Music Documentary Research Articles

A Study of a Music Documentary Testifying to Shostakovich

A Study of a Music Documentary Testifying to Shostakovich

Music, Documentaries and Globalization

This paper deals with the relationship between sound and image as expressed in the cinematic genre of music documentary. In particular, it tries to explore the way in which musical cultures are audiovisually expressed through filmic representation of music performances and artists/groups portraits. By applying a critical and comparative approach, the films Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Café de los Maestros (2008) become vehicles to investigate images and sounds of music in everyday life, with an emphasis on the impact of globalization and commercialization during their creation and interpretation procedures. The focus is on the commercial exploitation of these films in the context of world capitalism and the way in which it influences the construction of visual representations of non-European musical cultures and identities, as cultural industry shares today a comparable postmodern situation through the concepts of “world music” and “world cinema”. In this light, the paper discusses Latin American (Cuban and Argentine) identities and local music cultures which spread internationally via films and gain a place in the global music scene. Consequently, it points towards issues of authenticity, nostalgia, exoticism, hybridity, folklorization, and the Western domination upon musics as well as films.

The me you see: The creative identity as constructed in music documentaries

Stereotypically, creative people are considered intelligent, immature, demanding, aware, receptive, autonomous, flexible, introverted, self-confident, unconventional and asocial. They are driven by a desire to create, peer acceptance and, to an extent, commercial gain. They negotiate their creative persona by seeking validation from others. Accordingly, creative people are active agents in the negotiation of their identities, and they can communicate their attitudes and feelings towards their work through the stories depicted in documentaries. Netflix has released several documentaries capturing the creative process and projects of musicians and singers, which offer a ‘behind the scenes’ account of what it is like working in the music industry. These same documentaries offer insights into what it means to be a creative navigating the trappings of project-based work, questions of authenticity, audience and management demands, and the pressures of making successful music. The purpose of this research is to use thematic analysis to explore the documentaries of Shawn Mendes, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande and Queen + Adam Lambert for how they conceptualize the creative identity and whether they maintain or challenge the stereotypes that continue to be perpetuated in the media.

A green room scuffle in screen production research: Glass Shards as an ‘electromentary’

ABSTRACT Screen Production Research (SPR) is a developing field within the academy. SPR blends theoretical and practical methodologies to produce creative outputs, such as films, scripts, multimedia projects, etc. as research. This article will review my short documentary work with an emphasis on the most recent project, Glass Shards (2020). All of these creative projects will be contextualised within SPR frameworks to highlight the successes and challenges of lo/no-budget ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) filmmaking. Discussion of my previous films, Portrait of an Artist: Alice France (Co-Director Kim Ayres, 2014) and Artefact 93 (2019), will serve as critical reflections on specific practices that fed into the creation of Glass Shards. This latest project began as a traditional music documentary exploring local experimental musician Oliver Stewart and his songwriting talents. However, as filming progressed, new themes and complexities emerged that reshaped the final result. By examining the various filmmaking processes (pre-production, principal photography, and post-production), this article will review notions of identity, mental health, and performativity that developed throughout filming which, arguably, pushed the boundaries of music documentary. Effectively, through post-textual analysis, it will be contented that spontaneity and collaboration foster a creative environment that enhances the final outcome.

Re-membering the Postcolonial Musical Audience with Indigenous Soundscapes: Mbeyu Njija Music-Video Documentary in Tanzania

ABSTRACT There is a direct link between the Church musical audience and displaced indigenous music traditions in Tanzanian university programmes. Currently, many students admitted to tertiary institution music programmes come from a Church-based music background and hence their attitudes are governed by the colonial mentality that indigenous music is “heathen” and “evil”. Their views are reinforced by the Eurocentric curriculum that still perpetuates anti-indigenous music methods. As a result students are uprooted from their indigenous musical material and heritage. Curricula in Tanzania need to disrupt, repair, and transform the persistence of churchly neurophysiological sonic perceptions in the community. Furthermore, the curricula need to combat the impact of colonialism and globalisation that have continued to remain separate from indigenous knowledge. Mbeyu Njija is an indigenous music documentary that provides an example of what such a new curricula could include. The documentary attempts to “re-member” Tanzanian audiences with their lost selves by bringing them back in contact with fading memories of indigenous soundscapes. The article's argument is that indigenous music in formal institutions in Tanzania must begin by repairing the audience’s sonic imbalances and perceptions.

‘The Same Trade as Mozart’: Convincing the sceptics of electronic music’s value

In August 1969, the music documentary series Workshop (1964–78) focused on electronic music in a 55-minute-long film titled ‘The Same Trade as Mozart’. Produced and directed by David Buckton, the film included interviews with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tristram Cary and Justin Connolly; BBC Radiophonic Workshop staff Desmond Briscoe, David Cain and John Baker, and the Workshop’s founder, Daphne Oram; and Peter Zinovieff, director of EMS (Electronic Music Studios). It presented electronic music in a number of contexts, such as education, pop production and live performance. Technological change in music has often provoked hostility among the public and critics, and the rapid advancement of electronic music post-Second World War was no exception. Adopting a mode of analysis more commonly encountered in studies of the public communication of science, this article considers ‘The Same Trade as Mozart’ as an attempt by electronic music’s advocates, such as those listed above, to convince sceptics of its value. While sceptical responses to the presence of new technologies in music have been widely noted and theorized by scholars in science and technology studies, we call attention to the strategies employed by the advocates of such technologies to defend themselves against such criticisms, including humour, heuristic explanations and a focus on electronic music’s educational and thus social value. The use of computers in electronic music was a new and contentious development in the field, requiring a greater degree of advocacy from its proponents. We examine how the computer’s role in composition is presented in ‘The Same Trade as Mozart’, compared with other media portrayals of computing in the 1960s. Drawing on theories of filmed musical performance, we discuss how visual tropes of ‘classical’ music are used in ‘The Same Trade as Mozart’ to challenge preconceptions about the relationships between composers, musicians and new technologies.

Bridges within the Arts: Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese

Bridges within the Arts: Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese Doris Hambuch and Ioannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou “An exhibitionist only on stage,” David Yaffe writes about the 1965 Warhol Screen Test, “Dylan knew the camera loved him, but at that moment he did not love it back” (32). A great number of film appearances followed Bob Dylan’s experiment with Andy Warhol, most recently the Netflix original Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019). Other screen representations include Festival (1967), Dont Look Back (1967), The Concert for Bangladesh (1972), Eat the Document (1972), Renaldo and Clara (1978), The Last Waltz (1978), The Other Side of the Mirror (2007), Bob Dylan: Revealed (2011), and Trouble No More (2017). Arguing that film became the third most important component of Dylan’s work, after writing and music, we claim that his collaboration with Scorsese was best suited to facilitate his dependence on an audience: “I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself” (Chronicles 16), Dylan writes early on in his memoir. This suggests that he was, in fact, an “exhibitionist,” and not only on stage: “I needed to play for people and all the time” (Chronicles 16). The compatibility between Dylan and Scorsese, we argue, rests in their shared fascination with storytelling, and in their conviction that the bridge between fact and fiction is removable and sometimes redundant. In “Markin’ up the Score,” the opening chapter of Chronicles, Dylan recalls the significance of an encounter with the wrestler Gorgeous George early in his career (Chronicles 43). He remembers how he played as a teenager in the lobby of his Minnesota hometown’s main event building, when the celebrity’s wink and brief remark presented an inciting moment. In the next paragraph, he questions not only the fact itself, but also the relevance of its truthfulness: “Whether [Gorgeous George] really said it or not, it didn’t matter,” Dylan writes; “It’s what I thought I heard him say that mattered, and I never forgot it” (44). Scorsese, for his part, reveals in an interview with Raffaele Donato that “you can go back and stage the past. You want [End Page 119] to record the battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American war? Stage it. It is a natural impulse and so is recording. They go hand in hand. That’s why for me there was never ever a difference between fiction and non-fiction” (Donato 200). The compliance between the musician and the filmmaker on their poetic licence with reality culminates in The Rolling Thunder Revue, which adds fictitious interviewees to existing documentary footage, while also featuring scenes from Dylan’s own Renaldo and Clara. The Rolling Thunder Revue thus blends a great number of genres, including the mockumentary, and seems best fit to reflect what Yaffe emphasizes throughout his thorough Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (2011), that the singer/poet1/actor/director/painter2 “contains multitudes” (Yaffe xvii), a nod to Walt Whitman, whose influence Dylan himself highlights in his memoir (Chronicles 103) as well as in The Rolling Thunder Revue. Scorsese’s first experience with music documentaries was as a co-editor of Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970); Dylan appears in this film very briefly, although he did not participate in the festival. Scorsese went on to experiment with re-authoring techniques in his own The Last Waltz (1978). The team for this film included writer Mardik Martin, editors Jan Roblee and Yeu-Bun Yee, and cinematographer Michael Chapman. Dylan is the last guest in their documentation of The Band’s farewell concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, following many other famous musicians such as Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell. At the time Scorsese was working on The Last Waltz, Dylan was directing his Renaldo and Clara (1978), co-written with Sam Shephard. In contrast to the former, the latter was not received well at all. Yaffe explains that Dylan’s “mostly unloved” film “in the spirit of Fassbinder, tried to achieve a collective correlative”3 (34), and failed. Three decades later, it would go on to contribute to the mosaic that is The Rolling Thunder Revue...

Programming Brazilian music for a global film audience

Music is one of the most cherished topics in Brazilian documentary filmmaking. Vinicius (Miguel Faria Jr., 2005), Raul: O início, o fim e o meio (Raul: The Beginning, the End and the Middle, Walter Carvalho, 2012) and Chico: Artista brasileiro (Chico: Brazilian Artist, Miguel Faria Jr., 2015) feature among the most successful Brazilian documentaries from the last twenty years, which makes clear their appeal to national audiences. However, to better articulate their significance it is also crucial to understand them from an international context. The In-Edit – International Music Documentary Film Festival, an event solely devoted to the screening and discussion of music documentaries, allows us to do so. First organised in Barcelona in 2003 and swiftly exported and adapted in multiple countries, the current In-Edit occurs annually in Chile, Brazil, Greece and the Netherlands. Throughout the years, it has also been celebrated in Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Colombia and Peru. In-Edit Brasil was first organised in São Paulo in 2009 and showcases a wide variety of music documentaries both from Brazil and abroad. At the same time, some Brazilian music documentaries are screened in other In-Edits, such as Chile and Spain. In effect, In-Edit organisers hold a privileged perspective on the role that Brazilian music and Brazilian music documentaries play within the international scene. Cristian Pascual (Barcelona, 1980) was the director of In-Edit Barcelona from 2007 to 2019, and he is still part of the organising committee. We met him in São Paulo in 2017, and he provided us with a programmer’s view of music documentaries from all over the world. Despite how political events have altered the country’s international influence in global politics (most notably Jair Bolsonaro taking over as president at the beginning of 2019), we believe that Pascual’s views present a rich reflection on Brazilian specificities regarding the production and reception of music documentaries today.

Transforming Brazilian speech into popular song

In this interview, Luiz Tatit explores some specificities of Brazilian popular song which may explain the considerable success of music documentaries in the country. Such specificities include the connection between popular song and daily speech, its ties with Brazilian national identity and its complex relationship with foreign music styles.

Documentary shooting and samba

This article addresses the film Partido alto (Leon Hirszman, 1976­–1982), a Brazilian music documentary that showcases two sessions of partido-alto, a traditional, improvisation-based genre. The film highlights a separation between the diegetic music world, which is based on improvisation, and the technical approach to register it. First, it foregrounds the process of recording popular music through the noticeable presence of a microphone that strives to follow each singer’s unpredictable interventions. Then, the young professional singer Paulinho da Viola joins in on the performance with nonprofessional singers, working as a mediator between the official music scene and popular traditions. I suggest that, by using cameras and microphones to approximate a popular, nonrecorded form of art, the film raises some crucial issues in the history of samba. In particular, the ways in which cinematic techniques such as the sequence shot and voiceover are employed in the film allows us to reflect on the dichotomy between improvisation and recording, as well as the role of cultural mediators. Paulinho da Viola lies at the centre of these strategies, for he assumes an expert commentator and interviewer role, while also being a participant in the popular community.

Samba beyond the parade

In this interview, singer and songwriter Paulinho da Viola comments on the documentary Partido alto (1976–1982) and his friendship with director Leon Hirszman. He also describes the origins of partido-alto as a variety of samba, the transformations of samba schools in the 1960s and 70s and his relationship with audiovisual media during this time period, including the music documentary Saravah (Pierre Barouh, 1972) and televised music festivals. A crucial figure in the history of samba, Paulinho da Viola was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1942. As a son of a middle-class choro guitar player, he soon became interested in the samba that was played in the slums, most notably Samba School Portela in the Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Oswaldo Cruz. Paulinho’s career, which started in the 1960s and continues today, combines a plethora of vital song releases such as “Foi um rio que passou em minha vida” (“A River Broke into My Life”, 1970) and “Dança da solidão” (“The Dance of Loneliness”, 1972) that helped rejuvenate samba, with a political stance that vindicates the roots of this music genre as a popular community practice. In line with his political beliefs, in 1970 Paulinho used his popularity to endorse the first album by Velha Guarda da Portela, a band of senior singer-songwriters who had been marginalised by the music industry. In the mid-1970s, Paulinho became increasingly critical with the gradual commodification of samba and Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, to the point of breaking up with Portela Samba School when traditional composers, such as those from Velha Guarda, were ignored by the directorship. His involvement with Hirszman’s Partido alto was strongly attuned with that moment in his career, because partido-alto contains a variety of archaic, improvised samba that contrasts with commercial, commodified practices. He worked as a consultant, interviewer and narrator for that film, as well as a performer, alongside his admired colleagues from Velha Guarda da Portela.

Capturing the soul of the suburb

In his conversation with us, Lula Buarque de Hollanda analyses Conspiração’s precursor role in the recent wave of music documentaries in Brazil and reflects on the production process of O mistério do samba (The Mystery of Samba, Lula Buarque de Hollanda and Carolina Jabor, 2008).

Getting Home: A Discussion of “Accompaniment in Jazz and Psychoanalysis”

Situating his current paper (this issue) within the developing dialogue between psychoanalysis and music, as well as within the evolution of Markman’s own definitive contributions to that dialogue, this discussion identifies Markman’s inspired, embodied musicality as the primary force animating Markman’s writing and clinical work. Markman’s remarkable taxonomy of rhythmic styles of psychoanalytic accompaniment, formed entirely by his clinical experience, is highlighted and elaborated. The value of music as a source of metaphor is contrasted with an understanding of the actuality of music as a dimension of psychical life that is cultivated and healed through psychoanalytic accompaniment. Using “process notes” from a music documentary, the power of actual music is located in the fabric of culture, conducted through musical sound and forms of movement, including the rhythmic practice of the psychoanalytic frame and the antiphonic discourse of psychoanalytic process.

Wade in the Water

In January 1994, Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music, a first-time radio series collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio, began airing on hundreds of NPR affiliate stations throughout America. An ambitious and influential series of 26 hour-long documentary programs, Wade explored 200 years of black sacred music, including spirituals, ring shouts, lined hymns, jazz, and gospel. The series also featured the insights of music creators, performers, listeners, and historians who could place African American sacred music traditions within the social, political, and cultural context of their times. Wade eventually won a Peabody Award and other awards of distinction. Conceived and hosted by Smithsonian Institution curator, artist, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow Bernice Johnson Reagon, Wade required an intensive, five-year-long fundraising, research, and production journey of commitment. As the series’ associate producer, this article’s author worked with a host of dedicated radio producers, researchers, engineers, scholars, and music collectors who helped to make Wade a reality. Therefore, this article describes the series’ production journey from the vantage point of an insider, and it serves as a personal reflection on the making of a series that would set the standard for future long-form, NPR-based music documentary productions.

Youssou N'dour: I Bring What I Love (2008) as a Window into the Frictions between Islam and Popular Music in Senegal

ABSTRACT An important body of scholarship has explored the salience of Sufism (‘mystical Islam’) in Senegal. Approaches have emphasized its social and political dimensions, while little attention has been devoted to the symbolic yet important role of Sufi-affiliated pop musicians, especially mbàllax singers, in the grassroots negotiation of faith and religious tolerance in the country. Using the documentary, Youssou N’dour: I Bring What I Love (US, 2008), and observation, the study examines what it calls ‘cultural friction’, here a metaphor for the transient conflicts emerging as classically oriented Sufi Muslims condemn and protest against the encroachment of “obscene” practices on religious spaces and symbols. The study approaches the film as a music documentary following N’dour during and after the making of his Grammy-winning yet controversial album released in Senegal as Sant Yalla (‘God Be Praised’, 2003) and internationally as Egypt (2004). It analyzes cultural friction as part of a Senegalese artistic modernization, but also as a contemporary phenomenon speaking to the historical role of the Wolof ‘griot’ (bard) in the peaceful appropriation of Islam. Finally, the study portrays N’dour as a pop singer whose liberal Sufi perspective on music promotes his legitimacy to perform in the Islamic religious space as well.

Material and Expositional Frames in BBC <i>Arena</i> ’s Visual Jazz Jukebox

Since 1975, the award-winning BBC documentary series Arena has broadcast programmes on a plethora of cultural subjects. Films focusing explicitly on musical cultures form around 30% of Arena’s programmes; while ‘rockumentaries’ dominate, jazz is a regular topic of Arena’s music documentaries. This paper considers Arena’s first direct engagements with jazz in two 40 minute programmes from 1983. It demonstrates jazz culture’s interrelationship with the audio-visual through an examination of Jazz Juke Box I and Jazz Juke Box II (broadcast on BBC2 on 15/2/1983 at 10:15PM and 23/11/1983 at 10PM respectively). I present the programmes as key sites through which we can better understand Arena’s negotiation of jazz culture through two interdependent layers: firstly, I consider the programme’s aesthetic and formal presentation of jazz and its audio-visual materiality; secondly, I examine the extent of expository material presented in the programmes and the meaning it generates in relation to Arena’s and the BBC’s wider mediation of jazz.
 Jazz’s Visual Juke Box might serve a better title for the two programmes. Both programmes re-present a selection of, mostly full-length, promotional jazz shorts and ‘Soundies’. The films are introduced from a smoky bar by George Melly who directs our attention towards a visual jukebox that forms the centre of our engagement with the films. Ellington, Basie, Nat King Cole, Billie Holliday, and Bessie Smith are a few of the musicians featured in the, as the Radio Times called them, ‘witty, moving, surreal and always irresistibly entertaining’ short films. It is argued visual techniques are used in the programmes to blur technological lines between the materiality of different audio-visual modes and also spatio-temporal lines between the social spaces where Panorams were originally found and the bar Melly inhabits. In doing so, Arena draws our attention not just to the films themselves, but also the socio-cultural context that surrounded their consumption. The visual aesthetic is also argued to foreground and fetishize the ‘rareness’ of this ‘forgotten’ footage and its analogue mode of reproduction.
 Between the films, Melly often delivers a contextual and interpretive script that, although educational, does not rely on didacticism nor fully problematize the film’s stereotyped depiction of black musicians. Nevertheless, the audience is offered some possible interpretations of the film’s complex significance to the understanding, remembrance and history of jazz culture. This and the programmes’ expository materials present a mode of documentary film somewhat at odds with the more meditative style for which Arena became famous. This paper discusses the extent to which Arena’s critical presentation of the short films is conditioned by the creator’s own artistic subjectivities and by wider discourses on race and jazz on small-screens in 1980s Britain. It is argued that Melly’s persona, defined as much by his jazz and blues musicianship as his art criticism and journalism, continues the BBC’s fraught negotiation of jazz as an (un)popular music.

Spanish Cinema of the 2010s: Back to Punk and Other Lessons from the Crisis

This article focuses on how Spanish cinema production has echoed the neoliberal Eurozone crisis of 2008 in mainstream (large- and medium-size productions), and in its ‘opposite’ the independent sector, and how the effects of the crisis can be glimpsed (within the independent sector) on music (mostly Punk) documentaries which are not ostensibly about the economy, current politics or even the present. I suggest a course through the different ways in which Spanish cinema has been touched by the crisis: through the films of ‘crisis cinema’ to those that focus on the 1980s and early 1990s and its youth-led and Punk-inspired musical revolutions, via films whose strategy is to address the 2008–17 period in an indirect manner, or to retreat to the pre-2008 past. My ultimate aim is to prove that this seismic change to Spain’s society has forced a re-engagement with the present and the past.

Getting to the Point

Getting to the Point Stefan Iversen (bio) I really like music documentaries. If forced to rationalise this taste, I would point out two main reasons: one is to experience the aesthetic joy that can be derived from audio-visual performances; the other (less easily put on a cultural pedestal) is to revel in the decadent details of remarkable anecdotes, an important part of the story-bound fabric that provides music celebrities with [End Page 477] their cultural auras. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese delivers aplenty on both accounts. Combining unseen footage from Bob Dylan’s experimental and mythical 1975 tour of United States and Canada with present-day interviews, the film shows Dylan and artists such as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, and Allan Ginsberg performing and writing together in all sorts of creative collaborative activities. It also provides an informative stream of juicy stories about the tumultuous life of an (or perhaps even the) anti-establishment figure in modern music culture. During one such anecdote, it dawned on me that there might be a different point to the movie than the one I thought I was getting. In a present-day interview, actress Sharon Stone tells the story of how she as a young woman got involved with the tour and with Dylan. Dylan tricked her into believing he wrote “Just like a woman” for her, which then led to Stone joining the troupe. Wondering how this spectacular coincidence was missing from my previous knowledge about either cultural persona, I turned to the Internet as the movie ended, only to realise that the reason I did not know about this was that it never took place. Billed as a documentary, the movie offers no inter- or paratextual hints that central parts of it are made up; it has even been submitted to the Oscars in the documentary category. Upon closer inspection, other (but not all) interviews in the film appear to be discussing either completely or somewhat made-up events. The main framing device of the movie, a story about the eccentric filmmaker Stefan van Dorp who allegedly shot the concert footage, is made up. The concert footage itself, however, does document Dylan on and off stage in 1975. As a consequence of these conflicting textual and paratextual fragments, viewers (or at least this viewer—others might not even realise the presence of invented material1) are faced with a set of interpretational challenges, operating with all kinds of delays and with huge variance, depending on the particular cognitive environment of the individual viewer. This “Bob Dylan story” is not only a story about Bob Dylan or a story by Bob Dylan but contains an implicit double genitive: The intermingled narrative of fictionalised and informative events is itself like Bob Dylan and, vice versa, the combination of the words “Bob” and “Dylan” points less toward a biographical person and more toward a story with multiple conflicting points, effectively deconstructing the myth of the rock star. The film is by no means unique in its disruption of traditional distinctions between inventive and informative communicative devices: from experimental art such as autofiction and happenings via unconventional [End Page 478] documentaries to hoaxes, information campaigns, and even contemporary politics, present-day culture is riddled with texts that confuse their audiences due to subversive or mutually exclusive attributions of status as either fiction or nonfiction—texts that diverge from straightforward purposes and that are not so much out to make a point as to divide it. In order to approach such texts and try to understand their broader, real-world ramifications, one need not move away from definitions and distinctions about what it is that fictionalised discourse does, rather the contrary. A solid theory of how things normally work is needed to explain diversions of this kind. The understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical resource suggested and elaborated on by Walsh and others is such a solid theory. It offers a convincing, coherent paradigm through which to approach the forms and functions of fictional discourse. Its considerable explanatory powers stem from the fact that it avoids a series of pitfalls, inherent in most other theories of fiction...

Caribbean Cosmopolitanism: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and René Pérez Joglar’s Residente

In recent political discourse, “cosmopolitanism” has become synonymous with elitism and disloyalty to national values. However, this discourse ignores the varied history of cosmopolitanism, both as an aesthetic and a worldview. Not all cosmopolitanism is rootless, as demonstrated by Appiah’s Ethics of Identity (2005), which proposes a new kind of identity based on “rooted cosmopolitanism.” And as James Clifford points out, travel—and cosmopolitanism, along with it—is no longer (or perhaps never has been) reserved for wealthy elites. Clifford emphasizes that travel does not only include “Westerners” traveling to developing countries, but also the reverse; this second kind of traveler follows the trajectory of a different cosmopolitanism. This article examines cosmopolitanism in the work of two contemporary Caribbean artists—Dominican-American author Junot Diaz, and Puerto Rican musician Rene Juan Perez Joglar. The protagonist of Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao lives the tensions inherent in nationalist and cosmopolitan impulses—like the author, the novel moves between the Dominican Republic and the United States. The title alludes to Irish writer and famed cosmopolitan, Oscar Wilde. Although criticism of the novel has not drawn any connection to Wilde beyond the title itself, this paper suggests that Diaz’s work relates to Wilde on deeper levels related to cosmopolitanism, particularly as Wilde tied this notion to the struggle for individualism. Similar notions surface in Perez Joglar’s music and recent documentary film, Residente, presenting a rooted cosmopolitanism that, while acknowledging national history and culture, pushes the boundaries of identity across the globe.

About some features of authorship in a music video project

Relevance of the study . In contemporary music the search for new screen forms of presentation of music pieces to the general public is constantly happening, featuring innovation technologies (television, computer). Within this framework we can speak about a certain musical genre trend that is represented by art music documentary with a concert presentation, music video, and music video project, etc. Main objective of the study . The article considers phenomenon of authorship in one of the modern forms of video presentation of a musical work that was called ‘musical video project.’ In this form video images shown on the screen are added to the sound of traditional performance of the music piece, and this should promote an effective music message reach the mainstream audience. Methodology of the study . The main method was the analysis and research, as well as the synthesis, which allowed to combine different types of creative activity in the whole direction of the mid 20–21 century. Results and conclusions . The main participants of artistic activity here, as well as in traditional forms of musical presentation, remain the composer and musician. But at the same time another category of performers works, the number of which varies. Those may be video makers, sound and video directors, technical staff and other participants. To illustrate the expansion of the functions of authorship we give an example of a large-scale American video project located in Miami in a specially constructed New World Center architectural complex. The author of the entire architectural solution, built based on the principle of openness, is a famous American architect Frank Owen Gehry. We analyze features of the Sun Trust Pavilion concert hall where video projects take place. The author of the video footage is the famous artist Tal Posner, who relies in his video images on graphic structure and music style. The video footage is shown along with the music tempo– rhythm. The initiator and one of the leading participants of video projects is a famous American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The music is performed by the specially created New World Symphony Orchestra.