Music Era Research Articles

“Jamaican Sound Keroncong”: A Communication Study on the Spread of Keroncong in the Young Generation in Bandung

This research discussed Jamaican Sound Keroncong (JSK) as a communication media in the global era. The problem of research was that keroncong music tended to be unknown by most young people in Bandung, and it was lost almost a century among them. This research aimed to examine the communication between the structure, agents (SirIyai), and sub-agents (Crispy Crue/the fans), and the appreciation of the keroncong community in Bandung for their performances. Spredlay ethnographic methods were applied. SirIyai was trusted informants and participatory observations, and in-depth interviews were carried out within one year. The research finds that; (1) SirIyai creates a communication media product under the name of JSK as the binding structure between SirIyai as the agent and CCI as the sub-agent; (2) the development of the internet creates dynamics and generates communication space; (3) communication of musical instruments is the basic idea of JSK product creation as communication media; and (4) there is a fundamental change of the old keroncong communication system to that of the youth keroncong in the global era. SirIyai is considered as the role model of the recent keroncong communication and becomes the parameter of creativity of musical mixture of global music era in Bandung.

The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater by Naomi A. Weiss

Reviewed by: The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater by Naomi A. Weiss Ava Shirazi The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater. By Naomi A. Weiss. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018; pp. 304. Song culture was integral to Greek tragic performance since its earliest conception, but sometime in the fifth to fourth centuries bce, there was a musical revolution of sorts both on and off the stage. This "New Music"—to use a terminus technicus coined by modern critics—was characterized by multifaceted experimentations with traditional musical styles (such as innovations on modulation, diction, and instrumentation) and was associated in particular with the dithyramb and kitharodic songs. Scholars generally regard Euripides as a key pioneer, among other poets and musicians, ushering in this "new" musical era. The Music of Tragedy, on the one hand, offers a "corrective" of the adjective "New," questioning whether innovation is as much a matter of "radical departure" (24), as it is a complex and creative engagement with culture and tradition. But the book is more than a rectification of terms and genealogies, unfolding a much broader conceptualization of what Greek mousikē (a term which encapsulates the triad of music, song, and dance) could and can do in a drama. In order to reveal what mousikē can do, Weiss first rejects what Aristotle says it does not do in the plays of Euripides: participate in the action (Poetics 1456a). Modern studies of Euripides and New Music have further strengthened Aristotle's designation of Euripidean choreia (choral song and dance) as "interludes" [End Page 523] (embolima [ibid.]), suggesting that the musical pieces are more a respite from the intensity of the action rather than an integral piece of the dramatic puzzle. Focusing on the intra-(versus extra)-dramatic (9) significance of the chorus, Weiss argues instead for an inextricable bond between mousikē and mythos (story/plot) in Euripidean tragedy. The connection between music and plot, moreover, is much more than a matter of integration: music, both performed and imagined, "intensifies, varies, extends, and at times even challenges the mythos" (235). The book reveals the link between music and mythos through its own narrative of metamusicality—a key term and method of analysis for Weiss that captures moments in the dramas where "references to song and dance engage with live performance" (8). Chapter 1 lays out an overview of the conventions of metamusicality in the choral performances of archaic lyric and the earlier tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Long before Euripides, Greek choruses drew attention to their own performances and performativity through a technique that Weiss identifies throughout the book as "imaginative suggestion." With the mention of animals, objects, or gestures (23), choruses frequently invited viewers to imagine external images and sounds so as to merge imagination with live performance. Here, Weiss introduces the dynamics of vision and visualization as well as the "multilayered sound pictures" (34) that were integral to Greek choral performance, and which Euripides evokes in his later tragedies. Overall, the chapter is a crucial contribution to the cultural history of choral performance, complicating the widely accepted trajectory of innovation by showing how Euripides' metamusicality (a self-referentiality often linked with New Music) is profoundly indebted to tradition. But Euripides is still doing something new, as Weiss reveals in case studies that comprise chapters 2–5, with each covering a play from the last fifteen years of the playwright's career: Electra, Trojan Women, Helen, and the posthumous Iphigenia in Aulis. What sets these plays apart is the intricacy of metamusicality within their choral songs. In other words, these four plays reveal a high level of self-awareness on the part of the chorus that they are, in fact, a chorus, one that is part of a much longer cultural tradition of both dramatic and nondramatic choruses. No summary can do justice to the meticulous and productive performance of close reading in these four chapters, which at the same time subtly engages with more contemporary performance theory (for example, Phelan, 1993; Roach, 1996; Batson, 2005; Foster, 2010). Throughout these chapters, the reader witnesses Euripides' intricate self-conscious engagement with mousikē that points to Weiss's claim that contrary...

Refl ection of the scientifi c-critical position of R. Genika in his letters to N. Findeisen

Refl ection of the scientifi c-critical position of R. Genika in his letters to N. Findeisen

EvoluSon: Walking through an Interactive History of Music

Abstract The EvoluSon project proposes an immersive experience where the spectator explores an interactive visual and musical representation of the main periods of the history of Western music. The musical content is constituted of original musical compositions based on the theme of Bach’s Art of Fugue to illustrate the eight main musical eras from Antiquity to the contemporary epoch. The EvoluSon project contributes at the same time to the usage of VR for intangible culture representation and to interactive digital art that puts the user at the center of the experience. The EvoluSon project focuses on music through a presentation of the history of Western music, and uses virtual reality to valorize the different pieces through the ages. The user is immersed in a coherent visual and sound environment and can interact with both modalities. This project is the result of collaboration between a computer science research laboratory and a research laboratory on art and music. It was first presented to a public event on science and music organized by the computer science research laboratory.

An empirical analysis of the frequency and location of concerts in the digital age

As recorded music sales have dropped, live performances have become an important revenue source for artists. In this context, we study how the geographical distribution of concerts has evolved during the digital music era. Using data on more than 33,000 concerts in the United States from 2000 to 2011, we investigate how the distribution of concert locations has evolved over time. Our analysis shows that artists performed more concerts from 2000 to 2011, and that these concerts became more geographically dispersed during this period.

A History of Western Choral Music by Chester L. Alwes

Reviewed by: A History of Western Choral Music by Chester L. Alwes Anne Shelley A History of Western Choral Music. By Chester L. Alwes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015–2016. [Volume 1: xiv, 488 p. ISBN 9780195177428 (hardback), $150; ISBN 9780199361939 (paperback), $74.00; 9780190457723 (ebook), varies; Volume 2: xiv, 452 p. ISBN 9780199376995 (hardback), $150; ISBN 9780199377008 (paperback), $74.00; 9780190463656 (ebook), varies.] Music examples, tables, illustrations, bibliography, index. [End Page 73] In this two-volume set, author Chester L. Alwes discusses composers and elements critical to understanding Western choral music from the medieval period until the mid-2010s. Alwes feels it is essential to familiarize oneself with medieval-era liturgy and theory before examining fifteenth-century masses, so these works are presented mostly chronologically. Volume 1 begins with Guillaume de Machaut (approximately 1300–1377) and ends with Josef Rheinberger (1839–1901); volume 2 opens with the development of the oratorio and nineteenth-century genres such as the choral symphony, and concludes with John Adams. The publication is based on thirty years of Alwes's teaching of upper-level undergraduate and graduate student courses on the history of choral literature. In the preface to volume 1, Alwes outlines the three foci of the set: (1) text, due to the fact that most elements of choral music are naturally driven by words; (2) analysis, because knowing the composer's intent leads the conductor to a more informed performance; and (3) external influences—such as religion, culture, and politics—that shaped composers' motivations (ix–x). Few comprehensive surveys of the development of Western choral music are currently in print, so Alwes's contribution is particularly welcome. The most comparable recent publication is Dennis Shrock's Choral Repertoire, published in 2009, also by Oxford University Press. The two publications differ in several ways. Shrock's book first appeared as a single volume that was later supplemented by an anthology, Choral Scores (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). While there is no separate score anthology for the book by Alwes, his discussion of the music is detailed and theoretical enough that music examples are necessary, and the charts exploring texts and translations as well as movement titles and their elements (keys, meters, modes) are helpful. Shrock very cleanly assigned major musical eras to his chapters, and within each chapter he adhered to a hierarchical arrangement by country, composer, and selected works listed by genre (for composers with a notable output of choral music). He followed a predictable formula for each composer: a brief biography, summary of the composer's compositional output, and some detailed discussion of select works. While this is a sensible structure, Shrock's book functions more like a reference tool than Alwes's history, which is much more free-flowing in thought and concept, and more transparently acknowledges the ambiguity of transitions between time periods and classification of works into certain genres. Alwes's volumes could certainly be used as course texts. Section headings tend to reflect the composer, time period, or genre being discussed, rather than something more specific. Both volumes have an abbreviation key, and the thorough indexes represent composers, work titles, genres, techniques, and subject terms in useful detail. However, the volumes lack the pedagogical tools typically provided in a textbook; for example, there are no checklists at the end of each chapter or in the margins, or obvious questions that might encourage readers to reflect on what they just read. Volume 1 has fourteen chapters that flow mostly chronologically, each focusing on a genre, composer(s), or location within a particular time period. Alwes covers the Middle Ages in a single chapter; in chapter 1, he briefly explains the liturgical frameworks that became the basis for later polyphonic vocal music, then follows with the effect of modality on chant, and concludes with the emergence of polyphony. Sacred choral music of the Renaissance outside of England receives two chapters, which sandwich a single chapter that discusses madrigals, chansons, and other secular genres. Ending at the year 1525, chapter 2 explores developments in the mass and motet. Alwes unsurprisingly turns to the innovations of Franco-Flemish giants—Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Josquin des Prez—to demonstrate the...

An Empirical Analysis of Frequency and Location of Concerts in the Digital Age

As recorded music sales have dropped, live performances have become an important revenue source for artists. In this context, we study how the geographical distribution of concerts has evolved during the digital music era. Using data on more than 33,000 concerts in the United States from 2000 to 2011, we investigate how the distribution of concert locations has evolved over time. Our analysis shows that artists performed more concerts from 2000 to 2011, and that these concerts became more geographically dispersed during this period.

Ideologies of artistic vocation – implicitly gendered cultural policies?

This paper argues that notions of artistic vocation – the idea that artists receive a metaphysical calling to follow their path – can be understood as implicit cultural policies, among other functions deepening the connection between art and spirituality, as well as regulating gender access to creative production. The matter is addressed generally and with reference to two specific case-studies: the musical era of German Romanticism and contemporary Mexican indigenous groups of the Huasteca, both of which display reliance on narratives of vocation. Also, both cases – one historically remote, and the other removed from Western main-stream musical practices – are to act as mirrors to invite future discussions concerning the continuing cultural currency of ideas of vocation and their complex and subtle complicity in the perpetuation of arguably desirable (such as the promotion of creativity) and oppressive practices within the art world.

The importance of music component in constitution of stratified narrative in movie trilogy Lord of the Rings

The movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings of Peter Jackson is based on the eponymous literary achievement of J. R. R. Tolkien and represents one of the most screened literary work of epic fantasy genre. Here, the narrative presents a kind of stratification of the basic story that is related to the main character, so that by the end of the first part of the movie/book polyphonic structure forms. Poly-structure involves setting of synchronic events of 'main' character and his assistants, who will be reunited only at the end. The constitution of the narrative elements of the movie is completed with music component. Auditory role is related to the characters through the use of leitmotifs and expressionistic narrative complements. This paper shows the importance of musical components, primarily thru analysis of the leitmotif that constitute elements of narrative in movie and the overall presentation of the characters. Featured motifs belong to non-diegetic music role and there are nine of them. They are drama-motivated and they are transformed in accordance to the appearance in the movie, but they still remain recognizable. These elements of musical components are deeply involved in shaping of the narrative of movies. Music is often presented as a combination of several musical topics (mostly modal coloured), which point to the temporal determinant of the story i.e. the imaginary middle Ages (as before tonal music era). In addition, the frequent sound imaging without difficulty evoke characteristics of the characters. Great connection between audio and visual components in this trilogy makes storytelling extraordinary and offers the audience an insight into absolute magical world of Tolkien.

Stability and Change in Rhythmic Patterning Across a Composer’s Lifetime

Historical trends in the rhythm of Western European instrumental classical music between ∼1650 and 1950 have recently been studied using the nPVI equation. This equation measures the average degree of durational contrast between adjacent events in a sequence (such as notes in a musical theme). These historical studies (e.g., Daniele & Patel, 2013, Hansen et al., in press) have relied on assigning each composer’s music a mean nPVI value in order to search for broad historical trends across composers. Here we address how mean nPVI might vary across different compositional periods within a composer’s lifetime, focusing on four famous composers whose lives have been demarcated into different epochs by historical musicologists, and who were part of Daniele and Patel’s original study: J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. For these composers, we find that the mean nPVI does not vary dramatically across compositional periods. Nevertheless, there are interesting trends within the lifetime of each composer which reflect the larger ‘rising nPVI’ trend seen across all Austro-German composers studied by Daniele and Patel (2013). These findings demonstrate the utility of studying historical patterns in musical rhythm at two distinct timescales: within the lifetimes of individual composers, and across composers from divergent musical eras.

More ‘Blurred Lines’ when it comes to writing songs?

If songwriters were not clear about the difference between taking ‘inspiration’ from another's work, as opposed to actually copying someone else's efforts, they might be even more confused following a federal jury's decision in the ‘Blurred Lines’ case, especially in the modern music era where, in genres such as hip hop and rap, sampling and referencing are commonplace.

Tradition of Notation in the History of Turkish Music

Notation which is expressing of writing musical tones by using some type of special signs has changed into the many phases up to now which is widely used. Although different knowledge placed at the different sources about when and where the musical writings were came into existence. Notation in the tradition of Ottoman music era had become widespread from the beginning of 19th century. Within the traditional musical understanding as a method of education and transference, Notation was used mostly in the edvar books especially for explaining of theory of music. In opposition to implementation of traditional educational method (meşk), the books written for saving repertoire are the most important historical music resources from centuries they belong. It has a vital necessity for the musical observations and researches on recognizing and learning of different notations used in the history and reading the most important notation heritage of Turkish Music.

Multiple Viewpoint Systems: Time Complexity and the Construction of Domains for Complex Musical Viewpoints in the Harmonization Problem

We discuss the problem of automatic four-part harmonization: given a soprano part, add alto, tenor and bass in accordance with the compositional practices of a particular musical era. In particular, we focus on the development of representational and modelling techniques, within the framework of multiple viewpoint systems and Prediction by Partial Match (PPM), for the creation of statistical models of four-part harmony by machine learning. Our ultimate goal is to create better models, according to the information theoretic measure cross-entropy, than have yet been produced. We use multiple viewpoint because of their ability to represent both surface and underlying musical structure, and because they have already been successfully applied to melodic modelling. To allow for the complexities of harmony, however, the framework must be extended; for example, we begin by predicting complete chords, and then extend the framework to allow part by part prediction. As the framework is extended and generalized, the viewpoints become more complex. This article discusses matters related to viewpoint domains (alphabets), such as their size and consequent effect on run time; and presents methods for their reliable construction. We also present an empirical analysis of the time complexity of our computer implementation.

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War by Christian McWhirter (review)

Reviewed by: Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War by Christian McWhirter Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment (bio) Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. By Christian McWhirter. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 336. Cloth, $39.95.) Civil War music scholars often describe a need to rescue war-era music from obscurity. Christian McWhirter continues this tradition in Battle Hymns by calling for dialogue between historians and musicologists to improve the documentation of nineteenth-century American music. McWhirter describes his primary goal as constructing a social history of Civil War–era music. Two theories in his introduction frame his approach. First, popularity correlates to historical significance. Second, published period documentation best demonstrates music’s resonance with audiences. McWhirter makes bold claims about the power and prevalence of music, which unlike other nineteenth-century media is described as a universal language that was performed and consumed by Americans of all classes. Evidence from newspapers, diaries, letters, and sheet music leads McWhirter to conclude that music surpassed other forms of written and [End Page 434] oral communication in shaping American perceptions about the war. The author does not consider music’s social power unique to this period, but stresses that the mid-nineteenth century was America’s most musical era, and the Civil War was America’s first musical war. Battle Hymns’s thorough bibliography blends historical and musicological sources. McWhirter constructs a detailed narrative about increased music consumerism while skillfully supporting his claims with references to newspapers, manuscripts, and sheet music. According to McWhirter, Civil War music was a memorable and accessible media form and a cultural tool that disseminated political ideas during a time when Americans preferred music to speeches or newspapers. Civil War Americans needed to process war-spawned social disorder, and songs such as “The Bonnie Blue Flag” shaped regional responses to the war. Music functioned differently in civilian and military spheres, but white anxieties about racial difference were expressed through a shared enthusiasm for the music of blackface minstrels. After the war, commemorative songs reflected psychological needs to justify the war. As time passed, Americans refashioned songs to align with war memories. A great achievement of Battle Hymns is its synthesis of data from previous studies. The book is dense yet easily accessible to a wide audience, and in the midst of the sesquicentennial it should attract considerable attention. Although McWhirter documents a substantive Civil War song history, the book leaves some questions unanswered. Somewhat surprising is the author’s heavy reliance on centennial-era sources, which may have led him to characterize popular music as simple, homogenous, and universally intelligible. For instance, McWhirter frequently cites Willard A. Heaps and Porter W. Heaps’s The Singing Sixties (1960) as the best Civil War music source, even though his bibliography attests to the depth and breadth of more recent research (Eric Lott, Eileen Southern, Nicholas Tawa, Richard Crawford, Mark Smith, Steven Cornelius). McWhirter might have critiqued the cultural conditions from which centennial-era research emerged or balanced those references with more contemporary scholarship. McWhirter’s decision to rely on published, commercially available compositions with lyrics that were consumed by white audiences allows him to claim that music steered Civil War discourse, but the argument relies on a narrow definition of what counts as “music.” Specialists will quibble, too, with the author’s blurring “genre” with “theme” when he claims that the most popular music genres were “patriotic” and “sentimental”; both terms describe subcategories of American popular song. The terms “music” and “song” are used interchangeably, too, which unfortunately led McWhirter [End Page 435] to exclude other music forms, music produced and performed by ethnic and racial minorities, and music with nontextual characteristics. This exclusion is reinforced by McWhirter’s decision to measure the popularity of period songs by comparing sales reports to repeated mention of song titles in newspapers and other texts. These choices may have resulted in an oversimplification of national aesthetics. In his last three chapters, McWhirter relies on more recent scholarship, and the results are more critical and gripping. In chapter 8, “Veterans, Memorialists, and the King: The Revival and Legacy of Civil...

Don't stop thinking about the music: the politics of songs and musicians in presidential campaigns

Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Why Music Matters Part One: The Traditional Era of Music Chapter 1: The Early Use of Campaign Music (1789-1840) Chapter 2: Music Post Tippecanoe (1844-1916) Part Two: The Mass Media Era Chapter 3: Women's Suffrage&Wireless Technology (1920-1948) Chapter 4: Good Night, And Good Luck (1952-1968) Chapter 5: Music Transitions to the Pop Era (1972-1984) Part Three: The Popular Music Era and Beyond Chapter 6: The Canned CampaignSong (1988-2004) Chapter 7: Facebook, YouTube, & MySpace, Oh My! (2008 and Beyond) Chapter 8: Music of the Past, Present, and Future Bibliography Index About the Authors

The cognitive organization of music knowledge: a clinical analysis

Despite much recent interest in the clinical neuroscience of music processing, the cognitive organization of music as a domain of non-verbal knowledge has been little studied. Here we addressed this issue systematically in two expert musicians with clinical diagnoses of semantic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, in comparison with a control group of healthy expert musicians. In a series of neuropsychological experiments, we investigated associative knowledge of musical compositions (musical objects), musical emotions, musical instruments (musical sources) and music notation (musical symbols). These aspects of music knowledge were assessed in relation to musical perceptual abilities and extra-musical neuropsychological functions. The patient with semantic dementia showed relatively preserved recognition of musical compositions and musical symbols despite severely impaired recognition of musical emotions and musical instruments from sound. In contrast, the patient with Alzheimer’s disease showed impaired recognition of compositions, with somewhat better recognition of composer and musical era, and impaired comprehension of musical symbols, but normal recognition of musical emotions and musical instruments from sound. The findings suggest that music knowledge is fractionated, and superordinate musical knowledge is relatively more robust than knowledge of particular music. We propose that music constitutes a distinct domain of non-verbal knowledge but shares certain cognitive organizational features with other brain knowledge systems. Within the domain of music knowledge, dissociable cognitive mechanisms process knowledge derived from physical sources and the knowledge of abstract musical entities.

‘Nothing You Can See That Isn't Shown’: the album covers of the Beatles

From their release in the 1960s, the LPs of the Beatles have dominated the various selections and lists which routinely purport to identify the most popular/most influential/best albums of the popular music era. Throughout each subsequent decade, the verdicts expressed in audience polls, in critics' choices and in the comments of other musicians have served to effectively maintain and enhance the group's reputation.There is, however, an additional way - often alluded to, but rarely investigated - in which the albums of the Beatles are celebrated. Almost without exception, the album covers themselves have been seen as groundbreaking in their visual and aesthetic properties, have been congratulated for their innovative and imaginative designs, have been credited with providing an early impetus for the expansion of the graphic design industry into the imagery of popular music, and have been seen as largely responsible for allowing the connections between art and pop to be made explicit.

Singing and Selling Seeds

The Live Music Era on Rural Midwestern Radio Stations Gretta Woodson's singing career began on a hot summer afternoon in 1925. Employed as an office worker, Woodson and her sister had enjoyed a quick lunch in a downtown Oklahoma City restaurant. With some time left to kill on their lunch hours, the two women strolled through the downtown area, eventually passing the studios of Oklahoma City's new radio station, WKY. Neither woman had ever seen a radio station, so they decided to ask for a tour. Much to their bewilderment, however, the staff member on duty mistakenly thought the two women had stopped by to audition for a job: We just walked in (to the studio) and we visited with her a little... finally she said, "Do you play or sing?" I said, "Yes, I do." She asked me to sing something, so I did. When I got through, a man walked in and said, "Would you mind doing that (song) over again?"'. . . He put a microphone in front of me and he walked out of the studio... I went ahead and finished my song ... he came back in and asked, "Would you like to be on our Saturday night program?"1 Before she knew it, Woodson was a radio star. In fact, she worked at WKY for two years and enjoyed such popularity that she left Oklahoma in 1927 and moved to Chicago, where she became a recording artist for the Victor Phonograph Company and a performer on radio station WGN. Woodson's sudden rise to regional fame as a radio performer illustrates how broadcasters in rural Middle America turned to their cultural roots in radio's formative years to tap and develop a valuable natural resource, the local musician. From the early 1920s through the post-war 1940s, station executives combed their back yards searching for talented singers, yodelers, accordion players, fiddlers and guitar and banjo pickers. This was the heyday of radio's homegrown musician, when live music, albeit parochial and usually greenhorn in quality, dominated local program schedules. Stations always had plenty of air time to fill, and in a geographical region known as a breeding ground for country and folk music, the talent supply was equally plentiful, as Richard Lutz, a former musician for KFAL in Fulton, Missouri, explains: Here in Calloway County (Missouri) there's a lot of what we call "down home, back porch" musicians .... This county is full of fiddle players, banjo players, guitar players, mandolin players and some horn players, too ... it's only natural that radio would have reflected this culture.2 Live music was not unique to stations in the towns and cities of the rural Midwest; from radio's earliest days broadcasters in all regions of the country relied on local talent as a programming resource literally. But, as cultural geographers have noted, music is a unique form of cultural expression, and regional influences greatly impact the style and appeal of this art form. As a result, a given station's musical identity was largely shaped by native culture and custom, which was, in turn, based on the availability of local talent. Thus, instead of the civic orchestras, opera singers, or concert violinists commonly found on early day stations in the cities of the Northeast, radio in the rural Midwest thrived on homespun melodies from the KMA Cornpickers, the Ozark Ramblers, the Harmony Twins, Johnny White and his Sons of the West, the Pleasant Valley Gang, and "Happy Jack," the fiddling Irishman. Rural audiences loved this folksy fare because, if for no other reason, local radio's entertainers reflected the conservative, agrarian values that so typified the regional culture.3 The relationship that developed between local broadcasting and its indigenous cadre of entertainers bred a unique programming phenomenon that historians have mostly left unexplored. Consequently, little is understood about the lives of radio musicians, their career aspirations or the professional demands placed on them. Many broadcast histories focus on the media giants who built networks or major companies. …

From Saginaw Valley to Tin Pan Alley: Saginaw's Contribution to American Popular Music, 1890-1955

Most people wouldn't know to make a connection between Saginaw, Michigan and Tin Pan Alley, a name synonymous with the popular music industry and where New York music publishing houses were clustered together. Many might even wonder where Saginaw is. Located on the Saginaw River and at the base of Michigan's thumb, this former world lumber capital turned out a surprisingly large number of popular songwriters between 1890 and 1955, helping the American popular music publishing industry gain its reputation as a provider of music for all Americans to enjoy. From Saginaw Valley to Tin Pan documents the work of more than 60 popular songwriters who hailed from Saginaw. Among the greatest of the Saginaw songwriters were Charles K. Harris (After the Ball, Break the News to Mother, and Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven), Dan Russo (Toot Toot Tootsie, Goodbye), Gerald Marks (All of Me, Is it True What They Say About Dixie?), Ange Lorenzo (Sleepy Time Gal), Isham Jones (It Had to Be You, I'll See You in My Dreams, Swingin' Down the Lane, The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else, On the Alamo) and Ben Weisman (Paper Roses, Honey in the Horn). R. Grant Smith provides background information and anecdotes about the most famous songwriters and their most important songs. For example, when young Danny Russo would hit a sour note while practising the violin in the back of his family's fruit market, his father would good-naturedly toss a lemon at him. Extensive appendices list over 1300 documented songs, including the year each was first published. More than 70 sheet music covers dating from between 1890 and 1955 are interposed with the narrative, adding to the book's charm and historic value. Smith researched this music era thoroughly, using as a resource a number of scholarly and popular publications. He visited countless antique shops and antique shows, sorting through thousands of pieces of sheet music, and interviewed songwriters from Saginaw and other individuals familiar with Saginaw's contributions to the music of Tin Pan Alley and the musical heritage of America. Although its vast forests of pine are now depleted, Saginaw's legacy of songs which so many have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, still remain.

Popular music as a mode of communication, 1955–1982

Employing a dramatistic system based upon the critical frameworks of Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the fifteen most popular recorded single records each year between 1955 and 1982 is presented. Popular music is conceptually defined as a nondiscursive epideictic mode of communication and operationally defined as Billboard's top fifteen “hit” single records each year between 1955 and 1982. A total of 392 songs are classified as either ironic, mimetic, leader‐centered, romantic, or mythical and then examined by thematic content, decade, musical era, and with some attention to these patterns as long‐term musical trends. It is concluded that popular music is a reflection of younger American's changing attitudes which have displayed an increasingly ironic perspective of human relationships.