Musical Soundscape Research Articles

Effect of an Artificial Sound-Based Index on the Perception of Historical Block Environments

The acoustic environment can influence people’s perceptions and experiences and shape the soundscape. The soundscape has a unique role in shaping the cultural identity of a regional culture. Artificial sounds are an essential source of sounds in historical blocks; research has shown the influence of the ratio of perceived artificial sounds to the perceived extent of natural sounds on environmental perception in historical blocks. In order to explore this impact, this study uses the red soundscape index (RSIn), which represents the ratio of perceived artificial sounds to natural sounds, and constructs a structural equation model to elucidate the relationship between RSIn, soundscape perception, and sense of place. The results show that: (1) The evaluation of the sense of place is inversely related to the perception of artificial sounds and positively related to the perception of natural sounds. (2) Different artificial sounds have different effects on soundscape perception and the sense of place; the traditional culture soundscape index (TRSIn) has a significant impact on soundscape pleasantness (β = −0.13, p < 0.001) and soundscape quality (β = −0.09, p < 0.01). (3) The human soundscape index (ARSIn) has a significant impact on the sense of place (β = −0.14, p < 0.001). (4) The music soundscape index (MRSIn) has a significant negative impact on soundscape quality (β = −0.13, p < 0.05) and the sense of place (β = −0.12, p < 0.05). Therefore, the different dominant artificial sound sources should be considered and emphasized when designing and optimizing the soundscape of historic districts. The results of this study can serve as design guidelines and supporting data, providing a reference for the optimization and enhancement of the soundscape of historical blocks.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Healing Soundscapes im Krankenhaus

Hospitals increasingly becoming a focus of public interest as places of health promotion. With regard to a conducive acoustic environment design, music therapists can work closely with other professional groups to ensure that appropriate quality criteria and measures are developed. With reference to current research, the article derives the need to improve the aesthetics of hospital environments and positions the topic of research in the field of healing environments. It then introduces the concepts and approaches of Soundscape, Atmosphere, Environmental Music Therapy and Ambient Music, which essentially shape the interdisciplinary teaching and research project Healing Soundscapes. Healing Soundscapes aim to develop Musical Soundscape Interventions for specific hospital areas that positively affect the atmosphere. In the process, computer-aided generative musical compositions are played over loudspeakers. The concept of Healing Soundscapes is discussed, previous research is summarised and its further development is outlined.

Little Syria, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Little Syria, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Aya Nimer (bio) Omar Offendum's musical show Little Syria nods to the rich history of Brooklyn's Syrian community and is part of a vibrant tradition of Syrian performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.1 Offendum highlights this history by centering the rich visual language of shammi (Levantine) design, using mother-of-pearl chairs and gold decor to amplify the narrative style of the show and create a bridge between the audience and the historical titular neighborhood where the show is set. Little Syria, a collaboration with musicians Ronnie Malley, Thanks Joey, and Nano Raies, tells a story of Arabs in American life. By interweaving different narrative and musical techniques, Offendum shines a light on a historic Syrian neighborhood in Manhattan, New York and creates a space for communal healing. Offendum uses multiple cultural touchstones to encapsulate the broader and more intimate histories of Little Syria, creating continuity in the historical narrative of Arabs in the United States. Offendum builds this historical narrative through two concurrent processes. The first is by telling the broader history of Little Syria and Arab immigration in tandem with the intimate histories of people in Little Syria. The second is the use of hakawati, an Arab storytelling tradition that relies on motifs such as allegory, music, and spectacle to tell a story. Offendum uses hakawati as a storytelling practice to interweave our own daily emotional experiences with those of Offendum's historical figures, giving us a parallax view of racism, finding a job, and making money.2 The show begins with a track that outlines the experience of migrating to America through the lyrics "It's time for a new chapter/in this land of opportunity/the promises of rapture and happily ever after/lay behind these golden doors … allow me to explain before you butcher my name/label me unhireable or worse yet undesirable/I'm a man with a heart and a soul on a mission/here to build a better life …" Starting the show with a broad picture of the [End Page 90] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A snapshot of the stage and setup of Little Syria at the Brooklyn Academy of Music anxieties and emotions associated with immigration creates an aperture for Offendum to take us into the lived experience of a street salesman in Little Syria. The salesman sells his wares near an American soap factory that uses pig lard as a main ingredient. The owner of the factory often ridicules the Syrian salesman by calling him "dirty" and "unhygienic." The salesman thinks the ridicule is ironic considering Syrian soap's reputation as a valuable and potent cleansing agent. This segment animates the daily exchanges that comprised the lives of those living in Little Syria as they encountered racist institutions in their new neighborhood. This intimate history, which visualizes the emotional lives of historical figures, creates a space for us as viewers to reflect on our own experiences with racism. The interweaving of broad and intimate histories through hakawati shows how our emotional lives are intertwined with larger political histories. The musical structure is similarly comprised of two elements interwoven into a distinct style. Thanks Joey began the process of creating the musical soundscape of the show by sampling Arabic songs from the mid-twentieth century, which were then overlaid with Offendum's lyrics and complemented by Ronnie Malley's oud performance. Offendum's [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. A backstage shot of Omar Offendum, Thanks Joey, and Ronnie Malley at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [End Page 92] lyrics, combined with Thanks Joey's beats, create a moment that fuses the historic Arab soundscape of the 1900s with Offendum's contemporary hip hop style. This is further developed in Ronnie's live oud performance. The oud is an instrument with strong cultural associations and memories for many Arab listeners. The nostalgic nature of the oud evokes a soundscape reminiscent of home, another way that Little Syria engages with intimate histories. This soundscape simultaneously feels historic and contemporary, transporting listeners into a liminal world that acknowledges and draws...

Homeland echoes: music, sound, and devotion among the South Asian Hindu diaspora in Edmonton, Canada

ABSTRACT In Edmonton, the capital city of the province of Alberta, Canada, music, sound, and devotion have gained extraordinary popularity and proliferation among the South Asian Hindu diaspora. From festival celebrations to community gatherings or congregations in temples, this phenomenon of Hindu religio-cultural practice has been an important magnet to attract a vast number of the Hindu diaspora. Spending hours together, members of the South Asian Hindu diaspora engage in devotional musical soundscapes; immerse themselves in those soundscapes through clapping, singing, and bodily movements; and deeply engage in devotional activities. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2022, including three case studies, this article discusses how these homeland echoes – recreating and resembling homeland music, sound, and devotional practices – play a powerful role in maintaining homeland ties and function as a constitutive element of collective identity of South Asian-ness for the South Asian Hindu diaspora in the Canadian society.

Musicking assemblages and non-human becomings: Mapping morphogenetic processes and distributed agencies in Wolfgang Buttress’ the Hive

AbstractThe paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.

The Cultural Dialogue of Fidelity and Rendering in the Music of Googoosh in Hamsafar (1975)

This study examines the role of sound and the cultural dialogue of “transnational status” in pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, and more specifically, in the film-Farsi period. This study contributes to the literature because it mainly investigates how gender consciousness was promoted through the music soundscape in film-Farsi. The case study used to analyze and dissect the relationship—or rather, the borders and boundaries between the cultural dialogue of sound and music in film-Farsi—is the 1975 film Hamsafar (Fellow Traveler), directed by Masoud Asadollah. This paper will be of interest to film scholars and enthusiasts because Islamic feminism was infused in the “westoxification” and modernity of the powerful technique shaped by the soundtracks of films made before the Islamic revolution in 1979, especially by the voice and sound of Googoosh in the film Hamsafar.

Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800-1925, by Daniel Karlin

Reviewed by: Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925 by Daniel Karlin Lee Behlman (bio) Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, by Daniel Karlin; pp. xii + 195. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $44.95, $43.99 ebook. In Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, Daniel Karlin tracks the incursions into poetry and fiction of the extraordinarily vivid and now-lost musical soundscapes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London, Dublin, Paris, Florence, and New York. In seven chapters, four of which were Clarendon lectures at an earlier stage, we are introduced to writers' persistent fixations on aural street performances as works ripe for appropriation and restaging as dramatic tableaux. In selecting his examples, Karlin seeks to go "beyond mere reference," or that which only "adds local colour to a realist fiction"; rather, he investigates works in which a song "plays a specific part in an artistic design" (7). As this decision suggests—thematic connections across its chapters notwithstanding—this book as a whole is not thesis-driven. Elizabeth Helsinger's related Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) (which Karlin does not cite) is a useful point of contrast. While Helsinger reflects at length, via Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's aesthetic theory, on both "ideas about song" and "song as a possible model for understanding how poems can be said to think," Karlin resists larger claims about how his writers understand song as a rival or coequal to the lyric, let alone as a crucible for intellection ([University of Virginia Press], 2). He limits himself to actual existing street songs—or made-up ones—that made their way, as subject matter and quoted content, into poems and novels, while leaving unexamined the headier subject of how literary works might function as "song" and the implications of that gesture. He stays close to the ground of his chosen texts in resourceful readings of familiar and lesser-known poems by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Walt Whitman, as well as major twentieth-century novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. As with his earlier The Figure of the Singer (2013), Karlin's critical voice here is charmingly warm and direct, fast on the move but unhurried, as he teases out implications and chains of association. In the opening chapter, for example, he uses Robert Herrick's "Cherrie-Ripe" (1648), which famously incorporates an actual street seller's cry, as the point of departure for reflections on Thomas Campion, Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, the "migrations" of songs into visual art, and then back to poetry with Wordsworth's "Power of Music" (1807), to which much of the chapter is devoted (4). In discussing that poem, Karlin shows Wordsworth's middle-class spectator celebrating a solo violinist's performance before a rapturous working-class crowd, and distracting them from the cacophony of competing street sounds; as he keenly notes, this Orpheus figure "consciously or [End Page 338] unconsciously recalls" William Hogarth's etching The Enrag'd Musician (1741), a comic representation of street music and street life overwhelming a frustrated professional musician (16). (Wordsworth characteristically plays it straight, though.) Karlin later juxtaposes Wordsworth's poem with George Gissing's 1889 novel The Nether World to demonstrate how, in both, the surrounding street sounds constitute an assault on the senses that poses challenges to aesthetic reception and public order. Throughout the book, Karlin's avowed emphasis is not on street songs in their original cultural contexts but rather on how his authors repurposed them for divergent aesthetic and ideological purposes. A standout chapter focuses on Barrett Browning's use of street singers, children and adults in a range of late works that respond to the fluctuating fortunes of the Risorgimento in the late 1840s and early 1850s, including both parts of Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and "The King's Gift" (1862). In the former work, the child singer in the poem's second part "is there not by accident, 'overheard' as he passes beneath the speaker's window," but instead has been obviously planted there in a patently "improbable" gesture (46). The...

Like Birds in A Cage: Accounts About Social Isolation Soundscapes During the Pandemic in Brazil

This article presents and reflects upon the transformations on the soundscapes of Belo Horizonte (capital of the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil) and the surrounding countryside areas, noticed during the current social isolation period due to the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The starting point is a discussion about the concepts of landscape and soundscape, upon which our work is grounded, as theorized by scholars in the fields of geography, art, and sound studies; and also, the notion of proxemic zone, which guides our understanding of the relation between the listener and their space. The article then moves on to the authors’ own experiences during these pandemic days. One has stayed put, remaining in the center of a city with a population of 2.5 million people and taking notes of the different pandemic phases through the changing soundscape. Another has left her apartment in a bohemian part of town to stay at her countryside home, replacing the musical soundscape of nearby bars with the singing from tropical birds. Finally, the third author alternated his stay between places located in different neighborhoods of the city, looking at certain times for refuge in a farm in the countryside of the Minas Gerais. In addition to our own perspectives, we also discuss the experience accounts from 76 undergrad students, from Journalism and Advertising courses at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG, in Portuguese), regarding their social isolation soundscapes. These accounts have been originally gathered for the “Sound and Sense” class, guided by Raymond Murray Schafer’s sound diary, from his sound education exercises (Schafer 1992), and adapted to observe the soundscapes during the social isolation period due to the pandemic. The students’ accounts and the authors’ experiences are presented and discussed from a sound studies perspective, addressing the ways in which our sonic environment can shed light on urban changes and transformations in sociability.

Fujianese Provincial Brass Band Traditions of Chinese Immigrant Musicians in New York City: The Chinese Voices

This article focuses on the Chinese Voices Wind Orchestra. Fujianese brass band musicians immigrated to New York and changed Chinatown’s musical soundscape. The bands perform mainly inside or on the street outside of funeral parlors on Canal and Mulberry Streets. Their profession is mainly that of a funeral musician. They also travel to Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. for rites. They accompany families and decedents to cemeteries to play special repertoire. After the burial they perform songs of prosperity at receptions in restaurants. They maintain a wide repertoire of funeral songs and national marches. Funeral performances are a hidden music tradition performed at a sacred place for a sacred function, not intended for the public. Passers-by though observe bands performing outdoors when a coffin is brought to the hearse. There is a display of music and drama at this moment, for bands’ sounds transform the Downtown neighborhood into a Taoist aura. Bands came to perform adjacent to traditional Chinese instruments and at funerals as early as 1908, during the late Qing Dynasty influenced by the European imperial tradition. Today Chinese brass bands are transnational, and Fujianese bands bring the genre of a European brass band to New York in a Chinese interpretation of nationalism.

“A Few Years from Now” in Western Pernambuco

In this essay, Bruno Guaraná argues that Bacurau presents a cinematic intervention that is twofold: first, into global genre cinema, as it disrupts generic conventions of both the Western and the horror film and relocates the narrative to the margins; and second, into Brazilian cinema—in particular, regarding its depictions of the sertão, or hinterland. Guaraná calls attention to the role played by the film’s narrative and musical soundscape in engineering this audiovisual reeducation.

“This Is Ghetto Row”: Musical Segregation in American College Football

AbstractA historical overview of college football's participants exemplifies the diversification of mainstream American culture from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The same cannot be said for the sport's audience, which remains largely white American. Gerald Gems maintains that football culture reinforces the construction of American identity as “an aggressive, commercial, white, Protestant, male society.” Ken McLeod echoes this perspective in his description of college football's musical soundscape, “white-dominated hard rock, heavy metal, and country music—in addition to marching bands.” This article examines musical segregation in college football, drawing from case studies and interviews conducted in 2013 with university music coordinators from the five largest collegiate athletic conferences in the United States. These case studies reveal several trends in which music is used as a tool to manipulate and divide college football fans and players along racial lines, including special sections for music associated with blackness, musical selections targeted at recruits, and the continued position of the marching band—a European military ensemble—as the musical representative of the sport. These areas reinforce college football culture as a bastion of white strength despite the diversity among player demographics.

Music and Diplomacy: The Correspondence of Marshal Jacob Heinrich Flemming and Other Records, 1700–1720. Part II: The Wedding Ceremony of Friedrich August and Maria Josepha in Vienna (1719)*

In September 1718, Jacob Heinrich von Flemming, the Saxon Field Marshal and the first minister of the Saxon Privy Council, came to Vienna to complete the political negotiations between Austria, Saxony, and Poland that were to lead, inter alia, to the dynastic pact between the Wettins and the Habsburgs. This alliance was embodied in the marriage of Friedrich August (son of August II, king of Poland and elector of Saxony) and Maria Josepha (the eldest daughter of the emperor Joseph I, who died in 1711), which took place in Vienna on 20 August 1719. Flemming spent this time in Vienna not only for the purpose of intense political negotiations, secret meetings, and important public events; he was also actively involved in the social life of the city. He participated in balls, feasts, opera performances, and other entertainments in the salons of the Viennese aristocracy, and he reciprocated the same in his residence. He brought his own private music Capelle from Saxony, which accompanied most social events taking place at his Viennese headquarters. Based on Flemming’s Viennese diaries and other documentation from that time, this article represents the second and final part of a broader study on music and diplomacy through the lens of Flemming’s activities and correspondence. It recreates the musical soundscape surrounding the Saxon marshal in the Austrian capital, showing how Flemming used music as a tool to build trusting relationships (both political and social), and detailing the role the musicians played in fulfilling Flemming’s diplomatic objectives. Archival documents are used to reconstruct hitherto unknown musical aspects of the events surrounding the Vienna wedding of Friedrich August and Maria Josepha, and to provide indications about repertoire performed during Viennese marriage ceremonies of such rank.

Gray Areas

“Navigable narratives” are a subgenre of narrative-based video games under the umbrella definition of “walking simulators.” While they are a subgenre of video games, analyzing their score or soundscape purely through a video game lens paints an incomplete picture because of their different artistic focus. Models like Elizabeth Medina-Gray's modular analysis are a useful start but insufficient on their own to understand this genre's sound. Rather, a participant's experience in a navigable narrative is often quite similar to that of a soundwalk, especially a virtual reality soundwalk; the game composer/audio designer creates an intricate soundscape through which the participant moves, and with the main focus on the story and gradual travel, the participant has more time and capacity than in a typical video game to build meaning from the soundwalk they perform. One of the major relationships navigable narratives have with soundwalks is the breakdown of diegesis in the soundscape the participant takes in, which is unlike most video games. To analyze the soundwalk and also the soundscape present in navigable narratives, I draw from R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Janet Cardiff. In the opposite direction, in many ways navigable narratives are very much like “literary computer games,” or interactive narratives that may be analyzed via “ludostylistics” à la Janet Murray and Astrid Ensslin. A key element in many navigable narratives is the use of narrative time, as described by Alicyn Warren, rather than real time, which also sets navigable narratives apart from standard video games and especially from soundwalks. To explore these varied models and lenses, I demonstrate an analytical approach, using Leaving Lyndow (2017) as my primary case study. And so, between these analytical lenses of video game music theory, soundscape and soundwalk study, and ludostylistics applicable to literary computer games, I posit that the sound of navigable narratives is best understood through a synthesis of all three.

Editors' Note

Sobol and Senehi Editors’ Note Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2020), pp. 149–152. Copyright © 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 Editors’ Note Joseph Sobol and Jessica Senehi A t the outset of Storytelling, Self, Society, the editors set a course that reflected a certain prevailing understanding of the storytelling field around the turn of the millennium. Storytelling was at its core a live, unmediated transmission of story between designated tellers and sets of listening partners. Articles in the journal would be curated to place this primary act of narrative communication at the hub of a wheel of contemporary mediations and purposes, but unless we could manage, even after heavy squinting, to discern in a piece some chain of begats tracing back to the narrative Adam of orality, we would bar the door. This position was compensatory, perhaps, for revival storytellers’ own persistent sense of dispossession. Because oral storytelling had been silted under by centuries of technological strata, leaving it obscured in a cultural landscape full of shiny new narrative forms, we wanted the journal to display only the clearest and cleanest of our efforts to excavate and polish the lost inheritance. Applied storytelling work, with its artistic aims sublimated to a variety of social or institutional objectives—this would be the journal’s bread and butter, expressing the vernacular vigor of the art in a range of utilitarian settings. But storytelling as a traditional and contemporary performance art was to be set at the head of the feasting table. Even as this disciplinary model was being constructed, the cultural ground was shifting underfoot. In an article for this journal in 2010, one of the coeditors wrote, “Our decades of storytelling revivalism have seen the rise of the personal computer, that summary aggregation of all previous electronic mediating 150 n Editors’ Note functions into one exponentially powerful and pervasive cultural presence” (Sobol). As media prophet Marshall MacLuhan had foretold, this transformation in the technological environment begat an expansion or more properly an explosion of the cultural frame through which storytelling would be practiced and understood. Among the first to formalize the conjunction of storytelling and digital technologies were Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert of the California-based Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS). Atchley was a filmmaker, photographer, graphic artist , performance artist, and new-media savant as well as a storyteller fascinated by the emotional resonances of personal narratives and family artifacts. His experiments with the intersections of live and prerecorded storytelling pieces in digital media frames became a touchstone of a new format, crystallized in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the programs of the CDS. Lambert, who had run a local theater company in San Francisco focused on community oral histories, helped Atchley to transmute his long-form solo pieces into an easily transferable template for creating three- to five-minute “digital stories.” These would be developed in community workshop settings, using inexpensive portable technologies to mix recorded narration, visual montage, and evocative musical soundscapes. The techniques blended the appeal of family scrapbooking, the allure of new media, and emotionally accessible, populist aesthetics. This first iteration of the digital storytelling concept was one of several cultural developments around the turn of the millennium that reframed and complicated the contemporary storytelling movement. Others included the insurgent personal storytelling events embodied in The Moth mainstages and story slams and the spread of popular oral histories on radio, podcast, and social media. A defining thread to these developments is the tightly recursive layering of individual storytellers’ time-stamped voices in fractal webs of digital preservation , replication, and distribution. The 2010 article by Sobol continued: Digital media provide a democratic cultural matrix in ways that its predecessor media could not and never attempted to match. Armed only with cheap digital audio and video recording devices attached to their PCs, an international brotherhood and sisterhood of isolated geek youth can chat, hook up, clown around, make art, and broadcast their self-instructed self-expressions to potential audiences of millions around the globe, completely bypassing the Sobol and Senehi n 151 gatekeepers that have traditionally rationed out the products of prior cultural systems. (p. 75) In the decade since...

Listening to Another Italy

The transition between the 1950s and 1960s is a watershed moment for the construction of the Italian post-war identity through cinema. Not only do feature films of those years reflect this critical point, but also documentaries become a privileged medium for revealing the contradictions of a country that was increasingly divided between tradition and progress. In this article I focus on the production of composer Egisto Macchi, a leading figure in the renewal of Italian music. He worked with significant filmmakers scoring hundreds of non-fiction films during the 1960s. Combining archival sources with historiographical and theoretical discourses of musicology and film studies, I examine some key examples of Macchi’s soundtracks. Macchi’s scores shun widely encoded musical styles in an attempt to investigate the most striking and hidden character of the reality observed by the camera. On the one hand, experimental music is seen as the best way of engaging afresh with the subject matter; on the other, these documentaries establish a viewpoint and a way of hearing rooted in the contemporary music soundscape.

Reclaiming Josephine Baker in the Filmic Ethnomusicology of Djibril Diop Mambéty

Abstract This paper proposes an ethnomusicological approach to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s films as a means of reading their diverse musical soundscapes. Paying particular attention to Touki Bouki (1974), it demonstrates how this approach delineates what may be seen as a reclamation of Josephine Baker—an international figure who has been objectified for her race and gender—resituating her within a wider global African cultural heritage.

Conference Report

Popular music has regularly been a part of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the 2018 SEM meeting had a lot to offer scholars of popular music. There were panels on topics such as “Engendering Popular Music Soundscapes,” “Popular Musics and Indigenous Ontologies,” and “Global Pop

Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back by Mark Slobin

164 The Michigan Historical Review present a larger narrative of art, architecture, and design underlying the story of building and rebuilding of Detroit. Using photographs of the sculptures and through careful research of underlying history, Morrison produces a catalog encompassing the immense history and high design value. Across various sculptors and their styles, Morrison underlines these sculptures as a “metaphor for the city” (p. 3), “a symbol of nationalism” (p. 73), “a representation of history and ideals” (p. 149), and “a marvel” (p. 241). In the process, however, Morrison fails to introduce or conclude regarding the possible storyline of integration of art, architecture, culture, and city building. He finds the perfect tool in his photographic skill—a passion and love—but does not allow it to provide a bigger picture. The book will be helpful for art and architecture students, researchers, and practitioners, especially those interested in the history of art and architecture in the region as well as to general citizens and city leaders interested in rich artistic traditions in Detroit. Through illustrative documentation of architectural sculptures from eight decades in Detroit’s history, the book offers a critical insight into the architectural scene in Detroit. It also argues for a much-needed case for documentation, preservation, and historic conservation in the city and the region to identify, protect, and celebrate its rich heritage in art and architecture. Anirban Adhya Lawrence Technological University Mark Slobin. Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 233. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $29.95. In Motor City Music, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin aims to combine concentrated studies of the cultural impact of different immigrant and migrant groups in early- to mid-twentieth century Detroit with his own memories of growing up in a rapidly decentralizing ethnic neighborhood. By focusing on the intermingling of what he terms musical “traffic” in a nod to the city’s automotive culture, Slobin uses these stories, combined with archival research and interviews with prominent local musicians, to argue that neighborhood boundaries were porous enough to allow classical, popular, and ethnic music to converge in ways distinct to Detroit’s urban structures. The result is an unusual and uneven, Book Reviews 165 sometimes frustrating but often fascinating, glimpse of the city’s musical history beyond the customary focus on Paradise Valley jazz and Motown. Slobin begins with an examination of his early years, growing up in Detroit’s Jewish neighborhood, in a family with close ties to Eastern Europe. There are moments when his personal recollections feel like slapdash footnotes to more traditional research sources—noting that his school concert band shared a program with a noted orchestral teacher, or that his parents were friends with several esteemed local musicians, for instance, do little to bring the narratives to life. But in the introduction, he elegantly shows how listening to old Yiddish folk tunes, Soviet political anthems, American pop ditties, and classical concertos could form a musical soundscape that encouraged outreach and experimentation. He carries this argument through an intriguing, if somewhat disjointed, chapter on how the musical styles of different immigrant and migrant groups shaped the city’s culture during the Depression and World War II, and into a more fully realized section on how Jewish Detroiters re-shaped the mainstream music scene to reflect their own backgrounds and struggles. While Slobin does an admirable job detailing the heretofore unexamined effect that Jewish residents had on the city’s culture, most of the other specific ethnic and regional profiles are too cursory to function as in-depth examinations of the music forms themselves. And yet they still provide an intriguing look at how new residents kept their traditions alive while simultaneously helping to create new, multi-layered “American” identities. Slobin’s efforts to explain the intersections among music and race relations, however, are not quite as effective. In a chapter devoted to the city’s high school music programs in the 1930s and ’40s, for instance, he nicely describes how students of diverse backgrounds were trained in classical music stylings, even as African-American graduates were denied access to the same positions that awaited their peers. The programs ended, he explains, when...

‘Look into My Eyes’: Music, Religion, and the Politics of Muslim Youth in Norway

AbstractIn this article we explore the role of music in shaping and publicizing religious and political subjectivities and belonging among young Muslims in Norway. The article discusses practices of producing and listening to music in light of theories about ‘counterpublics’ and their soundscapes, the religious and the secular, and majority-minority relations. Musical soundscapes produced and consumed by young Muslims, the article argues, give voice to experiences and sentiments that are marginalized within mainstream cultural productions, and articulate both consensus and dissensus with national political institutions’ concepts and norms.