Historical Musicology Research Articles

European Travelers on Music of the East: Religion, Musical Works, and the Otherness of the Ottomans

As historical documents,1 the fragmentary reports of local music witnessed by scores of Western Europeans traveling in the Ottoman Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa between the fifteenth century and the First World War are a motley collection. More often than not, musical observations within the very large and widely read literature of travel arise only in passing—a sentence or paragraph in a letter or diary by a merchant, cleric, embassy attaché, or consular spouse more focused on trade, or on the inconveniences of travel. For this reason, much of what the travelers have to say about music does not obviously intersect with the usual concerns of scholars about historical musical practice. Relatively few of the reports represent attempts at empiricism by persons educated in music.2 It is these writings—like those of Giovanni Battista Donado (1627–99), Charles-Henri de Blainville (1711–71), Franz-Josef Sulzer (1727–91), Charles Fonton (1725–93), Giambattista Toderini (1728–99), and Guillaume André Villoteau (1759–1839)—which tend to be the longest and most detailed of the musical accounts available and which have received the bulk of scholarly attention since the 1950s. What we can learn from a fuller range of travelers’ observations, the offhand no less than the systematic, is not limited to the use to which they have been put most often by ethnomusicologists—that is, to provide valuable corroboration for the details of organology, history, and musical practice in areas east of Vienna and south of the Mediterranean found in other sources.3 In historical musicology, when effort has been made to use these travel accounts to explore the links between European and Ottoman musical culture, such efforts have tended to focus on musical borrowings, on critiques of orientalist and imperialist ideologies, and on the Turkish craze of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In music studies, the alla turca phenomenon has been the centerpiece of most discussions of what European travelers saw and heard.4

Etnomüzikoloji disiplininin gelişim süreci ve Türkiye’de yapılan çalışmalar ışığında Martin Stokes’un popüler müzik araştırmalarının incelenmesi

Etnomüzikoloji disiplininin gelişim süreci ve Türkiye’de yapılan çalışmalar ışığında Martin Stokes’un popüler müzik araştırmalarının incelenmesi

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

In the shade of “beautiful style”: talking about the chamber vocal music pieces by G. Donizetti

“Transporting the notes:” urbanization and westernization in the music of the northeastern Aegean islands in the nineteenth and the twentieth century

ABSTRACTThe music of the North Aegean Sea Islands between Europe and Asia has undoubtedly been influenced by neighbouring cultures. The syncretic melding of disparate strands has also formed an indigenous, cosmopolitan cultural identity in the North Aegean Sea islands, comprising Lesbos, Limnos, Ai Stratis, Chios, Oinousses, Psara, Samos, Ikaria and Fourni. Identity emerges from mythical and historical events, including indigenous Greek, Oriental and Western ethnic materials of continental and island origins. Adopting an interdisciplinary methodology crossing historical ethnomusicology and musicology, cultural anthropology and the sociology of music, this paper presents results of ethnographic research into music and dance. It explores identity formation from the late nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on changes in musical practices, performance, education, repertoire and lifestyle. Centralizing policies emanating from Athens combined with social and technological changes mark transitions from local to European, from eastern to western style, providing a context for urbanization and westernization.

Frolova-Walker , Marina Rimsky-Korsakov and His World (review)

REVIEWS 551 working practices and concerns also emerge clearly from the letters, including his intense restlessness when without creative activity, and his serious doubts about some of his weaker works, as well as disgust at the incompetence of proof readers; other major themes in this section are money and health, both relating to his relatives and servants. Another interesting part of the book is entitled ‘Musical Souvenirs’, comprising messages and jokes sometimes destined for albums or as lively letters and squibs to friends, revealing a sense of humour that is rare but not completely absent in his mostly passionate and emotional or gently sentimental work. The book’s next section, entitled ‘Key Documents’, begins with his birth certificate and continues with documents relating to his ‘personal and professional life in the administrative, economic and political context of the time’ also shedding ‘new light on the composer’s public image and social status in Imperial Russia’ (p. 199). Finally, a brief Chronology will help readers to follow the considerable peregrinations of Chaikovskii and his family. This composer’s great popularity has survived waves of snobbery in the twentieth century and continues strongly more than a century after his death. It must therefore be assumed that all aspects of his musical and personal heritage will be of interest not only to musicologists but also to a far wider public. This English-language version of the ground-breaking original Russian text has been prepared with great skill and care. The notes are particularly admirable, and the translations of the letters and other documents impeccable. Chaikovskii’s world of sentimental and highly emotional letter writing has long gone, but, for all that, this handsomely produced book should find much to fascinate those who want to know more about one of the world’s most popular composers. London Arnold McMillin Frolova-Walker, Marina (ed.). Rimsky-Korsakov and His World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2018. xiii + 369 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Index. $35.00: £27.00 (paperback). Scholarly attempts to rehabilitate the musical legacy of Nikolai RimskiiKorsakov (1844–1908) have been gathering pace for some time now, prompted in part by an article by Richard Taruskin, first published in Music Theory Spectrum in 2011, and also by the ongoing re-evaluation of almost every aspect of Russian music history since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whilst contributing to this specific academic development, Rimsky-Korsakov and His SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 552 Worldalsopromisestoraisethecomposer’sprofilewithmoregeneralaudiences and cultural organizations. Attractively priced, elegantly produced, cogently organized and often accessibly pitched, it deserves to be read and discussed widely, and if it leads to new priorities when it comes to artistic programming in our concert halls and opera houses, then its editor’s efforts will have been more than amply rewarded. The volume opens with a selection of thirty-two of the 189 letters exchanged between Rimskii-Korsakov and his late muse, the soprano Nadezhda ZabelaVrubel ´. Shedding light on musical politics, repertory and aesthetics around the turn of the century, they also portray the composer in a more personal, even flirtatious light than his often rather dour, academic image suggests. There then follow two articles examining the historical, intellectual and aesthetic contexts of two of Rimskii-Korsakov’s fifteen operas. Emily Frey’s outstanding analysis of Snegurochka (1880–81) deftly traces the impact of populism on its composer, tracing not just his evolution from radical young nationalist to academically respectable professor, but also his shift from the kuchkist values of the 1860s to something more timelessly idealized. Frey’s article is a model of nuanced, sensitive interdisciplinarity, lightly yet authoritatively bringing together elements of intellectual history, historical musicology and analysis to transform our understanding of both a key work and its composer. Anna Nisnevich’s account of Mozart and Salieri (1897) is a bracing and bravura attempt at reading a much overlooked work which sits uneasily between mid-nineteenthcentury nationalism and twentieth-century neo-classicism, but which is here revealed to be a crucial document in the composer’s endless process of selfrefashioning . The final opera to be discussed is Rimskii-Korsakov’s last stage work, The Golden Cockerel (1907), which is the subject of...

El estudio de las marcas de agua del papel como material para determinar la datación y procedencia de las fuentes histórico-musicales, y su grado de fiabilidad. (Una primera aproximación, a partir de los manuscritos de la primera mitad del siglo XVII del Archivo de Música de las catedrales De Zaragoza)

El estudio de las marcas de agua del papel (consideradas como marca del fabricante) como herramienta para datar documentos musicales, e incluso para investigar sus posibles procedencias, es un terreno que hasta la fecha ha merecido escasa atención (en cualquier caso, menos de la que mereciera) por parte de los musicólogos en nuestro país. Dependemos de trabajos de historiadores, en la mayoría de las ocasiones centrados en el período medieval, en fuentes de otros países, o en estudios excesivamente localizados. Por otro lado, la bibliografía de referencia básica es antigua y proporciona pocas pistas concretas al musicólogo interesado en datar las fuentes de su estudio. A partir de un caso concreto, las fuentes musicales de la primera mitad del siglo XVII del Archivo de Música de las Catedrales de Zaragoza, este trabajo pretende plantear puntos de arranque para futuros trabajos, al tiempo que concienciar a los profesionales de la necesidad de recoger cuantas más marcas de agua, mejor, con vistas a contar con una buena colección de materiales entre los que poder "comparar", y hacer así de esta herramienta (todavía hoy, y para nuestra disciplina, no excesivamente "fiable", —únicamente por lo joven e inexplorada—), un apoyo básico para los estudios de la Musicología histórica del ámbito hispano.

МУЗИЧНЕ ПОВСЯКДЕННЯ ВОЛИНІ (СЕРЕДИНА XVI – ПОЧАТОК XVII СТОЛІТЬ)

The presented article is the first study of this kind, where the musical life of Volhynia of the mid 16th - early 17th century is specially considered. In the study, we almost exclusively focused on the secular segment of musical everyday life. On the basis of the analysis of historical acts, fiscal accounting documents and other sources, three thematic sections were formed. The first section is devoted to the study of musicians in Volhynia. In the fiscal accounting documents, initially the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown), various terms are used to refer to musicians and related professions: "dudari", "skomorokhy", "skrypali", "trubachi", "medwednyky" "muzyky", "hudky". From these and other documents we learn about the number of musicians in different small settlements. Among the nicknames that were given to musicians, the "dudnyk" and "skrypka" prevail, sometimes there is a "hudka". Separately, in the act documents other music specialties are mentioned: "Jews Cantors", "organist", "pyshchyk", "trubach", "bubnist". Also, in the documents of such kind, one could find some episodes from the everyday life of the musicians. Musical instruments are discussed in the second section of the article: "kobza", "turkish kobza", "lute", "quintar lute", "violin", "italian violin", "cithara", "duda", "smyk", "truba", "bubon". The last section deals with two separate phenomena of Volhynia musical culture - music in dance and Volochebnyy ceremonies. The lack of study of Volhynia musical culture in previous years encouraged the emergence of various myths, in particular, about the poverty of the musical culture of the Volhynia autochthonous population. According to the myth, the pipe organs of the Catholic temples were brought to these territories by the Polish colonists after the Union of Lublin. However, as it is shown in the article, the first mention of the Lutsk organist dates back to the time before the Union of Lublin and the name of organist indicates his Ruthenian origin. Thus, the obtained results allow us not only to fill the gaps in Ukrainian historical musicology of the mid 16th - early 17th century, but also to hope for the appearing of similar studies of other Ukrainian lands.

1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music

Slavonic and East European Review, 97, 1, 2019 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK & PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH Long before the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union had questioned the notion that 1917 might constitute some kind of single, decisive rupture, whether in historiography or history itself. In particular, historians have come to see the October Revolution as an expression of Russia’s broader experience of modernity, revealing continuities between Imperial Russia and what was to become the Soviet Union, disputing narratives of exceptionalism, and proposing affinities with models of social development arguably more characteristic of Western European countries.1 Literary scholars too had long grasped the significant connections between pre- and post-revolutionary instantiations of Russian modernism, even if these were often disputed by émigré authorities unable, or unwilling, to admit that the Soviet Union might have any claims on culture. Vladimir Nabokov, no less, offered a survey course at Cornell University in 1950 on ‘The Modernist Movement in Russian Literature’, which included Tolstoi, Chekhov, Blok, and even the nineteenth-century lyric poets, Fet and Tiutchev, yet pointedly avoided anything written in Soviet Union after 1917.2 Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College, Oxford, and Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. 1 See, for instance, David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, Basingstoke, 2000; Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930, Ithaca, NY and London, 2008; Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, Pittsburgh, 2015; Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Search for the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925, Ithaca, NY and London, 2002, and Matthias Neumann and Andy Willimott (eds), Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide, London, 2018. 2 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, London, 1992, p. 171, cited in Catriona Kelly (ed.), Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts, 1905–1940, London, 1999, p. xix. PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK & PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH 2 This was, though, an extreme position. More typical were those scholars who explored the continuation of the so-called ‘Silver Age’ well into the 1920s, or those, by contrast, who saw the roots of Soviet modernism in the pre-revolutionary era or even the fin de siècle.3 Intellectual historians were equally alive to the impact of pre-revolutionary thought on Soviet culture, not just in the form of the precursors of the Marxist-Leninist canon, but also as represented, perhaps more surprisingly, by the complex and ambiguous legacy of Nietzsche or Russia’s engagement with psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud and Jung.4 But what of music in this context, and how have musicologists conceived of the impact of the October Revolution? Superficially, at least, the notion of 1917 as a dramatic caesura is one that still continues to inform aspects of historical musicology. In part, this may be related to the very obvious fact that some of Russia’s most prominent composers left around the time of the revolution — most notably Sergei Prokof´ev, Sergei Rakhmaninov and Igor´ Stravinskii. Even if their motivations were very different, their collective stories nonetheless give the impression of a radical discontinuity. The fact that within Soviet Russia itself, it was the young Dmitrii Shostakovich who came to symbolize the cultural aspirations of the new state further corroborates this impression of a clear divide. Indeed, the whole history of twentieth-century music could be provocatively read through the binary oppositions seemingly represented by the pairing of Stravinskii and Shostakovich: Russia Abroad versus the Soviet Union; freedom versus tyranny; pure music versus musical meaning; modernism versus Socialist Realism, and so on. Such an account would, of course, be facile and reductive, yet is nonetheless often implicitly there in popular narratives, even whilst it has been comprehensively challenged in much of the academic literature. Staying with the biographical context for a moment, it is instructive to compare the story of Russian music with that represented...

Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton

Research Article| December 01 2018 Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton Elizabeth Titrington Craft Elizabeth Titrington Craft Elizabeth Titrington Craft is an assistant professor of music at the University of Utah, where she teaches courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, music of the United States, musical theater, and opera. Her research examines musical theater from the early twentieth century to the present, focusing on racial and ethnic representation, immigrant narratives, constructions of nationhood, marketing, and reception. Her published work appears in Studies in Musical Theatre, The Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical, and Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000. She received her PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (4): 429–447. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0429 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabeth Titrington Craft; Headfirst into an Abyss: The Politics and Political Reception of Hamilton. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (4): 429–447. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.4.0429 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 PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Ideaby Jack Boss

Book Review| October 01 2018 Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea by Jack Boss Boss, Jack, Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea, Cambridge University Press, 2014: xxviii + 437 pp. ($110.00 cloth) Charlotte M. Cross Charlotte M. Cross Charlotte M. Cross holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Columbia University. She has taught at Columbia, Barnard College, and the Manhattan School of Music. In 2007 she was a fellow at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory. She is preparing translations of Schoenberg’s 1925 Gedanke manuscripts for publication. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Music Theory (2018) 62 (2): 369–370. https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-7306275 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Charlotte M. Cross; Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea by Jack Boss. Journal of Music Theory 1 October 2018; 62 (2): 369–370. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-7306275 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Music Theory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by Yale University2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

How Blue Can You Get? “It’s Tight Like That” and the Hokum Blues

Research Article| October 01 2018 How Blue Can You Get? “It’s Tight Like That” and the Hokum Blues Roberta Freund Schwartz Roberta Freund Schwartz Roberta Freund Schwartz is an associate professor of historical musicology at the University of Kansas. Her areas of specialization include the music of the Spanish Renaissance and African American popular music. Her work on music patronage by the Spanish nobility, British blues rock, and blues has appeared in a number of compilations and festschrifts, and her monograph, How Britain Got the Blues (Ashgate, 2007), won the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence for Best Historical Research in Blues and R&B. She is currently working on a book about the city blues style and the recording industry before 1940. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2018) 36 (3): 367–393. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.3.0367 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Roberta Freund Schwartz; How Blue Can You Get? “It’s Tight Like That” and the Hokum Blues. American Music 1 January 2018; 36 (3): 367–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.3.0367 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 PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLES You do not currently have access to this content.

A mechanical source of Turkish music from 18th-century London

A late 18th-century mechanical organ, built into a clock made by Henry Borrell of London, plays melodies that sound completely unlike those normally found on English domestic musical clocks. This article draws on the disciplines of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and horology to argue that these tunes derive from the repertory of the 18th-century Ottoman court. The melodies are analysed firstly in the context of the Ottoman repertory and then alongside contemporary European transcriptions of ‘exotic’ music, notably Edward Jones’s Lyric Airs (1804). The distortion of ‘Turkish’ melodies in European representations is set within the wider context of orientalism and musical transculturation; this evidence is then brought to bear on the interpretation of music that may also be subject to mechanical distortion. The article ends with a consideration of how these earliest known sounding examples of Ottoman music may have arrived in London, and what reception they found there.

Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan by Gerald Groemer

Reviewed by: Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan by Gerald Groemer Shawn Bender (bio) Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan. By Gerald Groemer. Oxford University Press, New York, 2016. xxv, 304 pages. $105.00, cloth; $36.95, paper. Gerald Groemer’s Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan is an exhaustively researched work of historical musicology on the visually disabled women musicians of Japan called goze. In his book, Groemer traces the emergence and coalescence of goze into performing groups in the Edo period, the challenges of their occupational “liberation” in the Meiji period, and the gradual dissolution of goze organizations over the course of the twentieth century. Those scholars familiar with his previous work will not be surprised by this choice of subject. Groemer’s The Spirit of Tsugaru: Blind Musicians, Tsugaru-jamisen, and the Folk Music of Northern Japan (Harmonie Park Press, 1999) remains the most comprehensive treatment available in English of the shamisen music of northern Japan, a folk genre in which the most important innovators were blind men. The music of the socially and geographically marginal is clearly of great interest to Groemer, and in devoting two monographs to it he effectively reverses the dominant gaze of Japanese musicology, one which usually begins with the music of religious and imperial court ritual, moves through an overview of the classical stage arts, and concludes with some mention of folk and popular styles. Instead, in Groemer’s writing, the folk [End Page 147] are front and center; classical elements receive mention only when they are intentionally incorporated into performance by folk musicians. In so doing, Groemer seems to be motivated by the laudable desire not just to write about the music of Japan’s marginal groups but to write their music into the field of Japanese ethnomusicology, or, to be more specific, English-language scholarship on Japanese music. As a detailed description of the lives and music of Japan’s blind female shamisen players, Goze is a great success. Groemer draws heavily on Japanese primary and secondary sources in constructing his account. He thus brings the insights of Japanese researchers to a much larger scholarly public. But, for too much of the book, Groemer’s narrative stays within the descriptive and taxonomic mode characteristic of much native and foreign scholarship on Japanese music. Aside from the formal analysis of song texts and musical structure, Groemer’s book rarely moves beyond description and classification either to make a persuasive argument about what goze represent or to engage substantively with social theories of disability, performance, and gender that might aid in understanding them from a broader perspective. In the introduction, Groemer tells us that the word “goze” was originally a polite way to refer to a woman. Eventually, though it is not clear how, the term came to refer exclusively to blind female musicians. Their activities centered in the Echigo region of Edo-period Japan (now Niigata Prefecture), largely because of the unique adaptation of domestic architecture to the winter weather of the region: goze found the outdoor hallways created by the overhanging eaves of row homes convenient in their itinerant search for paying customers. The chapter provides additional accounts of goze by European visitors to Japan and by native Japanese folklore scholars. Interesting as these anecdotes are, it would have been beneficial to have included as well some statement of the argument of the book in this chapter, or in the preceding preface, that would help the reader place this and other parts of the book into context. Clearly, the status of goze as visually disabled is a key defining characteristic of their occupational identity. In the first chapter, Groemer focuses his discussion on what he calls the “production of visual disability” (p. 15). The chapter moves through early Buddhist understandings of disability rooted in the transgressions of past lives to biomedical objectifications of disability in late Edo and Meiji-period Japan. Groemer shows that, regardless of the intellectual paradigm within which visual disability was understood, the end result was the same: the production of a disabled subject (p. 34). Neither in medieval nor in modern Japan did...

Expressive Tempo Modifications in Adelina Patti's Recordings: An Integrated Approach

This paper explores the extent of expressive tempo modifications as a function of textual content in four operatic arias recorded by Adelina Patti between 1905 and 1906. Their analysis made it possible to determine to what extent significant tempo modifications coincide with those moments in the music, in which special emphasis is demanded by the lyrics. A twofold approach was adopted: the paradigms of historical musicology provided the conceptual tools necessary to define the context, reconstruct the vocal practice, and understand the relationship between the lyrics and the compositional solutions underpinning them; the degree of tempo variability for each aria was determined by empirically measuring the crotchet beat lengths and by calculating the value of mean, mode, standard deviation and coefficient of variation. Results show that Patti's renditions of the four arias present tempo modifications which are instrumental to the expression of their dramatic content, as recommended by the singing methods and treatises which appeared in the course of the nineteenth century. Most crucially, they challenge the assumption that interpreters trained in the late romantic culture abused the composer's intentions and indulged in tasteless, exaggerated interpretive choices.

Laurie Stas, ed. She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whitness, Femininity, Adolescence, and Class in 1960s Music

Laurie Stras, ed. 2010. She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music. Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Laurie Stras's edited volume She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music is a welcome addition to the recent scholarship on music by female musicians of the 1960s that attends to the complexity of the women and girls who performed and listened to this music in the United States and the United Kingdom. So unexplored is this area of inquiry from a musicological standpoint that, in her introduction, Stras appropriately envisions She's So Fine to be the beginning of a re-evaluation--with emphasis on value--of the very premises of 1950s and 1960s (23). By extension, Stras's ambitions for the book not only necessitate an interrogation of the merits of the popular music canon, but also call for a reconsideration of the standard criteria for assigning and naturalizing value wherever it calcifies. The pop music of women musicians in the 1960s has, critically and in general popular thought, been denigrated for its polish and mass appeal. Celebrated volumes on rock history such as The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, (2001) or Robert Palmer's Rock and Roll: An Unruly History (1995) have participated in the dismissal of groups by crediting their success to the complex labor force of producers and song-writers the musicians. Stras observes that Pop and its attendant girl-space, with their alleged emphasis on conformity and concomitant lack of authenticity, have been noted as a phenomenon, but one that always seems to operate as a foil to prove rock's ultimate superior cultural worth (22). The most troubling problem posed by these gendered constructions of genres is not so much that popular music is consistently gendered female--for as Stras observes, pop music was indeed a space dominated by teenage girls who represented the target audience (21)--but that this feminization simultaneously becomes a marker of conformity, lack, or devaluation. Clearly, the diminished social status of adolescent girls in Western culture is one explanation for the motivations behind this discursive and political suppression of pop and the heterogeneity of the singers in question. She's So Fine, therefore, is a valuable feminist work because it resonates as the unequivocal rejoinder to all of the pejorative connotations that justify the reduction and dismissal of the category of girl from androcentric histories of popular culture. This collection is divided into three main sections that are organized into a loose chronological fashion, drawing from a broad range of disciplines that include cultural studies, historical musicology, performance studies, and media studies. It uses a wide array of primary source materials that include recordings, television broadcasts, interviews (both published and personal), biographies, autobiographies, images, journalism, rock criticism, and fan-created artifacts. Its methodological and theoretical approaches to 1960s pop are so diverse that each reader can map a different trajectory through their arguments, but always with the sense that the essays are in conversation with each other. Stras charts a course that does not quite resemble a conventional recovery project, whose purpose might be to make extraordinary, otherwise forgotten music more available, mostly because accessibility and public exposure have never been a significant problem for the uniquely situated status of 1960s groups. As Stras mentions in her introduction, pop presently exists in an abundance of forms within popular culture, entertainment, and media (7)--so much so that the '60s singer is both a standard, camp figure. The academic and critical devaluation of singers, then, has little to do with our failure to acknowledge pop and everything to do with a deliberate disempowerment of the teenage girls involved with its creation and reception. …

“We Can Always Empathize with Ourselves”: Pastiche, Parody, and Rock Journalism in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013)

This article studies the hipster as the neoliberal offspring of the yuppie. In order to understand the pillars of these cultures, the focus is on their staging of a musicology. I use the term “musicology” here as an umbrella term for the musicological musings of representatives of each of the subcultures studied here. These often encompass approaches to the scholarly analysis of music as regards historical musicology, performance practice, or music theory.of this paper also studies the music industry’s corresponding modes of production by the lived experience of both the hipster and the yuppie subcultures. For a closer reading of these, the parodied rhetoric of music journalism in the novel American Psycho and its film adaptation will serve as a starting point to discuss the relevance of economic and cultural capital in subcultural style or fashion statements.

Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof by Kay Norton

SOCIOLOGY OF SINGING Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof. By Kay Norton. New York: Routledge, 2016. [xxiv, 202 p. ISBN 9781138825314 (hardcover), $135; ISBN 9781138825321 (paperback), $44.95; ISBN 9781315740065 (e-book), varies.] Music examples, illustrations, references, index.Norton describes her project in Singing and Wellbeing as an attempt to synthesize recent scholarship on social and historical importance of singing with medical evidence of music's health benefits. Her work, which combines fields of music, medical humanities, and medicine, is timely given rise in prominence of work of Oliver Sacks (especially his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and Brain [New York: Knopf, 2007]) and 2014 film Alive Inside, which documents power of music to activate neural pathways, especially in Alzheimer's patients. (The clip Henry Wakes Up went viral on multiple social media platforms.) The task of combining these three disciplines is daunting, given that all are highly specialized.In industrialized West, fields of music and medicine exist in separate worlds, but historically they have been inextricably linked. (It is not by chance that Apollo was god of music and medicine.) In recent centuries, Western culture and science created a false dichotomy that separated activities of mind and those of body. According to medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, before seventeenth century, human consciousness was not only collective but also a bio-psycho-spiritual unity. With rise of scientific thought, that consciousness split, and we were suddenly simultaneously [aware of] being a body and having a body, a phenomenon that is associated with the rise of a discursive, metatheoretical 'modernist' orientation to self that is secular, self-reflexive, and ironic (Arthur Kleinman, Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience [New York: Free Press, 1988], 50). What is most important for purposes here is that this new split in consciousness interferes with total absorption in lived (ibid.) . It is precisely this total absorption in a lived experience that is central to act of singing, especially group singing. A hyper-individual and self-reflexive consciousness (as found in West) may lead to discomfort with reuniting art of singing and scientific study of medicine. But non-singing Western doctor is in minority; vast majority of healers-across cultures and throughout history-have employed an inflected human voice in some way during healing process, whether through chant, prayer, or song. Western skepticism is one of main challenges that Norton faces in her work.A second challenge is Western tendency toward discipline-specific specialization. Norton's research is not just about music and medicine, but also music and wellbeing. Wellbeing involves far more than just physical health; it is a complex balance of physiological, psychological, social, and political elements. In some ways, this book addresses all of these-from how music changes our physiology to how music can be used to identify with others. Of course, studying such a complicated and multifaceted phenomenon as wellbeing requires expertise in a wide variety of fields. Disciplinary integration creates profound challenges for modern Westerner. Norton recognizes and indeed embraces her own limitations, and so my review must do same. Both Norton and I are trained in field of historical musicology; neither of us is a scientist, psychologist, sociologist, or medical practitioner, but we are both deeply interested in connection between music (singing specifically) and wellbeing in its broadest possible definition. Indeed, Norton's work here extends beyond fields of music and medicine in order to study significance of human singing voice using evidence from fields of anthropology, evolution, world history, psychology, theology, and philosophy. …

O diletantismo inglês: o violino na cultura britânica no século XVII


 
 
 A música para violino é tema recorrente em diversas pesquisas da musicologia histórica. No entanto, uma abordagem mais detalhada sobre os primeiros passos de seu repertório carece de atenção. Desde seu aparecimento na renascença tardia, a música para violino esteve ligada à música de dança. Seja nas tavernas, nas casas, ou nas ruas, a posição que esse instrumento conquistou na sociedade levou-o a um papel de destaque nas cortes europeias. Na Inglaterra, foco deste artigo, o violino serviu, primeiramente, como instrumento integrante das English Masques e dos consorts reais. Isto deu ao violino e sua família maior autonomia de repertório, de modo que este passou a atuar em gêneros essencialmente instrumentais, como a fantasia-suíte, a sonata e o trio-sonata. Neste estudo, observaremos como o instrumento em questão influenciou o panorama da dança na Inglaterra do século XVII, utilizando-se de obras de compositores representativos daquele período: John Playford (1623-1687) e Peter Prelleur (1705-1741). Em seguida, estudaremos, com mais detalhes, os gêneros citados previamente, a fim de esclarecer a relação do violino para com o estilo italiano em ascensão, bem como sua execução pelos músicos amadores, fundamentais para o desenvolvimento da popularidade e reputação desse instrumento além de sua perpetuação na cultura britânica 
 
 

Book Reviews

K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (eds) Music in Video Games: Studying Play New York and London: Routledge, 2014: 232pp. ISBN: 978-0415634441review by Michiel KampThis volume falls right in the middle of a boom in publications on video game music. Following Karen Collins's Game Sound and her edited volume From Pac-Man to Pop Music (both 2008), there have been a number of articles and chapters appearing on the subject, both throughout the various Oxford Handbooks and in journals that focus on music in audiovisual media. These are joined by Kiri Miller's Playing Along (2012) and William Cheng's Soundplay (2014), which, although bundled in book form, can really be considered collections of article-length (case) studies. Add to that Peter Moormann's edited volume Music and Game: Perspectives on a Popular Alliance (2013) and the question becomes how this Routledge volume Music in Video Games: Studying Play (2014), edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, distinguishes itself from or relates to this rapidly growing field.The question is perhaps unfair, as the academic study of video game music is still in its infancy and the field anything but saturated, but it is fruitful to consider the different strands and approaches that operate on this relatively new and exciting topic within musicology. And, to start with, it has to be said that this is first and foremost a musicology volume. Whereas, for instance, From Pac-Man to Pop Music offers a multitude of scholars from different disciplines - and even expands its topic to include game sound - the chapters in Music in Video Games almost exclusively employ methods from historical musicology and music theory. This means the book has no shortage of well-printed and clear music examples that, given the dynamic and adaptive nature of game scores, get quite inventive.Another thing that sets this volume apart from others is the fact that it, for the most part, eschews grand theories of game music in general in favour of more focused case studies - one, or a small number, per chapter. These include what might by now be called the canonical cases of Super Mario Bros. (1985), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), and Silent Hill (1999, albeit only in passing in Rebecca Roberts' chapter), but also introduce a number of new and worthy topics of study, such as Plants vs. Zombies, representing the less-than-glamorous but ubiquitous non-dynamic soundtracks of low-budget mobile games; the soundtrack of Sid Meier's Civilization IV (2005), which features pre-existing music in a manner completely unlike other audio-visual media such as films, showing the idiosyncrasies of video games when it comes to representation; and all-but-forgotten soundtracks such as that composed for The Dig (1995). Together, these case studies uniquely represent the variety of video game soundtracks, whereas other collections have mostly presented the variety of approaches to game music.The chapters are loosely ordered according to topics, moving from 'chip music' to analysis of dynamic soundtracks to horror games to hermeneutics. This, admittedly, is gleaned from the introduction, as there are many threads that connect chapters in the book, although none of them explicit. The book starts with 'the classics': Neil Lerner's analyses of the Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. soundtracks. Central to this chapter is the link between early game music and early film music, a thread of research that Lerner further explores in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (2014). There, he focuses on the very earliest video games, and his structural and semiotic analysis of Donkey Kong here is reminiscent of that chapter. However, particular attention is paid to the unity the soundtrack provides in an otherwise incoherent and inconsistent game world ('Why does Mario have three lives?' Lerner asks, following Jesper Juul [2005]). The tonal coherence Lerner notes is striking, and it is even more prevalent in his analysis of the later Super Mario Bros. …

International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus15).

The 8th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus15) took place from the 17th to 19th of September, 2015, in Leipzig, Germany, a city with a strong academic and musical heritage. Leipzig was home to famous musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. It was where Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory for experimental psychology in 1879 (Rieber & Robinson, 2001, p. 206), and where Hugo Riemann founded one of the first institutes for Musicology in 1914 (Gollin & Rehding, 2011, p. 140). Against this background was held a conference highlighting the interdisciplinarity of modern Musicology.Musicology itself is a broad field. The discipline in its modern shape has grown out of Historical and Systematic Musicology, and Ethnomusicology as a younger field. The most prominent segregation thereby lies between Historical and Systematic Musicology; exactly where the line falls is up for debate, however, the two differ slightly in their aims. Whereas Historical Musicology may be largely descriptive, cataloguing how music has been written and performed in the past, Systematic Musicology asks why music is the way it is (Parncutt, 2007). Musicology as a whole is considered basic research in a widely spread area, as it draws upon knowledge from a vast range of disciplines and applies it to the study of music. This is, perhaps, more so the case with Systematic Musicology, because wide perspectives must be drawn upon to address these fundamental questions. Consequently, Systematic Musicology borrows methods from Psychology, Mathematics, Computer Science, Sociology, Neuroscience, Anthropology, Biology, and even History, in its search for answers. As a conference for young researchers, SysMus15 embodied these interdisciplinary ideals, so that attendees could be exposed to a wide range of perspectives on music.The Idea of SysMusThe idea behind the SysMus conference series is to give earlystage researchers the possibility to become familiar with scientific conference procedures in an environment of peers. Due to the internationality of the presentations, all sessions are held in English. Critical feedback can be offered by members of an audience with differing backgrounds because of the openness of conference toward researchers either from within Musicology or from other disciplines with an interest in music research. Furthermore, renowned researchers are invited to present their research in keynotes, or to give workshops. The conference is held in a different country every year, which further increases its internationality; the previous conference (SysMus14) was held at the University of London (Bauer & Neumann, 2014). At present, over five different countries across Europe and North America have hosted SysMus since it started in Austria in 2008, where it was founded by Dr Manuela Marin (who was a Doctoral candidate at the time) and Professor Richard Parncutt. All SysMus conferences are organized by a local committee composed entirely of Doctoral and Masters students, under the supervision of a member of staff at the host university. The annual cycle may seem intense compared with biennial or triennial conferences that have sometimes become a norm (e.g., ICMPC is biennial, Neuromusic is triennial) but, given that SysMus only accepts student presenters (with the exception of the invited keynote speakers), this maximizes the opportunity for young researchers to participate. Ultimately it aims to provide a practice ground for students, and an ideal first conference in which to speak and share their ideas with their peers.SysMus15SysMus15 hosted >30 early-stage researchers from various universities with a focus on music. It was organized by a team led by Laura Neumann (University of Leipzig) under the supervision of Professor Sebastian Klotz (formerly of the University of Leipzig, now Humboldt University of Berlin). …