Male Musicians Research Articles

The world with us: Sight and sound in the “cultural flows” of informal learning. An Indigenous Australian case

Abstract Studies of informal learning have tended to take for granted the success of youth in acquiring expertise with digital media. However, the pace of change in technologies increasingly requires individuals to learn on their own or in “unofficial” communities of learners. Examined here is a case of such learning within remote Indigenous communities of Australia. Based on a three year ethnographic research project investigating Indigenous youth learning in community-based learning spaces, this paper focuses on the learning of digital media technologies by adolescent and young adult male musicians. Revealed here is the manner in which long-standing social interactional patterns integrate with visuospatial and embodied modes employed by youth to bring digital media into their lifeways.

Women Musicians in British Silent Cinema Prior to 1930

Referencing a range of sources from personal testimonies, diaries, trade union reports and local cinema studies, this chapter unearths the history of women musicians who played to silent film. It traces the pre-history of their entry into the cinema business through the cultures of Edwardian female musicianship that had created a sizeable number of women piano and violin teachers who were able to fill the rapid demand created by newly built cinemas around 1910. This demand was further increased during the First World War as male musicians were called to the Front and the chapter documents the backlash from within the industry against women who stepped in to fill vacant roles. The chapter argues that women were central to creating the emerging art-form of cinema musicianship and shaping the repertoire of cinema music during the first three decades of the twentieth century. With the coming of sound, those women who had learned the cinema organ, in the face of considerable snobbery, were also well placed to continue musical careers in Cine-Variety during the 1930s and beyond. This article looks particularly at the careers of Ena Baga and Florence de Jong who went on to play for silent films until the 1980s.

Rufus Thomas, Man of the House of Happiness

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In his eighty-four years, Rufus Thomas worked with hundreds of colorfully named musicians and radio personalities--like Hot Rod and Honey Boy, Moolah and Gatemouth--but other than calling himself world's finest teenager, Thomas never needed a funky handle to distinguish himself as a singer, songwriter, and disc jockey in Memphis, Tennessee. His career was entwined with virtually every great blues, RB yet, Thomas believed that as a pure entertainer he had no equal. As he put it: There is nobody alive, on the face of the earth, who can do Rufus like I do Rufus. Thomas had a run of memorably goofy top-ten R&B hits in the 1960s, but listing them (Walking the Dog, Do the Push & Pull ...) or mentioning the dozens of bands who paid tribute with covers (The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith ...) misses the point. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, after all, doesn't feature Rufus Thomas. Instead, his influence derives from the bawdy figure he cut and the freewheeling tone he set. Whether performing on Beale Street, recording for the legendary Sun and Stax labels, emceeing fund-raising revues, or misbehaving late at night in a radio studio, he communicated something essentially spiritual. He gave hot-blooded young male musicians from Mick Jagger to Busta Rhymes the grammar for thinking and talking and joking about their deepest, darkest, nastiest urges. With unabashedly raunchy good humor, he helped define the tradition of the fun-loving trickster, the likable lech. Until shortly before his death in 2001, Thomas continued to work Saturday mornings from six to ten, co-hosting a radio show at WDIA-AM. After a guest appearance a few years earlier, he simply kept coming back, and nobody minded. After all, it was Thomas, as much as anyone, who once made WDIA the most important radio station in the country--the nation's first to switch to all-black programming. Everyone knows what a big deal it was when, in 1953, a nineteen-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley paid a visit to Sam Phillip's Sun Studios to make a record for his mom. But WDIA quietly debuting its Tan Town Jamboree four years earlier may have had farther-reaching effects on American culture and the history of popular music. At the time, African Americans in Memphis couldn't visit the city's fairgrounds or zoo. The city's lone African American police officer wasn't permitted to arrest, or touch, anyone white. But suddenly, with all these smart and funny African American voices enlivening the air, playing down-home race music, and discussing the great and small concerns of the African American community of the Mississippi Delta, WDIA brought together the urban and rural, the poor and well-to-do, the schooled and unschooled, in one powerful demographic. Profit had been the original motive, of course, but once the white station managers switched to an all-black format, they didn't hedge their bets. They went out and hired the most audacious on-air personalities in a town brimming with audacious personalities. And then they did something amazing: they let Rufus Thomas and his colleagues simply be themselves. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Rufus, you are one handsome devil! Thomas exclaimed, within minutes of my dropping by WDIA'S scruffy, shag-carpeted studios in 1999. Visiting Memphis was a musical pilgrimage, and WDIA's downtown studios were my first stop. Well-dressed all the time! Thomas went on. Even on your off days! You can hear them saying it as soon as they pass you on the street: 'Damn, that Rufus is sharp! Uh-huh!' And for a man your age, who is still able to go out on the street and look sharp, it's remarkable. Or there's another word you can use: It's incredible! It truly is. Whatever you put on, you make something happen that nobody else do. …

Two Strikes and the Double Negative: The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Cases of Female Jazz Saxophonists

On January 1,2012,1 was invited to a party at my friend's house in Brooklyn, New York, where about ten jazz musicians gathered and celebrated the New Year over food and drinks. They knew me both as a jazz saxophonist who worked from the late 1990s to the early 2000s and as a researcher who conducted fieldwork in the late 2000s in New York City. Some of them helped me to connect with female jazz saxophonists to interview for my dissertation research. After talking about my research and several female saxophonists' remarkable success in recent years, a white male (and friend) mentioned, You know, white guys are the least favored in the scene. Yes, that's very true, another white male immediately responded. According to those two men, black musicians are more appreciated and female musicians attract more attention. In a similar way, one of my musician friends in Pittsburgh told me recently, You're a hot commodity because you're a woman sax player. I'm a white guy, nobody cares. These white male musicians' comments suggest that two different systems of preference are at work here: black musicians over white musicians because of authenticity, and female musicians over male musicians because of novelty. As a result, they perceive a certain hierarchy in the jazz scene: black men, black women, white (nonblack) women, and white (nonblack) men. This grading, whether valid or not, is different from the ones seen in many areas in American society where white males are often ranked the highest. More importantly, their comments demonstrate that the instrumental jazz scene is a site where both gender and race merge in complex dialogues that involve authenticity, belonging, and career advancement. This article explores how such issues, surrounding gender and race, intersect in the experiences of female jazz saxophonists. Based on interviews with female jazz saxophonists who are active in New York City, I draw attention to how African-American cultural identity affects female saxophonists' employment and the way they perform gender in the context of jazz. Specifically, I examine the meanings of these racial and cultural issues for African-American and non-African-American women who play jazz. How do these women talk about these issues in the context of their lives as performers? Why are there so few African-American female jazz instrumentalists in the current jazz scene? These questions and interviews frame this study, which shows the complexity of how African-American and white women experience jazz and demonstrates how gender issues in jazz can be shaped by race, especially various notions about blackness. The first part of the article focuses on issues of authenticity and jazz performance, especially as viewed by white female saxophonists, both American and European. The second part addresses practical, employment matters, chiefly the roles race and gender play in the employment of white female musicians and their interactions with male musicians. The third and fourth sections draw attention to the views of African-American women on similar subjects as previously mentioned and explores issues surrounding the scarcity of African-American female instrumentalists. My ideas of gender and race, as well as the use of intersectionality as an analytical framework, should be explained further. I subscribe to Stuart Hall's definition of cultural identity that consists of two seemingly opposing views: a fixed, unchanging, cultural essence, yet not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture but rather constantly undergoes transformation (Hall 1989, 69-70). In his discussion of Afro-Caribbean cinema, Hall posits that cultural identity belongs to the future as much as to the past (Hall 1989,69-70). I also draw on Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity; I consider categories of identity performative (Butler 1990). In other words, there is no essential quality for any identity category. …

Psychological well-being in professional orchestral musicians in Australia: A descriptive population study

We report the major findings from the psychosocial questionnaire component of a cross-sectional population survey of the musicians in Australia’s eight full-time professional symphonic and pit orchestras. The response rate was 70% ( n = 377). Female musicians reported significantly more trait anxiety, music performance anxiety, social anxiety, and other forms of anxiety and depression than male musicians. The youngest musicians (<30 years) were significantly more anxious compared with the oldest musicians (51+). The youngest female musicians were most affected by music performance anxiety. Music performance anxiety was lowest for the older musicians (51+ years). Thirty-three per cent of musicians may meet criteria for a diagnosis of social phobia. Twenty-two per cent answered in the affirmative to a question screening for post-traumatic stress disorder. Thirty-two per cent returned a positive depression screen; this subgroup had higher scores on the anxiety measures. Linear regression analysis identified the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T), the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), the Anxiety and Depression Detector (ADD) and age as independent predictors of music performance anxiety severity. Significant numbers of musicians drank alcohol in a manner outside the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) alcohol guidelines (2009); only 6% were current smokers. This study has identified a significant pattern of anxiety, depression and health behaviours that require attention in occupational health and safety policies and programmes for this workforce.

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF MUSIC IN THE EARLY ISLAMIC COURTS

Until the ninth century, the role of the professional musician in pre-Islamic Arabia and Mesopotamia was primarily fulfilled by women. Men were socially prohibited from working as musicians, though some transgressed gender and social boundaries by adopting feminine dress and playing ‘women's’ instruments. With the advent of Islam, patronage of qiyān (singing girls), mukhannathūn (effeminates) and later, male musicians, did not substantially change. During the early Abbasid era (750–950 ce), however, their collective visibility in court entertainments was among several factors leading to debates regarding the legal position of music in Islam. The arguments for and against took place in the realm of politics and interpretation of religious law yet the influence of traditional expectations for gendered musical performance that had existed on the cultural landscape for millennia also contributed to the formation of a musical semiotics used by both sides.In this article, I examine the representation of musicians in the early Islamic court in Baghdad from the perspective of select ninth-century Arabic texts. First, I begin with a summary of the gender roles and performance expectations for pre-Islamic court musicians and point to their continuation into the early Islamic courts. Then, I suggest how the figure of the musician became a key referent in the development of a musical semiotics used in medieval Islamic music discourse.

Rethinking the notion of chimurenga in the context of political change in Zimbabwe

Chimurenga music was popularised by Africans during the struggle for independence in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Its creators were freedom fighters struggling against colonialism. This music was articulated from guerrilla bases in Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, and from some local artists inside Zimbabwe. Chimurenga music protested against the exploitation of Africans by colonialism, and also critiqued the oppression of women within African society. Critics of chimurenga music have given the erroneous impression that the musical genre ended in 1980, and that there was only one version of chimurenga music. After independence, chimurenga music has criticised corruption, bad governance by the new leaders and delays in redistributing land to the African masses. Post-independence Zimbabwean singers with varying levels of political consciousness and employing different linguistic strategies have created different ways of naming reality through alternative versions of chimurenga music. These Zimbabwean male musicians demonstrate that attempts to generate a local discourse of freedom in the era of globalisation and corporate organisations that control the production and distribution of chimurenga music produce not one version of chimurenga music, but multiple versions (and sub/versions) of chimurenga music that confirm, collude, overlap and contradict each other in their ways of naming the post-independence Zimbabwean reality.

‘Welcome singing sungura queens’: Cultural studies and the promotion of female musicians in a Zimbabwean male-dominated music genre

ABSTRACT It has been repeated over the years that Zimbabwean popular music is a male-domain and the best-selling sungura genre is nearly exclusively composed by male musicians. Female musicians have opted for the socially acceptable gospel music, avoiding the secular sungura for fear of stigmatisation. Many other reasons have been provided to explain women's virtual absence from the sungura genre, some of them sound, and yet others purely sexist and ludicrous. Using Cultural Studies and critical political economy approaches, which seek to both critique and transform the current gender demographics of sungura band leadership, vocalism and monopoly of instrument playing, this paper attempts to provide ways of introducing and nurturing female sungura musicians into the recording and performing industry. Such introduction of female sungura personalities is not only to add to the exciting diversity of creative sungura suppliers, but to expand the discursive and democratic spaces in which women can self-articulate, ironically within a medium that has been accused of negatively stereotyping and objectifying them.

Spirituality and Devotional Music in the Royal Convent of the Descalzas, Madrid

Musicological interest in the convent of the Descalzas, Madrid, has focused almost exclusively on the salaried male musicians (notably Tomás Luis de Victoria) who provided music for the institution and the nuns and royal daughters who resided there. Yet contemporary chronicles and spiritual biographies offer insight into nuns' music as well; these documents suggest the careful crafting of an image of the women's piety and the deliberate projection of Habsburg spiritual authority through musical means, from private devotional singing in the cloister to a Habsburg nun's public musical patronage.

Over the Rainbow

Quinn, Davin K. MD1; Flaherty, Alice W. MD, PhD1; Herman, John B. MD1; Kleinschmidt, Trude L. MD1Editor(s): Olds, Jacqueline MD Author Information

The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film. By Heather Laing.

Film-music studies and gender studies have come a long way in musicology. Each has established productive lines of enquiry, and each boasts important monographs whose influence extends well beyond the specific field. To take two famous examples, Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991) and Claudia Gorbman's Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, Ind., 1987) have become iconic in their respective area and spurred imaginative research across topical borders. Somewhat surprisingly, investigation of film music in terms of gender is only in its infancy. Heather Laing attempts to fill the gap through her study of gender and film music in 1940s films. The book is only partly successful in its ambitious goal, but at its best has a great deal to contribute. A pathbreaking study, it promises to jump-start further work on gender and film music. Laing's premiss is simple. In 1940s films in which a woman has a key role, specifically melodrama and the so-called woman's film, non-diegetic music crafts women's emotional make-up, while diegetic music is reserved for men, especially as performers and composers. This divide echoes long-standing ideological binaries between women's tie with emotions and men's connection with the mind and, by extension, artistic creativity and control. The core of the study consists of four interpretative chapters (2–5) on key repertory linked with certain functions of women's appearance in the films. Chapter 2 takes up the Hollywood tear-jerker Now, Voyager (1942) with respect to women and dialogue, which Laing confusedly refers to as ‘voice’, which can mean something quite different from spoken words. The next chapter explores the female listener in relation to the male performer in Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), an American film that is unfortunately unavailable at present in video format. Chapter 4 concerns the female musician—woman as musical agent—in the British war-time film Love Story (1944). Finally, chapter 5 addresses the male musician in another British war-time film, Dangerous Moonlight (1941). Laing justifies the inclusion of a masculine focus by arguing that this is needed to highlight the differences with the treatment of women, the stated focus of the book.

Be‐in‐tween the Spa[ ]ces: The Location of Women and Subversion in Jazz

Winner of the William M. Jones Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2007 American Culture Association Conference It is surprising and disturbing to find an area of discourse where the location of women and questions of gender have seldom been addressed, especially one as large and as problematic as jazz. Rather like the Bermuda Triangle, is a mysterious, curious area of complicated intersections where women frequently disappear. However, within the vanishing point, and within the representations of its location on the map of music history, is a site of subversion in performance and language, where power is asserted and appropriated and undermined. Like elusive and untranscribable blue notes, women in exist, invisible, in-between the spaces, creating voices through subversion and speaking in ways that are nearly impossible to transcribe into a discourse traditionally owned by men, and where questions of gender are nearly always overshadowed by questions of race. Language surrounds and is embedded within it, in ways that frequently intersect and interweave, and ways that often become problematic because of these very intersections and inter-weavings. These intersections in the discourse are part of why jazz, why music not just passively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of gender organization (along with many other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted, contested, and negotiated (McClary, qtd. in Heble 142). The avoidance of jazzwomen-and more particularly, jazzwomen instrumentalists - is a deliberate lack constructed in the hegemonic discourse to veil the crisis of identity within jazz. Identity comes to crisis when an idea assumed to be static is displaced, and replaced, with doubt and uncertainty (Mercer, qtd. in Heble 11). Because the area of discourse surrounding women questions constructions of gender-and of race - the women instrumentalists must be removed from the discourse of so that the construction of as a masculine space cannot be destabilized. Women have been playing and singing since began in the late 180Os, but in order to play women have had to pass as men, perform as men, pass as white, and pass as black. By performing aspects of identities that are generally naturalized, according to hegemonic white male discourse, women have had to be largely written out of jazz, in order to prevent them from rewriting the power structure of discourse itself. Jazz in/as Language-Masculine Space To musicians, jazz is the system of language surrounding the music, the language used to describe the music, to discuss the music (Monson 85). Even within language, systems for talking about can differ significantly, from in academic language, in music critic's/reporter's language, and in the slang language of the musician's community. With the acceptance of into the university, music departments have created not only majors, but also academic language for discussing jazz. The distinction between academic language and the critical language of newspapers and magazines is important because although the language in academia is not necessarily jargon packed, it does revolve around a white European musical tradition and also creates the canon of sanctioned by university music scholars. The language used by newspapers and magazines does not create the same sort of intellectually sanctioned canon, although the two languages are similar in that they are predominately used by white men, and both languages can be said to center around exclusion. Within the space created by these two languages, singers are not real musicians, women are largely ignored, and men are portrayed according to how well they can play-the better a male musician's chops, the more likely he is to be idolized within the canon. Color becomes problematic within these languages because male musicians are put into color binaries, either misrepresenting musicians as black, or overlooking musicians that are nonwhite and nonblack, with few exceptions. …

Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Thumri Lyrics (review)

Reviewed by: Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Thumri Lyrics Amanda Weidman (bio) Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Thumri Lyrics. Lalita du Perron. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 234 pp. (127 pp. of text; 77 pp. of lyrics with transliteration and translation) with photographic plates, glossary. The classical music traditions of India, as we know them today, are the result of a process of selection from and redefinition of a variety of musical traditions from the subcontinent, often practiced by and identified with different communities. Prior to the 20th century, much musical tradition and knowledge was located in communities of hereditary women artists—the tawaifs [courtesans] associated with the courts of Lucknow and other North Indian courts, or the devadasis, associated with Hindu temples in South India. Despite the rather different milieus they occupied, tawaifs and devadasis had in common the fact that they were highly educated musicians and dancers who did not marry, but had relationships with men who acted as their patrons. As is now well-known, the lives these women lived came under attack in the late 19th century, under pressure from social reform movements that identified them as "prostitutes" and promoted a morality based on the ideal of the respectable "family" woman. Elite nationalism, meanwhile, encouraged the revival and purification of music and dance by such respectable women in the early 20th century. Those musical genres that had been associated with male musicians, such as dhrupad and khyal in North India, have become the main repertoire of what is now called Hindustani classical music, while genres associated more strongly with courtesan culture—ghazals and thumri—occupy the lesser status of the "semi-classical." Both ghazal and thumri concern the topic of romantic love and the longing that accompanies separation from one's beloved. While ghazal is in Urdu and is written from a male perspective, thumri, in Hindi, is written from a female perspective, although thumris have been mostly composed by men and are also sung by men. Unlike the unambiguously "classical" genres in which words are considered less important than "the music itself," ghazal and thumri both require a knowledge of the meaning and sensitivity to the poetic structure of the composition to be sung effectively. As Lalita du Perron points out in this informative book, ghazal and thumri have had different trajectories in the 20th century: "Whereas ghazal could distance itself from the courtesan tradition by [End Page 186] virtue of its male perspective and its independent role as poetry outside of a musical context, thumri had 'performance' as well as 'femaleness' woven into its basic structure, and could not escape the stigma that came to be attached to women performers" (27). Du Perron's book focuses on the lyrics of thumri, in an attempt to redress the neglect of the poetic aspects of these compositions. A large part of the book consists of what she calls the "main corpus" of thumri compositions—a group of 138 texts and their variants that she has collected from various performances and anthologies. For each text, the original Hindi, a transliteration, and translation are given, in addition to notes on the translation and identification of the recording in which it can be heard performed. The translations of these thumri texts, as well as the chapters that focus on their poetic devices and tropes and the construction of the female voice in them, are the main contribution of the book and should be of interest to scholars of Indian classical music and Indian literary history generally. Although the book claims to focus on the literary analysis of thumri texts apart from performance, du Perron, a student of the renowned vocalist Girija Devi, has extensive knowledge of the musical and performance context of thumri, and she does include an analysis of the way in which the poetic aspects of thumri are enhanced by musical performance, especially repetition, emphasis, and variation of particular words and phrases. The recordings to which du Perron refers are carefully identified, but it is unfortunate that at least a few recordings, which she analyzes in detail, could not be included with the book. Interspersed with these parts of the book that take a...

A gendered study of the working patterns of classical musicians: implications for practice

Despite an increase in participation at all levels of the music profession, women continue to experience fewer opportunities to forge careers in music and are less likely than men to apply for leadership positions. This article presents results from a study in which 152 instrumental musicians reflected upon their professional practice and career aspirations. The study examined differences in the professional practice of male and female musicians and found female musicians to be more likely to teach, and less likely to sustain performance positions because of the difficulties associated with managing family and other commitments whilst maintaining an uninterrupted career in music. It is proposed that educators have a crucial role to play in the development of curricula reflective of the realities of professional practice in a profession where interrupted careers can result in a loss of technical skills and in outdated curricular and methodological knowledge.

Life-threatening hobbies in the youth?: Two autoptic cases suggesting arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy

Determining the cause for the sudden death in young adults tends to be complex and difficult. Two cases of death of young people were autoptically investigated who died suddenly while carrying out their hobbies (a 22-year-old male musician and a 20-year-old female dancer). In both cases neither the police investigation, the autopsy, nor the toxicological investigations gave any relevant results. However, when investigating the histology fatty and fibrotic tissue in the right ventricle of the myocardium were found, whereas the myocytes proved to be degenerated—typical for arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC). It is important to consider the possibility of heart rhythm failure if a clear reason for sudden death in young adults cannot be detected. Heart rhythm failure often involves the genetic background of the case, which suggests that genetic analysis should be carried out as a supportive means of diagnostics.

Discrimination of Cello String Height: Musicianship and Sex

The aim was to investigate differences by sex and music expertise in performance of a manual proprioceptive skill. Active left hand finger-movement discrimination for differences in string height was examined in a position similar to cello playing. Men and women who were experienced cellists and nonmusicians made active string depression movements and then made absolute judgments regarding which of five string positions were presented. Although no main effect was significant, analysis yielded a sex x musicianship crossover interaction (F(1,51) = 8.4, p = .006) wherein the female cellists performed better than the female nonmusicians, and the reverse occurred for males. These significant differences in active movement discrimination across sex and musicianship may be important in further understanding focal hand dystonia, a disorder wherein the interaction of sex and expertise is observed as a strong preponderance in experienced male musicians.

Holy Restraint: Religious Reform and Nuns' Music in Early Modern Rome

Suspicion of nuns’ music during the early modern period reflected both the Tridentine preoccupation with religious celibacy and traditional distrust of female religious autonomy. Church officials prohibited certain types of liturgical and musical expression in Roman convents as well as interaction between the sisters and male musicians. The authorities were well aware of the attraction of nuns’ music, an attraction comprised not only of the skill and virtuosity of the singers, but also the allure of the forbidden. To counteract some of that attraction, officials severely limited the use of any music but Gregorian chant in the convent churches. Archival documents reveal that enforcing enclosure in Roman convents occupied religious authorities throughout the post-Tridentine period. Yet, nuns continued to perform in the monastic churches, often with many of the members of the curial hierarchy present. This article explores those religious, financial, and societal forces that resisted enclosure in Roman convents.

Neural control of playing a reversed piano: empirical evidence for an unusual cortical organization of musical functions

Using functional magnetic imaging techniques and neuropsychological tests, we studied a young male musician (C.S.) who performs at a professional level both on a regular piano keyboard and on a reverse keyboard (reversed right to left). The participant was left-handed, had left dominance for language but, remarkably, right dominance for the control of piano playing on both keyboards. With respect to music perception, C.S. showed left-sided activation dominance within the left superior temporal sulcus, which is normally associated with higher order auditory processing and right-sided activations in the secondary sensory cortex extending into the supramarginal gyrus. We suggest that C.S.'s pattern of functional asymmetry, characterized by audio-motor control using a right-sided network, could be a factor in his exceptional piano-playing ability on both the standard and reversed keyboard.

Performing Jazz, Defying Essence: Music as a Metaphor of Being in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Abstract The cultural validity of jazz has been evaluated very differently by various critical camps. Some voices try to essentialise jazz by either claiming it as a specifically African American tradition dominated by black, and mostly male musicians, or, alternatively, by explicitly limiting its cultural functionality to the black diaspora. Other voices, in contrast, insist on the hybrid genealogy and dialogic openness of jazz as a form of art that inherently defies boundaries of gender and race. Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet fully subscribes to the latter opinion. Revolving around the jazz musician Joss Moody, Trumpet not only takes up jazz as a core theme but also refers to jazz-aesthetic principles and performative arrangements in its narrative design. Most importantly, however, Trumpet uses jazz as a metaphor of being, as a model of identity formation that privileges a performative approach to the social and biological constraints of gender and race

Minus the Sexual

SUMMARY A busy, prominent Philadelphia polyamorous married male activist, musician, and father challenges misconceptions and stereotypes of bisexual male promiscuity. Who has time for it?