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond ed. by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind David Bratman Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond, edited by Julian Eilmann and Friedhelm Schneidewind. Zurich: Walking Tree, 2019. Cormarë Series no. 39. viii, 474 pp. $32.00 (softcover). ISBN 978-3-905703-39-9. This is the third anthology of articles about Tolkien and music. Together with its two predecessors (Music in Middle-earth, edited by Heidi Steimel and Friedhelm Schneidewind, Walking Tree, 2010; and Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, McFarland, 2010), it demonstrates that music was vital to Tolkien's imagination. All three anthologies venture outside of the topic of music as strictly defined, into lyrics on their own as poetry, and into Tolkien's special interest of the music—if it may be so called—of language as studied in philology. The "and beyond" of this book's title, however, alludes to articles discussing other authors in comparison with Tolkien, and to articles covering music inspired by Tolkien. The most prominent theme of Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond, however, is the central topic of the pervasiveness of music and musical references in Tolkien's work. This is the theme of some of the bestwritten as well as the most persuasive articles in the anthology. In what might as well serve as the keynote entry, though it is the sixth essay in the book, Elizabeth A. Whittingham delivers a sweeping declaration that music is essential to Tolkien's legendarium, completely imbued into the story. Her examples are primarily from the Silmarillion papers, particularly The Lays of Beleriand. Two more surveys with equally impressive sweep, despite narrower topical focus, come from Jennifer Rogers with a thorough ethnomusicological analysis of some incidental song verses in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers, and from Angela P. Nicholas, who digs out an impressive number of musical references in the life of Aragorn, both as a singer and as the focus of music around him, particularly in his role as king. These two essays, though placed together, are separated from Whittingham's to which they are most closely related. [End Page 266] Several other authors pursue the same theme on a smaller scale, again scattered through the book: Sabine Frambach with a quick survey of the music of Tolkien's evil characters, who she concludes "almost exclusively use functional music" (339); John Holmes, who sets out to "canvas the references to harps" in Tolkien's works (361); and Bradford Lee Eden, who itemizes, but does not analyze, the perhaps surprising number of musical references in recently published work by Tolkien, from The Story of Kullervo to the book form of A Secret Vice. Two other remarkable articles follow the theme of pervasiveness in a tighter focus. Renée Vink traces the shift from a concentration on dance in "The Tale of Tinúviel" from The Book of Lost Tales to one on song in the same story retold in "The Lay of Leithian," evincing the increasing influence of the "Ainulindalë" on Tolkien's imagination. Petra Zimmermann writes strikingly on Tolkien's use of silence in his fiction, both in general and specifically as an element in performances of songs and poetry. She suggests that the heightened emphasis on sounds in a silent environment gives the reader cues for how to hear the story in the mind's ear. This essay could be tied to one elsewhere in the book by Allan Turner on Tolkien's use of music to mark a shift from the ordinary to the wondrous, as with the arrival of Gildor in The Lord of the Rings or several moments in Smith of Wootton Major. In her essay on Aragorn, Angela P. Nicholas discusses the Lament for Boromir ("Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows," TT, III, i, 19–20) mostly in terms of Aragorn's personal reaction to Boromir's death and its place in the quest. Three other articles raise the particular question of fictional plausibility: could Aragorn and Legolas have improvised such a complex lyric? Nancy Martsch's article addresses the general topic of...

The Role of Macedonian Folk Songs Featured in Macedonian Films in Amplifying the Emotions

Macedonian folk songs, as a part of Macedonian traditions and culture, represent an integral part of Macedonian history marked by resistance, military feats, and tendencies for maintaining the Macedonian national identity. This paper is focused on the issue of whether two Macedonian folk songs With Torments I was Born and Listen Patriots created in the course of the 19th century – a period marked with active struggle for liberation and independence of the Macedonian nation – additionally intensify the emotions provoked by the storyline and action of the films, in which they have been incorporated. During the research process, the authors of the paper used the mechanism of cognitive appraisal as a model for content analysis, as well as psychological and ethnomusicological analysis of the resulting data. The units of content analysis were the sequences of scenes of the film, in which the two Macedonian folk songs were used. The selected songs and films, as well as the interaction between the sound and visual senses, clearly present the deep relationship between music and emotions in a specific, identity-related context. The findings of the study are in favor of the thesis that Macedonian folk songs, created as a result of the centuries-old struggle of the Macedonian people, when used in Macedonian films, intensify the patriotic emotions of the viewers and strengthen the concept of uniqueness in the Macedonian identity, due to the processes of repetition and revitalization of collective memories.

New Tendencies in Development of Kinetography in Serbia and the Region

Play and music are an inseparable phenomenon of human expression, encompassed by the single term – dance. Recording of dance performances, as well as transcription of dance music, are the primary tasks of ethnomusicological analysis in Serbia, and in Europe as well. This enables the understanding of the process of inner constitution of dance and dance music, and the path is opened for their observation in the sphere of the contextual. To this aim, the main tool of analythical observation of dances is kinetography, and the basic object of ethnomusicological analythical thinking are the kinetographs.
 The system has been developed and perfected over time, mainly in ballet and modern dance. Ethnochoreologists and recorders of traditional dances also use kinetography, but a problem is encountered in the process, since the traditional dances include the movements not existing in ballet and modern dance. Therefore in the recording of traditional dances the creation of new signs is needed. The paper focuses on the renewed interest in kinetography, since on the grounds of the analysis of the responses of the informants on the subject it has been established that the recording of dances, and even of the stage movement, has its potentials. The author raises the issue of the redefinition of the term kinetography and its affirmation, pointing to the necessity of its further development in Serbia and the region as well.

Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life by Lila Ellen Gray (review)

Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life. By Lila Ellen Gray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [xvi, 309 p. ISBN 9780822354598 (hardcover), $89.95; ISBN 9780822354710 (paperback), $24.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Lisboa e sempre Lisboa. is always Lisbon. Fadistas (fado singers) sang out this impassioned refrain many times during the years that I lived in doing research (2012-13). Fado, Portugal's celebrated genre of popular song, had just been added to UNESCO's World's Intangible Cultural Heritage list (November 2011), and the city proudly displayed the new honor on banners and billboards emblazoned with dramatic images of Portuguese guitarra players and central figure, Amalia Rodrigues. It is precisely the intangibility of this music that makes the refrain is always Lisbon work: its meaning cannot be taught, only understood. Fadistas often summarize exceptional claims to place, space, memory, and identity, as reflecting an authentically Portuguese expression of soul. Fado Resounding, Lila Ellen Gray's illuminating ethnographic study of fado, draws together over ten years of fieldwork from both long- and short-term periods of research (1999-2010) to interrogate claims to Portuguese soulfulness, grasping hold of the genre's seeming intangibility and questioning the ways that the genre transforms sound and performance into meaning.Fado Resounding takes its place in a growing body of literature that seeks to include in sociological and anthropological studies of genre as lived experience and expressive cultural form. In this study, Gray focuses on vadio (amateur fado), an improvisatory practice of in which performance often intermingles with pedagogy and practice in restaurants and taverns (tascas). Through a series of animated vignettes, Gray mixes together her firsthand experience as a student of vadio (personal stories about lessons, conversations, and performances) with careful theoretical analyses of those interactions. Taking this approach, Fado Resounding does not aim to contribute a broad survey of the historical foundations of the genre, a focus that is still lacking in English-language scholarship and has only recently gained ground among Portuguese-language scholars.Drawing on critical theories of genre, intertextuality, cultural history, sociology, anthropology, and sound studies, vadio becomes the site of wide-ranging investigations into and meaning in performance. Six chapters follow an introductory explication of the study's theoretical framework. The first four chapters together argue that fado as genre serves as nexus of gathering (and releasing) for historical narratives, embodied practices, for ways of feeling and remembering, for sensing place, and for affect (p. 159). In chapter 1, Gray's ethnographic experience as a student of vadio serves to interrogate both the implicit and explicit practices of learning performance aesthetics. Contrasting the implicit learning achieved through rituals of listening and singing in amateur contexts with the explicit pedagogies of institutionalized instruction, the author illuminates what she calls a ubiquitous imaginary of the essentially unlearnable (p. 45). Chapter 2 links this imaginary to self-reflexive engagement with the past, which fadistas reimagine through the present. The past is inter - animated by place in chapter 3, which centers on fado's city, Lisbon, and examines the ways in which the city is both experienced and imagined through performance. Chapter 4 rounds out the opening part of the study with a more traditional ethnomusicological analysis of the sonic structure and vocal style of performance. Concerned primarily with the performing voice, the author examines the influence of improvisation (and the memory of prior improvisations) in shaping musical signification. Together, these four chapters make an evincing argument for as genre in the ethnographic interrogation of the soulful-one of most exclusive claims to meaning-in terms of learning and pedagogy, conceptions of past/ present, locality and place, and stylized performance. …

The Musical Expression of Identity in Maale Patrilineal Society (Southern Ethiopia)

Abstract Located in Southern Ethiopia, the Maale traditionalists act for the preservation of a particular form of ancestor worship. Their society, highly hierarchized, is based on a complex patrilineal organization. Several researchers have shed light on the numerous markers used by the Maale traditionalists to express their position in the social hierarchy. This article aims at highlighting the various ways in which Maale music participates in this system of differentiation. In a continuation of previous studies, this article argues that gender, kinship, descent, and fertility are key concepts in understanding the Maale conception of hierarchy. Within this framework, Maale music appears as an offering that the musicians address to their ancestors and lineage elders. Culturally, each offering is supposed to convey four types of information, which are the musical context, the circumstance, and the social position of the musicians and of their social elders. The ethnomusicological analysis reveals the ways in which the lyrics, dance, instruments, and musical parameters convey all these pieces of information.

'Up there is a foggy mountain': An ethnomusicological-filological contribution on a traditional song from the Kopaonik region

A comparative ethnomusicological and philological analysis was made of the narrative song (ballad) field recording Tamo gore maglita planina, from the village of Mrca, Kopaonik mountain region, South Serbia. The song was sung by Sultana Savic (b. in 1903) whose birthplace is the nearby village of Stava. Philological analysis revealed that the features of the song's language belong primarily to the Kosovo-Resava dialect type, with occasional influences from Prizren-Timok speech. The song's content shows its connection to old Balkan beliefs, partly personified by the shepherd mythological couple of Radoje (Vlasic Radule) and Janja. Ethnomusicological analysis provides numerous arguments (rudimentary monothematic form, refrain pause, tone row consisting of trichord, repetitiveness) to support the assumption that the song is a part of the archaic Balkan, Serbian and South Slavic ritual vocal tradition, formed, most probably, under the predominant influence of Dinaric rural vocal culture. These findings are also complementary to Jovan Cvijic's anthropogeographical remarks about the region where the song originates from.

Revelations of cultural consumer lovemaps in Jamaican dancehall lyrics: An ethnomusicological ethnography

We believe that dancehall music’s more sexually explicit lyrics, labeled “slack” and maligned as evocatively misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic, mirror historically discordant social and economic tensions that entangle men and women in contested couplings, and thus render sexuality an instrument of socioeconomic power. Applying an ethnomusicological analysis, this paper fills a void by situating the slack Jamaican dancehall/ DJ lyrics within a revitalizing indigenization socialization perspective. By probing the cultural roots of this increasingly popular yet disparaged musical tradition that disturbs moral etiquette, we hear sexual bravado and counsel on love that betray important gender codes. For a particular social class, gender socialization nurtures a cultural consumer lovemap inscribed by a harsh economy during a particular point in time.

Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia (review)

Reviewed by: Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia Michael Jackson Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia. By Allan Marett . 2005. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 320 pages. ISBN: 0819566179 (hard cover), 0819566187 (soft cover). The culmination of nearly twenty years of ethnomusicological research among the Aboriginal peoples of the Daly region of northwest Australia (Marri-tjevin and Marri-ammu), this exemplary work extends and deepens our understanding of Aboriginal traditional song, while going a long way toward closing the gap between our scant knowledge of Aboriginal musical arts and our abundant knowledge of Aboriginal painting. Marett's focus is the Wangga songs and dances that periodically body forth or bring back into being the life-ways and Law of the "ancestral dead," the Walakandha. The grounding thematic is death and regeneration, and Marett's task is to show how this dialectic plays out both musically and socially, mythologically and contemporaneously. This analytical reach carries Marett's work far beyond abstract ethnomusicological analysis, and his in-depth contextualizations of musical events keep faith with the Wangga composers themselves who expect every performance to simultaneously honor the ancestors and speak to the needs of the living. Marett begins his monograph with an ancestral story in order to demonstrate how a myth connects with a sacred geography, figures in contemporary paintings on canvas or board, and finds expression in Wangga songs. His careful analysis enables us to actually see this complex interplay between prosody, melody, and specific narrative events. Subsequent analysis shows how social relations between Wangga singers and dancers are also implicated, and how the music is one element in a process that draws together the dead and the living and affirms the continuity of people and country. This merging of identities, Marett shows, also comes from the co-participation of both spirits and living persons in song composition, since it is in dreams that the Dreaming becomes manifest, and in the body-mind of people in the here and now that predecessors are brought back into being. Marett's meticulous explorations of the ways in which ghosts and ancestors "give" songs to songmen and the germ of a recovered song is elaborated in preparation for performance are truly edifying. Nothing is static or timeless. In the intersubjective and collaborative space between the living and dead, images, melodies and metres are constantly being worked upon or manipulated to get them "straight," to make them ring true. "Truth," however, is only ostensibly a correspondence to the past. [End Page 187] For what is vitally important is that musical conventions actively recreate rather than blindly recapitulate received notions of identity and belonging. Certain melodies and rhythmical patterns have the potential to bring to mind specific places and specific congeries of relationship, but the realization of this potentiality depends on the knowledge, skill, and judgment of practiced performers. Marett's detailed transcriptions and notations of both music and dancers' movements enable us to see precisely how this re-realization of knowledge is accomplished in several repertoires of Wangga songs. Since songs travel widely in the course of ceremonial exchange and the scattering of people, Marett devotes his final chapter to a comparative study of Wangga in areas as far afield as the Kimberleys and Arnhem Land. Allan Marett is to be congratulated for his painstaking work in doing justice to the Aboriginal songmen whose work it is to keep their ancestral world alive. Michael Jackson Harvard Divinity School Copyright © 2006 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

Song of Transformation

First Nations Englishes display continuity in discourse structuring, even when the speaker is monolingual in English. This article documents this cultural and discursive continuity through the analysis of a young Seneca songwriter’s performance of an original non-traditional song, written and sung in English. The analysis highlights key features of traditional Iroquoian discourse as they appear in the song text, and ties those discursive strategies to the social and political context of the performance venue, the songwriter’s family and the Six Nations community. This multilevel ethnomusicological analysis explores issues of genre and style as they relate to identity and resistance in the context of a Canadian First Nation.

Musical Form and Social History: Research Perspectives on Black South African Music

Recently, audiences in Europe and the United States have responded with great excitement and enthusiasm to black music from southern Africa, especially from South Africa. While this new and unprecedented interest may be a product of growing awareness of the injustices and deprivations of apartheid, it must represent an appreciation of the rhythmic and melodic qualities of the music itself. A look at research and literature on the music reveals a preoccupation with these dual concerns: on the one hand, the socioeconomic circumstances from which the music has grown, and on the other, the intricacies of its musical form. Although in some studies these two perspectives have illuminated each other to provide a complete picture, most researchers have tended to emphasize either one dimension or the other. Each of these approaches carries its own shortcomings. The earlier style in ethnomusicological analysis concentrates on the technical aspects of music, and examines musical instruments, scaletypes, uses of rhythm, and the way in which these formal characteristics have spread from one tribal grouping to another. This perspective is most often associated with an interest in pure traditional music, and a scorn for hybrid styles or those which have evolved out of the experience of proletarianized communities. In its most conventional form, then, this kind of ethnomusicology appears remote from the concerns of social historians, and stands accused of irrelevance and lack of concern with the pressing issues confronting communities in present-day southern Africa. The more recent approach views music as a sociohistorical phenomenon, and is concerned with the way in which social groupings have formed around, and expressed themselves through, musical performance. This style of analysis is predominantly concerned with evolving and urbanizing musical styles. In its preoccupation

Book reviews

Venda Children's Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis. John Blacking. Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1967, 210 pp., 15 plates, 14 figures. R7,00. Among the Wild Ngoni. W. A. Elmslie. London, Frank Cass, 1970. 3 ed. £4,20. An African's Religion: The Spirit of Nyajena. Michael Gelfand. Cape Town, Juta, 1966. xii, 135 pp., map, illus. R3,75. African Crucible: An Ethico‐Religious Study with Special Reference to the Shona‐Speaking People: Michael Gelfand. Cape Town, Juta, 1968. xiv, 163 pp., illus., tables. R4,50. Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo and across the Great Desert to Morocco. Réné Caillié. London, Frank Cass, 1968. Volume I: viii, 475 pp.; Volume II: xiv, 501 pp., maps, illus. £10. Trading Life in Western and Central Africa. John Whitford. London, Frank Cass, 1967. xxii+x, 335 pp., map. £4,20. (In both books, Central Africa refers chiefly to the interior of what is now more commonly called West Africa, and particularly to the northern areas of the river Niger.) Reeftown Elite: A Study of Social Mobility in a Modern African Community on the Reef. Mia Brandel‐Syrier. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction) xxxvii, 335 pp., 28 tables, 4 figs. £3,50.

Venda Children's Songs. A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis

Venda Children's Songs. A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis