Music Scene Research Articles

Whose jembe? A drum as a countercultural icon and a symbol of African authenticity in Zagreb

ABSTRACT The ubiquity of the jembe in western and northern Europe, as well as in North America, was instigated during the 1970s by influential West African jembe players, later developing within world music, where this drum came to represent the essence of ‘African music’. In Croatia the popularity of the jembe did not arise until the late 1990s, motivated by local Croatian musicians who shaped an African music scene in Zagreb. More than a decade later, the first performers from West Africa—specifically from Senegal—settled in Croatia and claimed a space in the limited scene that had mainly crystallised around the jembe. Albeit within a climate of open collaboration, frictions emerged between these two groups of jembe performers surrounding issues of authenticity and labour. This article focuses on the initial phases and issues at stake in this encounter between Croatian and Senegalese jembe practitioners. Although these tensions resonate with exoticising discourses and notions of appropriation that have often characterised the world music industry, it is argued that generalising interpretations as well as the actors’ subjective readings must be deconstructed in order to grasp the complexities of this encounter and the processes shaping the African music scene in Zagreb.

Malian music ‘made in France’: postcolonial relationships through world music festivals and ‘transcultural creations’

ABSTRACT As a former French colony, Mali's musical landscape contributed in important ways to the formation of the world music scene in France, where many of its most famous musicians have recorded, performed, and sometimes settled, especially from the 1980s onwards. Drawing on this context, the essay offers an overview of the African world music scene in France through some of its main vectors of development, including labels, festivals, and cultural institutions. This is approached through the analysis of programmes from important French world music festivals showcasing Malian musicians, such as Africolor or Musiques Métisses, and by exploring examples of musical collaborations—referred to in France as ‘transcultural musical creations’—which were often implemented within cultural institutions and featured in festivals. Elaborating on how an elitist art culture was created, by stressing certain features of Malian music to the detriment of others, it is argued that these musical productions perform a play with otherness, which, in turn, has enabled western canons to take the guise of praising Malian music genres and instruments. Ultimately, these creative processes—and the discourses that foreground them—shed light on how France articulates and negotiates the postcolonial relationships it sustains with some of its former colonies.

Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia (review)

Reviewed by: Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia John W. Troutman (bio) Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Metal Scene by Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale E. Zappia University of Nebraska Press, 2020 SEVERAL RECENT BOOKS have chronicled contemporary, local, and transnational Indigenous music scenes. Kyle T. Mays's Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018) charts the rise of Indigenous hip-hop generations, and the way hip-hop's aesthetics, sound, and accelerant for political mobilization have staked out innovative expressions of sovereignty within various Native communities. Kevin Fellezs's Listen but Don't Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific (2019) posits the Hawaiian slack key guitar as a fecund site of expression of and contestation over notions of Kanaka Maoli values, aesthetics, politics, and more. Kristina M. Jacobsen's The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging (2017) showcases in rich detail the vibrant, diverse, and long-standing country music scenes that proliferate within the Navajo Nation. Now, in Rez Metal, filmmaker Ashkan Soltani Stone and historian Natale A. Zappia have illuminated yet another set of multigenerational music scenes that rattle and shake the Navajo Nation's lush soundscape. The publication of Rez Metal accompanies a documentary film project by Stone and Zappia, who spent time interviewing band members and scenesters in multiple communities, as well as in the metal epicenter of Gallup. Following a brief introduction, the slim volume's chapters rely upon lengthy quotations from excerpted interviews to explore the idea of "rez metal" to describe the experiencing of bands within a sampling of the Navajo Nation's metal venues—from hogans and house parties to dedicated clubs—to introduce the readers to some of the bands through interviews and to contemplate the genre's future. Throughout, the authors and interviewees ruminate on why and how metal matters to its Diné and neighboring Indigenous adherents. "Metal is justice," says Jay Cee, a radio DJ at Gallup's KZZ classic rock station. He continues, "It helps release all my anger, all my frustration" (33). The authors queried several men and women in the first chapter who expressed their histories with the genre and why they were drawn to identifying as a metalhead. Cee celebrates the life as a means to release tension but also to let loose and have fun within a community of like-minded peers [End Page 189] who congregate through mosh pits, head bangs, and the spellbinding, deafening lockstep drones of guitar, bass, and drums. Cee speculates that those drums might provide a link to older Indigenous musical traditions, but he also points out that metal continues to conjure negative stereotypes in the minds of others: in Zuni, where he grew up, some elders consider the metal scene a distraction that prevents its citizens from fulfilling their duties to their people. Edmund Yazzie heard similar concerns from some of his elders, but his parents were metalheads, and his father, a pastor, bought Yazzie his first record as a kid, by the band AC/DC. Now Yazzie gigs as the drummer in his son's band, Testify. Yazzie is also a member of the Navajo Council, and his interview reveals how deeply metal has been embraced by members of the Navajo Nation. Stone and Zappia's work is most compelling when it reveals through anecdotes the deep multigenerational history of metal and its embrace by the Nation's government as a positive, family-friendly element of today's vibrant Diné culture. The authors interviewed current Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, who also passionately supports the Nation's metal scene and sees it as a positive tradition with the capability to heal and provide hope for many. In the first chapter, Stone and Zappia suggest that the "cathartic communal experience" of metal fuels its embrace and provides "'equipment' to deal with the historical, cultural, and economic trauma shared by Navajos . . . the music is both an escape from the day-to-day and also a saber to rattle in frustration and anger at the status quo" (13). With this power to bring people together, multiple...

Sarawak Talent Export Through Music Ecosystem Development

Talent export through music ecosystem decelopment refers to the process of identifying and promoting talented Sarawakian musicians and its ecosystem, and helping them to gain exposure ande success on a global scale. This can involve a range of activities, including music education and training programs, infrastructure development to support the music industry, and promotional efforts to bring local talent to the attention of international audiences. The ultimate goal of talent export through music ecosystem development is to create a supportive and sustainable environment for musicians, enabling them to achieve their full potential and make a meaningful contribution to the state economy as well as the music scene.

In Memoriam: Robert (Bob) Miller 1947–2022

In Memoriam: Robert (Bob) Miller 1947–2022

Cultural and musical values of Àdàmò traditional music in Ìjèsàland

Àdàmò traditional music practice in Ìjèsàland has been part of the culture from the inception, as history says that Ìjèsà people brought the art with them to Ìjèsàland from Ile Ife. Owing to this assertion, it is then obvious that Àdàmò traditional music is a traditional heritage of Ìjèsà people both home and abroad. This paper seeks to view the cultural and musical value of Àdàmò traditional music in Ìjèsàland, how important is this genre of music to the Ìjèsà sons and daughters within Ìjèsàland. To achieve these, information for this write-up was gathered through in-depth interviews with seven (7) of its exponents and four (4) community dwellers across the land. In addition, discography, books, journals, and internet constitute the secondary source for this write-up. It was found out that in spite of the over bearing influence of modern musical practices and several musical genres in Ìjèsàland, Àdàmò traditional music has its place in the day to day activities of Ìjèsà people, especially the role it plays during the major traditional festival of Ìjèsàland called Ìwúde Oba, that the festival will not be concluded until Àdàmò traditional music is performed. This study therefore concludes that, this genre should be explored by the musicologists and attention should be given by all and sundry in Ìjèsàland for better placement, relevance and developments among the contemporaries in Nigeria music scene.

Music, Style and Message: A Classification of Major Themes in Nigerian Hip Hop

Hip hop which originated from the African-American community of the Bronx New York is exerting a domineering effect in most African countries. It is un-arguably and gradually becoming the most popular mode of musical expression among artistes in the sub-sahara region with visible affiliation to the global popular culture trends. The Nigerian youths have embraced this music style and identified with its culture thereby bringing the genre to the mainstream of the country’s popular music scene. Through lyrical and textual analysis of select songs and artistes, this paper examines the Nigerian hip hop brand against the backdrop of its major identifiable themes and attempts a classification module for the genre via its output and messages.

Immigrant Birds

Immigrant Birds

I Used to Love to Dream, by A. D. Carson

Review| August 01 2022 I Used to Love to Dream, by A. D. Carson I Used to Love to Dream, by A. D. Carson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11738372 Jasmine A. Henry Jasmine A. Henry JASMINE A. HENRY is a Predoctoral Fellow at William Paterson University and Future of Music Faculty Fellow at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, placemaking, DIY sonic practices, and music technologies within contemporary East Coast electronic dance music scenes. She currently serves as Media Lab Director at the Newark School of the Arts, where she provides marginalized community members with access to music technologies and industry knowledge. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2022) 75 (2): 409–419. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.2.409 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jasmine A. Henry; I Used to Love to Dream, by A. D. Carson. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2022; 75 (2): 409–419. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.2.409 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Few scholars have had as highly publicized a junior faculty career as A. D. Carson, Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia (UVA). In 2017, Carson made national headlines as the Clemson University doctoral candidate who submitted his dissertation in the form of a thirty-four-track rap album entitled “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions.” Carson used the album to reflect upon his experience of living in Clemson, South Carolina, as a Black graduate student navigating a predominantly white Southern university campus structured by physical markers and histories of white supremacy. Rather than using traditional modes of academic writing, he employed rap performance as his central methodology to illuminate and articulate issues of race and racism in predominantly white academic spaces and Black communities. In doing so, he put into practice a powerful method of documenting, processing, and working through the trauma... You do not currently have access to this content.

Uncovering Cultural Capital in Indonesia’s Underground Music Scene: A Discourse

Underground music is considered to have a very strong context in terms of cultural capital. By examining the capital and musical concepts of the underground music scene, it is possible to elaborate and explain the collapse of the regime. So that it raises a reaction to freedom in voicing certain class ideologies. The role of music was finally able to represent the voices of the politicized or oppressed people overpowering, one of which occurred in the New Order. Underground music emerged as a cultural capital which Bourdieu called an artifact in dissecting the problems of the social field. The purpose of this research is to uncover the cultural capital possessed by Underground Music which creates views that open the minds and hearts of representatives of certain classes. This research is carried out by reviewing literature, musicology, and historical records of Underground music, which will be presented and dialogued with the concept of Modal theory from Bourdieu and popular music analysis from David Machin. This research tries to answer the image anxiety that emerges from the dark and loud Underground Music Scene but instead has a sacred context in the development of the socio-cultural situation in Indonesia.

The singing Performer: Who am I on stage when not singing?

Approaching Kunstlieder with the background as a jazz interpreter, has challenged me to find, not only, my interpretation of the lieder/songs but to also find my interpretation of my role(s) as the singer on stage between classical music and jazz scenes. Through performing music, the chosen body of work, we are not only repeating and interpreting the music but repeating and interpreting ways of performing it. This research focuses on the role(s) of the singer on stage and the moments between the songs; the open space between one piece of music and another that offers the possibility to communicate and connect with the audience. What happens in these moments? What stories do we tell and how do we tell them? What do I communicate with, through, in - and outside of the lied, the song, the piece of music. What do I perform in the open space between between the songs - my self(s)?

Treating Audio Manipulation Effects like Photoshop: Exploring the Negative Impacts of a Lack of Transparency in Contemporary Vocal Music on Young Learners

Amidst the great and rapid advance in digital audio processing over recent decades, a range of new ‘manipulation’ software has problematised the popular music scene, both in terms of authenticity and achievability of performance. This paper will set out to define manipulation effects as separate from the more over-arching umbrella term of staging effects, under which they have been vaguely included for a number of years. By separating out the staging of vocals from the manipulation of their core content, by pitch correction for example, we can more specifically observe their impact on audience reception and vocal pedagogy. The reception element of this research would be largely related to that of authenticity and the presentation of liveness in online video, but this paper will focus on the effect of the unachievable on vocal learners. These could range from confidence issues to serious vocal problems. This paper explores the possibilities of music following the same trajectory as photography, where manipulation is concerned. Photoshop’s usage in media has provoked a great deal of controversy in recent years, with high profile campaigns resulting in legislative changes such as Israel’s Photoshop Law, which imposes certain restrictions for models and a disclaimer requirement for publishers. It’s a possibility that if the music industry were required to provide disclaimers for audio releases and online videos, that there would be more transparency in vocal pedagogy, with the potential for fewer vocal health problems related to copying unachievable performances. The aim of this paper is to open a conversation about the effect of a lack of transparency surrounding audio manipulation so that more can be done to address it.

Improvement of Speech Recognition Technology in Piano Music Scene Based on Deep Learning of Internet of Things.

The main goal of speech recognition technology is to use computers to convert human analog speech signals into computer-generated signals, such as behavior patterns or binary codes. Different from speaker identification and speaker confirmation, the latter attempts to identify or confirm the speaker who uttered the speech rather than the lexical content contained in it. The short-term idea is that it should be able to record the musical sound played by the user with a certain musical instrument, then extract the note and duration information from it, and finally generate the corresponding MID file according to the MIDI standard, which can set the type of musical instrument in advance to complete the function of musical sound transformation, such as playing with a harmonica, and playing the MID at the end is the piano sound. With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, fields such as machine learning, electronic communication, and navigation have placed high demands on real-time and standard text recognition technology. This paper merges the sound of visual music into text-based data set training, uses the exported scanner features for model training, uses the model to extract features, then uses the features for prior training, and then uses pretraining. DNN results show that the combined training of target prevention and expansion plans, by replacing long-term and short-term memory networks, end-to-end speech recognition programs, and behavioral tests organized by mobile devices, can provide a larger receptive field combined with expanded convolution instead of long and short periods. The experimental results show that when the input sampling point is 2400, it can be seen that the convergence speed of the model becomes slower with more than 90 iterations and the loss of the model on the verification set increases with the increase in the number of iterations. This shows that the model in this paper can fully meet the needs of speech recognition in piano music scenes.

Punjabi Munde and Urban Lovers: Transcultural Masculinities on the British Asian Music Scene

Punjabi Munde and Urban Lovers: Transcultural Masculinities on the British Asian Music Scene

Music Emotion Recognition Model Using Gated Recurrent Unit Networks and Multi-Feature Extraction

A large number of music platforms have appeared on the Internet recently. The deep learning framework for music recommendation is still very limited when it comes to accurately identifying the emotional type of music and recommending it to users. Languages, musical styles, thematic scenes, and the ages to which they belong are all common classifications. And this is far from sufficient, posing difficulties in music classification and identification. As a result, this paper uses the methods of music emotion multi-feature extraction, BiGRU model design, and music theme scene classification model design to improve the accuracy of music emotion recognition. It develops the BiGRU emotion recognition model and compares it to other models. BiGRU can correctly identify happy and sad emotion music up to 79 percent and 81.01 percent of the time, respectively. It goes far beyond Rnet-LSTM, and the greater the difference in emotion categories, the easier it is to analyze the feature sequence containing emotional features and the higher the recognition accuracy. This is especially evident in the accuracy with which happiness and sadness are recognized. It can meet users' needs for music recognition in a variety of settings.

The Extensions of Opera: Radio, Internet, and Immersion

Social distancing is a central (un)word of the pandemic year 2020. Now, music culture thrives on performative ‘liveness’—even in classical music, where live experience has become the core of the musical artwork in the age of its mechanical reproduction. At the same time, the history of music can be read as a history of the dissolution of boundaries: from the body (voice), to mechanical instruments, to electronic extensions. Accelerated by regulations in response to the COVID-19 crisis, music culture passes another media transformation, entering new virtual stages. In fact, crisis always implies changes and chances too: economists call it ‘creative destruction’, artists call it innovation. And indeed, ‘social distancing’ in interaction with accelerated digitalisation also holds media-aesthetic potential. With the support of new media, and this is the hypothesis of this essay, the contemporary music scene in particular can form new dramatic forms that go far beyond the classical one-way stream: by enabling virtual participation instead of physical co-presence.

All My Time: Experimental Subversions of Livestreamed Performance During the Covid-19 Pandemic

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had spread internationally, resulting in governments shutting down concert halls, theatres, and other performance spaces. In this environment, the livestreamed performance flourished, with many musicians embracing the medium, performing to online audiences from their own homes via a variety of social media platforms. Whereas many major performing arts organisations created livestreams that attempted to emulate existing paradigms of concert films, many experimental musicians found ways of subverting these conventions, creating new works that could only have been created during these lockdowns. This article gives an overview of these experimental approaches, documenting the major types of ‘lockdown music’ observed across the international experimental music scene, and exploring their play with the relationships between sound and vision, and with the perception of online liveness. The article then examines a particular case study co-created by the author and composer Damian Barbeler. All My Time is an interdisciplinary work that draws on many of these games of diegesis and syncresis. The pianist duets with an unseen pianist in another country, household appliances become chamber partners with synthesisers, gin bottles are transformed into complex percussion instruments: image and sound seem incompatible, but the audience cannot tell which is live. By documenting the important body of work created during 2020–2021, the article explores how these online performances have expanded the possibilities of interdisciplinary music and the experience of liveness online, forming a basis for a continuing examination of the long-term legacy of ‘lockdown music’.

Opening Up Virtual Mosh Pits

This article investigates the sociabilities that surround in-game concerts and music scenes in the massively multiplayer online games Fortnite and Minecraft. Drawing on ludomusicology and cultural studies, it will rethink the virtual music scene concept to better incorporate the technical, economical, aesthetic, and social aspects that affect how relationships are developed inside MMOs among members for whom music and games play a primordial role in their personal life-worlds. Focusing on Travis Scott’s Astronomical performance in Fortnite sponsored by the video game and music industries, as well as the independent music festivals in Minecraft organized by volunteer-run virtual events producer Open Pit, allows for comparisons that are valuable in highlighting the characteristics that define a virtual music scene and differentiate it from an in-game concert. In order to conduct such a task, this essay will analyze Scott’s Astronomical performance currently hosted on YouTube while also considering statements made by the rapper in his 2019 Netflix documentary Travis Scott: Look Mom, I Can Fly and magazine interviews with the rapper and the team responsible for this event. In order to understand Open Pit’s festivals, several interviews with its members available online, as well as excursions undertaken by journalists to these events, will be investigated, providing an immersive account of what attending an Open Pit music festival can feel like from their perspectives. In the end, the article argues that as much as Scott’s performance changed what can be expected of in-game concerts by joining game and music aesthetics, Open Pit’s periodic events and their connection to the hyperpop music genre are a better representation of the virtual music scene concept developed in this article.

Imposter syndrome: A case study on the experiences and perspectives of a teenage feminist indie band

This research article features the perspectives of two young women who create and perform as an indie band together. Their stories demonstrate a stark contrast between their relative success in this early stage of their career and the obstacles that they continue to face. Linked to an underlying feeling of imposter syndrome, they reveal an ongoing struggle with confidence as musicians, resentment of the gentrification and closure of music venues, unsupportive high school teachers and administration and age-related barriers to the indie music scene. Encounters with sexism and ageism within the music scene and industry allude to systemic issues resulting in a dearth of musical spaces in which young artists can participate safely. Through interrogation of existing pathways to musical experiences and deeper understanding of young artists and their experiences within these avenues, attention to these discrepancies is critical in all settings of music education.

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