Music Criticism Research Articles

“You Don’t Belong in Nashville!”: Politics, Country Music, and the Reception of Robert Altman’s <i>Nashville</i>

Robert Altman’s film Nashville (1975) generated a prodigious amount of press commentary following its release. Early on, critics praised the film, but a disappointing box office led many to assume a split between big-city liberal audiences and small-town conservative audiences. Subsequent press coverage connected this divide to both the film’s politics and its use and portrayal of country music, as political pundits, music critics, country music stars, and general audiences weighed in. This essay situates the reception of the film within a shifting country music industry, which was growing increasingly aligned with the Republican Party and increasingly suspicious of new artists. Altman’s overtly liberal political opinions, and his unusual decision to have the cast, along with music supervisor Richard Baskin—novices to country music—compose the songs, alienated him from the Nashville country music industry. Janet Staiger’s theorization of “talk” provides a compelling framework, as the film served as a flashpoint to argue political truths about the nation post-Watergate and to define country music’s evolving authenticity in a commercializing marketplace.

The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History

Pablo Palomino's book The Invention of Latin American Music aims to trace the development and embrace of the notion of Latin American music as it is commonly used today, whether in academic circles, among listening audiences, in the realm of cultural policy and diplomacy, or with artists and performers themselves. The author argues that the concept, which began to take shape and exert its influence in the 1930s, did not emerge out of a cohesive and concerted regionalist project. Instead, it is the result of a process of layering of competing ideas regarding Latin America as a geographical entity, which intersect with modernist and nationalist desires for cultural distinctiveness and with more pragmatic concerns regarding the creation, protection, and expansion of networks and markets centered on different forms of musical production (live performances, radio broadcasts, recorded sound, music education programs, academic research, etc.). As a result, Palomino defines Latin American music as an aesthetic category, one that provides a convenient handle to those who engage with it, despite lacking a single discernible core or clear external boundary.Palomino further suggests that understanding this process of invention and naturalization also sheds light on the often-overlooked transnational dynamics that informed the various articulations of musical nationalism in Latin America. With this he adds a much-needed regional-level historiographical analysis of how musical nationalism and cosmopolitanism are interrelated and mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. The book begins by considering how a heterogeneous collection of music performance circuits—local, national, regional, and intercontinental—led not to a unifying notion of Latin American music but instead to the emergence of multiple incarnations that partly overlapped and partly competed with one another. Additional conceptualizations of Latin American music grew out of a nascent commercial music industry, in which music critics, royalty collection organizations, and broadcasting stations used a variety of genre labeling practices to negotiate their positionality vis-à-vis national and transnational discourses of authenticity regarding the musics with which they were involved. Nationalist and populist state musical polices, for their part, relied on transnational notions of civilizing the citizenry and elevating the vernacular to help create a regional Latin American framework. That framework was then fleshed out by a transnational network of scholars who undertook the work of theorizing the nature of Latin American music and thus defining its aesthetic ethos. Finally, US foreign policy interests in the region, in particular as articulated by the Music Division of the Pan-American Union and later by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, helped to legitimize the work and expertise of these Latin American music scholars, naturalizing the aesthetic category defined by them and laying the foundation for decades of research, educational initiatives, cultural exchanges, music festivals, and music industry categories that continue to invoke the category.The Invention of Latin American Music covers a great deal of ground and offers a number of important insights for readers interested in the historiography of music research in Latin America. Based on meticulous archival research in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the various case studies included in this book are engrossing in their own right, many of them providing tantalizing leads for future research. The book is also important because of its emphasis on social actors, institutions, and perspectives within the regional context of Latin America, a much-needed complement to other recent research that has tended to privilege the role of US-based individuals and institutions. The book's regional emphasis also offers a good alternative vantage point from which to broach the subject of music nationalism in Latin America, one that meshes well with the work of music scholars like Cristina Magaldi, Fernando Rios, and Leonora Saavedra and that helps to highlight and complicate the overlaps and continuities between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Music Criticism in the Age of Digital Media (With Two Contributions by Benjamin MiNiMuM/Angèle Cossée, and Peter Uehling)

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An Angel, a Thief, and a Mothership: Imaginative Considerations of Black Being

Among the artists and music critics within the black sci-fi community interviewed for the film The Last Angel of History, Director John Akomfrah interweaves the narrative of the Data Thief who is on a quest to find the mythical crossroads. As a juncture marked by transience and inhabited by time travelers, the crossroads is where secret black technology is forged. The famous legend says that Robert Johnson learned the blues by selling his soul to the devil. The blues was a secret due to its transformative power to replicate and recode itself into several musical genres thereafter. The Data Thief, a cyborg-like fictional character, searches 200 years after Paul Johnson’s discovery to find the mythical crossroads to obtain the keys to his future. His journey commences with one spoken clue: “Mothership Connection.” Drawing from the narrative of the Data Thief and the allusion to Parliament’s 1975 album that situates blackness in outer space through funk music, this essay examines the ways in which inhabitants of the crossroads, the Data Thief and George Clinton in particular, produce a new expressive order against the grain of a nebulous history imposed upon them by dominant white cultural representations. Through a reorganizing of black aesthetics, critical theory and liberation politics, this article highlights how black artists manipulate and imaginatively transcend linear time and make history beyond the Middle Passage epistemology. The movements of these artists collide with theories of spacetime borrowed from science fiction in service of theorizing black performance.

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis Rosemary Golding (bio) The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis; pp. xiii + 553. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $150.00, $149.99 ebook, £110.00. Recent years have seen a flurry of interest in the history of writing and thinking about music in the nineteenth century, including the histories of musicology, musical institutions, musical criticism, and music education. This is a welcome further development of the predominant focus on texts and documents within studies of music in nineteenth-century Britain, the speciality of editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century follows a broader trend over several decades to situate music in its cultural context, drawing fully on the rich archival and documentary material available. This volume is both a very welcome account of that recent work and a showcase of substantial original research covering an impressive range of topics. The handbook has become an important vehicle for research over the past decade, with significant publications in musicology and neighboring disciplines from Oxford, Cambridge, and Routledge. The handbook format is different in conception from an edited collection of essays, often leading to an uneven balance between comprehensive coverage and detailed study. The present handbook includes chapters ranging from new research to valuable summaries of existing literature, using both focused case studies and broader reviews. Contributions vary from summaries of developments in a range of geographical areas to focused studies of a single region, and from covering the whole nineteenth century to concentrating on a shorter time period, usually the end of the century. These differing approaches provide plenty of gems among the topics explored, but also lead to a less-comprehensive consideration of some themes than might be expected. The volume's introduction acknowledges the striking paucity of women scholars represented in its authorship. Women are also under-represented in the examples and case studies, a perennial problem in nineteenth-century history but one worth addressing [End Page 340] in key publications. The international spread of authors is laudable, but noticeably concentrated in the Global North. Scholars of the period urgently need to acknowledge the limitations of their research and the vast amount of the nineteenth-century world with which there is little or no scholarly engagement. There is no doubt that musicological scholarship will become richer with sustained and meaningful engagement with colleagues from South American, East Asian, and African nations, as well as from further recognition of the methodological and disciplinary histories that continue to shape our work. This volume goes some way toward that goal, but much remains to be done in connecting these ideas to present practices. Nevertheless it is cheering to see a wider range of scholarship coming into focus, drawing close links between intellectual, cultural, and musical history. Kevin C. Karnes's discussion of Saul M. Ginzburg and Pesach Marek's project on Russian-Jewish folk songs, for example, examines new meanings for historical writing. Another example is Allis's chapter on travel writing, which examines this newly expanded genre associated with the technological developments of the century. Simon McVeigh's chapter on the concert series links musical performance with key intellectual themes such as historiography and national identity. Throughout the volume, perspectives common in studies of Victorian music and its contexts are given a broader, more international framework that further enriches and enlivens the study of British music. Which chapters will be of particular interest to readers of Victorian Studies? Here the idiosyncrasies of the handbook format are apparent. Several chapters are particularly notable for their attention to Victorian Britain, offering both an overview of key themes and an introduction to the relevant literature, as well as detailed case studies. In part 1, "Texts and Practices," Allis's chapter on travel writing draws on a range of authors including Henry Inglis, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens; the majority of sources are English-language reports of travels and music in continental Europe...

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Constance M. Furey, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. Vol. 18: Mass–Midnight

Constance M. Furey, et al., eds. <i>Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. Vol. 18: Mass–Midnight</i>

“Chumak song” for baritone and piano by Volodymyr Runchak: compositional and genre-stylistic features

The topicality. Musical works of the famous Ukrainian composer, conductor, public activist, the passionate propagandist of modern music of Volodymyr Runchak today are in the area of special attention of music critics and musicologists. After all, his works today represent the advanced position of the Ukrainian contemporary art music. A confirmation of this thought is the widespread recognition of the creative works of the artist both in Ukraine and in many countries of the world; his works are at the most famous festivals of contemporary music and in prestigious concert halls in many countries are performed by the most famous musicians and bands.&#x0D; The purpose of this article is the implementation of historiographical analysis of the composer’s creative work of the famous Ukrainian composer Volodymyr Runchak. Tasks, which are subordinated to the main aim, is to identify areas and aspects of musicological research, the musical composer, as well as a statement of their basic ideas. The ultimate goal of the analysis is the identification of the unexplored and untouched aspects and genre of the areas of musical creativity of the author.&#x0D; The methodology of the work is centered on the principles of historicism, source studies, and documentary, which provides an analysis of the researches of the composer’s musical creativity in connection with cultural, historical and artistic phenomena and in their interaction. In addition, methods of retrospective, structural-system analysis, interpretation of musicological considerations, isolation and generalization are involved.&#x0D; The results obtained in the course of achieving the aims in this paper concentrates on the analytical interpretations of the major musicological publications on the music of V. Runchak and demonstrate the range of problems and issues are already involved in scientific development.&#x0D; The scientific novelty of the work lies in the implementation of historiographical analysis of the composer’s creative work of the famous Ukrainian composer Volodymyr Runchak, identifying areas and aspects of existing musicological studies of the musical creativity of the composer and highlighting the unexplored areas of musical creativity of the author, that are seen promising for further scientific practices.&#x0D; The practical importance of historiographical analysis conducted in this work lies in the possibility of using it for future studies of musical creativity V. Runchak, systematization of scientific information in the field of art regarding the research on musical creativity by contemporary Ukrainian composers.&#x0D; Conclusions. The composer in his works successfully realizes the ideological and figurative dominants inherent in the traditions of the ancient folk-song genre, which is the Chumak song, in the modern musical-linguistic paradigm. The author vividly stylizes the melodic-thematic component of his work in the folk spirit, using typical frets, intonation, and other structural elements inherent in the Ukrainian epic melody, which includes this genre variety of Ukrainian folklore. On the other hand, the author organically invests this melodic-thematic construct in the bright “facet” of modern musical style, which is fully saturated primarily with the piano part, which in general forms the unique and interesting effect of «new folklore». Identified and analyzed in this work compositional and technological factors and elements of the system of means of expression involved in this work, not only contribute to the significant freshness of its musical-linguistic and genre-style features, but are directed by the author, primarily obtaining the necessary image and emotional characteristics and experiences in accordance with the chosen genre archetype and its conceptual meanings. And in this sense, “The Milky Way” by Volodymyr Runchak is quite an illustrative work in a rich and diverse array of modern Ukrainian chamber and vocal music.

Sprachlosigkeit und Trauma in Toshio Hosokawas "Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima" (1989/2001)

The oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima (1989/2001) by the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa commemorates the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. While the contemporary composer has received considerable attention in music criticism and musicological writings, his oratorio has rarely been considered. Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima represents not only a central point of reference for Hosokawa’s aesthetic ideas; it also offers insights into his understanding of music, nature and humanity. In this work Hosokawa merges the Japanese topos of the seasonal cycle with the genre of the oratorio. The latter connects the work with a post-war tradition, where religious, literary, philosophical and political texts are embedded in the Christian Requiem, in order to mourn the traumatic events of the Second World War. Since 1945 the oratorio has become a central medium of memory for the Second World War. This article develops an interpretation of Voiceless Voices in Hiroshima against the backdrop of research into cultural memory and psychological approaches to trauma: While in the second movement eyewitness accounts, political speeches and the sounds of sirens recall the trauma of war, the later movements represent processes of regeneration and self-discovery under the auspices of the changing of the seasons. In this process, the notion of “breath” is of paramount importance, its flowing and abrupt stopping illustrating the struggle for verbal and vocal expressiveness.

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Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples: Politics, Patronage and Artistic Culture, by Anthony R. DelDonna

<i>Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples: Politics, Patronage and Artistic Culture</i>, by Anthony R. DelDonna

The relevance of context in musicological interpretation. Hermeneutical applications on certain Romanian writings and works

Abstract We have been perceiving ever more acutely for the past two decades a major change in the vision and musicological style in the Romanian language: language analysis and historiographic research have slid onto a secondary plane, while the commentary of the work, of its interpretation and the characterisation of the style, determined by the social, political, biographical, artistic factors, by the means of expression of the time focus researchers’ interest increasingly. The history of contemporary musicology recognises the moment of change of the thinking paradigm in the 1980s writings belonging to Joseph Kerman: the article How we got into Analysis, and How to Get Out and the volume Contemplating Music. The author criticises the formalism and positivism which define musicology, identified with musical analysis, reveals its ideological nature, as the relation between analysis and organicity is the leading ideology. The American musicologist pleads for a more cultural form of musical criticism, supported by the exposure of the context and of the sources of the work objectified. According to Kerman, musicology had become more discoursively-critical and less positivist (so-called scientific), being more preoccupated with interpretation than with information on the writing details and historical data; it had reconquered its interdisciplinary valences and envelopped all musical genres. Analysing the effects of this direction on the Romanian musicological discourse, we do two case studies: 1. the recent collective work Noi istorii ale muzicii românești [New histories of Romanian types of music], coordinated by Valentina Sandu-Dediu and Nicolae Gheorghiță in the direction of emphasising and/or cancelling the effects of (nationalistic, socialist-realist) ideology on the value judgement of the anthologised musical and creative phenomena; 2. the musical comedy Amorul doctor [Dr. Love] by Pascal Bentoiu, regarded from the perspective of the relation between the artistic value and the cultural trajectory broken by the obscurity of Romanian society in the first half of the 1960 decade.

Singing Webern, Sounding Webern: Bethany Beardslee, Grace-Lynne Martin, and Marni Nixon, 1950–1957

Abstract Anton Webern’s vocal music has long been overshadowed by the aphoristic miniatures and rigorously organized twelve-tone works—both largely instrumental genres—for which the composer is best known. Yet over half of Webern’s output consists of vocal works. During the 1950s, as composers and intellectuals celebrated the “instrumental” Webern, an alternative view of the composer was emerging through the performances of three soprano soloists. Bethany Beardslee gave posthumous premieres of three of Webern’s works in New York and recorded his Four Songs op. 12 for Dial Records. On the other side of the country, Grace-Lynne Martin and Marni Nixon performed works by Webern at the Evenings on the Roof in Los Angeles, and collaborated with Robert Craft on Columbia Records’ Anton Webern: The Complete Music. Beardslee, Martin, and Nixon adopted a variety of approaches to learning Webern’s famously difficult works, and their work paid off: all three sopranos earned praise for weathering the extreme technical challenges of Webern’s soprano lines while also delivering musically satisfying performances. Yet these performances have been largely forgotten in the decades since, as a consequence of changing attitudes toward postwar performance practices as well as the sometimes sexist views of male music critics. Nevertheless, the performances of these sopranos constituted a crucial step toward perspectives on Webern that are now current among contemporary performers and scholars, and understanding their contributions is essential to understanding the vocal side of Webern.

Singing (vocal) as a component of ballet: the experience of interpreting the phenomenon in the context of artistic trends of the early 20th century

The article is devoted to one of the forms of creative synthesis of types of art, which is being actualized in the modern space-time of musical and stage compositions, including through its own historical and genetic code. Singing in ballet appears in the context of art of the early 20th century as a common aesthetic phenomenon. However, music criticism and academic science have not yet provided the explanation of its mechanisms (image-aesthetic, psychological, form-creating, communicative), its overriding tasks in the concepts of modern musical theatre. The experience of problem statement in the field of interpretology provides the relevance of the topic of the article and determines the novelty of the obtained results.&#x0D; The purpose of the article is to reveal the preconditions and content of the functional unity of the art of singing and dance against the background of artistic trends of the early 20th century (starting with “Pulcinella” by I. Stravinsky).&#x0D; The creative tandem of dance and singing has its roots in ancient Greek culture, on which the creators of the French tradition of ballets du court (J.-B. Llully focused. In the realm of «mixed genres» of baroque music, the «golden age» of homo musicus began. The latest history of singing in ballet begins with I. Stravinsky, his «Pulchinelli». The obtained results of the research of the problem “What is singing in ballet — a tribute to history or an invention of modern culture”? First, the presence of the “genetic code” of this phenomenon in the art of Western Europe of the Modern times; secondly, the regularity of the tendency to synthesize singing in the art of ballet as a manifestation of neoclassicism, closely related to the historicism of compositional thinking of I. Stravinsky.&#x0D; The conclusions outline the preconditions and content of the functional unity of singing and dance in the format of artistic trends of the early 20th century: 1) the historical and cultural code of French art (singing — dramatic play — dance); 2) personal self-reflection of I. Stravinsky (his relations on the basis of creative cooperation in the early 20th century later formed a wide range of communication for artists: O. Rodin, A. Modigliani, K. Monet, P. Picasso, V. Kandinsky); 3) imitation of pre-classical, pre-baroque, and ancient folk traditions. In general, the revival of the function of singing in ballet of the 20th century took place on the basis of musical historicism and serves as a mental sign of the birth of neoclassicism.

Rock Trolls and Recovery

Rock Trolls and Recovery

Said the Hooker to the Thief

Said the Hooker to the Thief

A Study on Teaching an Appreciation of Pungryu Music of the Late Joseon Dynasty

본 연구의 목적은 도상해석학을 적용해 조선후기 풍류음악의 감상교육 내용을 제시하는 것이다. 연구 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 전도상학적 기술을 통해 도상 자료에 나타난 연주 악기와 레퍼토리, 음악 수용층, 향유 장소에 대해 파악할 수 있었다. 둘째, 도상학적 분석을 통해 조선후기 풍류음악이 다양한 방식으로 향유되었으며, 줄풍류와 가곡을 발달시키는 과정을 보여 주는 것임을 알 수 있었다. 그리고 이러한 특성들은 서울의 도시적, 경제적 성장, 중인층의 부각 등 중세적 신분제의 해체, 전문음악인의 풍류방 참여 등 조선후기의 사회적, 문화적 상황과 밀접한 관계가 있음을 밝혔다. 셋째, 도상해석학적 해석을 통해서는 풍류음악이 연행되던 풍류방이 통합적 음악 활동과 예술 활동의 장으로서의 역할을 하던 공간이었으며, 풍류 활동이 삶 속에서 음악을 향유하는 모습을 보여주는 것이라는 점을 조선후기 풍류음악이 가진 문화적, 상징적 가치로 제시하였 다. 그리고 이러한 결과를 토대로 교실에서는 학생들 개인의 음악적 선호와 수준에 맞는 음악 활동이 이루어지고 이를 삶속에서 통합적 음악 활동으로 향유할 수 있도록 해야 한다는 점, 비평 활동이 좀 더 활발하게 이루어져야 한다는 점을 시사점 으로 제시하였다.The purpose of this study is to present the contents of appreciation education of Pungryu music in the late Joseon Dynasty by applying iconology. The study results are as follows. First, it was possible to grasp the musical instruments and repertoire, the music audience, and the place of enjoyment according to previous iconological description. Second, through the iconological analysis, it was found that the Pungryu music of the late Joseon Dynasty was enjoyed in various ways, showing the process of developing Julpungryu and Gagok. In addition, it was revealed that these characteristics are closely related to the social and cultural situation of the late Joseon Dynasty, such as the urban and economic growth of Seoul, the dissolution of the medieval class system such as the rise of the middle class, and the participation of professional musicians in Pungryubang. Third, according to the iconological interpretation, it is shown that the Pungryubang, where Pungryu music was performed, was a space that served as a venue for integrated musical and artistic activities, and that the Pungryu activity shows the enjoyment of music in life. It was presented as a cultural and symbolic value of music. And based on these results, it is suggested that music activities that are suitable for students individual musical preferences and level should be made in the classroom and that they can be enjoyed as integrated music activities in their lives, and that music criticism activities should be conducted more actively.

Between Exoticism and Ethnomusicology: Musical Representations of Greenland and India on European Interwar Radio

ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate how colonized cultures were presented to “home” radio audiences through sound (music, speech, sound montages) during the inter-war years. The focus is on how a small group of broadcasts containing musical representations of the colonies of Greenland and India afforded the imaginative work and temporary imagined communities to Austrian, Danish, and British radio listeners in relation to the spatiality and otherness of distant peoples and locations. I suggest a typology of four modes of musical representation in broadcasts reaching from the European tradition of musical exoticism to the use of recordings of indigenous music. Biography: Morten Michelsen is a popular music scholar and professor of musicology at Aarhus University. His research interests include popular music and mediation, music radio and sound studies, historical radio studies, questions of taste and music criticism, and popular music historiography. 2013–2018 he led the research project A Century of Radio and Music In Denmark ( www.Ramund.ikk.ku.dk) and contributed to other large research projects concerned with radio. Among his recent publications on sound, music, and radio are three anthologies on music radio, including Tunes for All? (Aarhus University Press, 2018) on Danish music radio and Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (Routledge, 2019) on international music radio.

“Why does Mr. Schumann not write discerningly about Meyerbeer?”

Schumann’s Les Huguenots review is considered a textbook example of ideologically-blinded music criticism. A closer look at the situational context of its genesis—from related texts prior to his article to the reactions thereafter—can perhaps afford insight into what prompted Schumann to write his fatal essay.