Music Icons Research Articles

Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance: The Emergence of a Musical Icon

Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance: The Emergence of a Musical Icon

“Memory Makes Us Brave”: Hauntological Echoes of the Past in the Music of Chile’s 2019 Social Upheaval

Abstract: The 2019 social upheaval in Chile began with students jumping turn-stiles in protest over a modest increase in the metro fare, but it quickly expanded into a widespread denunciation of nearly every facet of the neo-liberal economic system installed under the 1973–1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. “It’s not the thirty pesos,” protesters claimed, “it’s the thirty years,” referring to the three decades of neoliberal policies after the return to democracy in 1990. In the days and weeks after the protests began, a soundtrack emerged of both original music and songs repurposed from Chile’s past. Even the new songs created in the wake of the 2019 protests also frequently reference, sample, or allude to Chile’s musical icons of the Chilean New Song era of the 1960s and early 1970s or to dictatorship era music. Both the protests and their music are therefore rooted in a hauntological past. Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology” in Spectres of Marx (2006), where he examines the ways in which the spirit of Marxism, like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future.” In Ghosts of My Life , British cultural theorist Mark Fisher applies Derrida’s concept of hauntology to English language cultural production, arguing that 21st-century cultural products reflect a “slow cancellation of the future.” “It doesn’t feel like the future,” Fisher writes; instead, “we remain trapped in the 20th century.” This article examines how the hauntological songs of the 2019 social upheaval seek to inspire and support an oppositional consciousness against the neoliberal system and how the resilience of that same system maintains Chile’s musical ghosts in a perpetual limbo .

Biracial Discrimination Recounted: A Deep Dive into The Meaning of Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey is an American singer and songwriter; whose mother is white, but her father is black. In 2020, she released The Meaning of Mariah Carey retracks Carey’s life as a biracial woman. This article explains how she is discriminated and reacts to the discrimination. The theories employed are Post-National American Studies; Blank, Dabady, and Citro’s types of discrimination; and Aguirre and Turner’s reaction to discrimination. When she was a kid, teenager, and young adult, the discrimination she endures is more intentional and explicit. The discrimination becomes subtler and more indirect, as she has cemented her status as a musical icon. The fact that she is still discriminated even after she has reached the peak of her superstardom suggests that biracial discrimination can happen to any mixed-race person, regardless of their socioeconomic class. Discrimination comes from both sides of the race. The article signifies how the discrimination faced by mixed-raced people are both similar, but also different from the experiences of other minorities.

Music Icons, Allegories and Symbolic Representation: Iconological Analysis of Thai Murals Along the Mae Klong Riverside

Abstract This article examines the Thai music iconology – with a focus on the instruments and ensembles and their symbolic representations – of monastery murals along the Mae Klong riverside. It also investigates how Thai music iconology links to broader views on Thai music, including those from Buddhism, culture, and social realms. Thirty-eight murals from the Ayutthaya period to the King Rama V period were selected for analysis. Improvised tools from Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2020) inter-semiotic, multidimensional approach and Panosfky’s (1962) concepts of iconography were employed in the data analysis. Additionally, an in-depth interview was conducted with key informants, including local intellectuals and experts in the related areas, for data triangulation. The findings show significant influence of music on Thai social forms, religious beliefs, as well as cultural and historical values.

Exploring Transcultural Communication via Perceived Social Distance and Intergroup Acceptance toward K-Pop and Asian Culture

Well-known K-pop (Korean popular music) bands have gained the status of pop music icons, owing to their widespread popularity around the world. This study explored the interrelations between a set of relevant social and psychological factors to explain how K-pop has also contributed to a one-of-a-kind transcultural communication phenomenon on the Internet via social media. An online survey was conducted with a sample of non-Asian American college students, as K-pop is highly popular among this group of music fans. A path analysis was performed to test a conceptual framework that integrated social distance theory, common ingroup identity model, and dialectical mode. The conceptual framework theorizes that perceived social distance and intergroup acceptance between individuals of non-Asian and Asian descent, as well as perceived musical similarity between Western and K-pop cultures, will underscore the intention for transcultural social media communication about K-pop. The current study contributes to advancing the literature by addressing the social-psychological domain of transcultural communication in the context of popular entertainment across social, cultural, lingusitic, and national boundaries.

Breaking the Code: An Investigation on The Vocal Registers of Malaysia’s National Songstress Puan Sri Saloma

Investigations on vocal registers have been a great subject of debate. Early vocal pedagogues and scholars like Bacilly (1668–1690) and Behnke (1836–1892) paved the way for the modern-day investigation to take place through the categorisation of vocal registers across various music genres such as classical, jazz, and popular. However, an investigation on the vocal registers of Puan Sri Saloma (1935–1983) as a popular music icon of Malaysia has yet to be done. This paper intends to examine Saloma’s vocal registers through vocal analysis of five selected songs using case study as its research design. These songs are transcribed using music notation software (Sibelius) and analytical diagrams using similar software are produced to show the use of chest, middle, and head registers in each song. The finding shows the usage of the said registers and a diagram of Saloma’s vocal range is then produced, proving that Saloma was an alto. This study does not intend to limit Saloma’s vocal capability, but rather to celebrate her vocal prowess and encourage other scholars to conduct further investigations concerning Saloma as Malaysia’s national songstress.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate Cultural Production in Afghanistan

AbstractIn the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, sound recording technologies—including radio and cassettes—proliferated in Afghanistan and reached transnational lengths. While the state came to dominate these technologies, it could not prevent users from circumventing its censors with alternative perspectives and discourses. This article highlights the examples of Farīda ʿUsmān Anwarī, a noted radio announcer, producer, and journalist, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir, Afghanistan's most popular musical icon to date, to showcase the ways in which the Persianate literary canon served as the medium for sounding dissent amid the changing social and political dynamics of the time. Pushing the boundaries of recorded speech created an alternative space where dissent became possible and the strategic use of mass media paved the way for transnational sonic solidarities among a diverse community of listeners across the Persian-speaking world and beyond.

Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks

<i>Nadia Boulanger and Her World</i>, edited by Jeanice Brooks

The Investigation of Celestial Musical Performers of “Pi’pa and Flute” in the Yungang Grottoes

&lt;p&gt;雲岡石窟是目前保留北魏原跡最完整的石窟寺群，在《妙法蓮華經》的影響下，石窟寺中可見「三世佛」、「二佛並坐」與「千佛」等佛造像的特色，其中部分的伎樂雕像反映出《妙法蓮華經》的典故，而在這些反映《妙法蓮華經》典故的伎樂雕像中可見「琵琶伎與笛伎」對列作為伎樂供養以表法的圖像，然在北魏之前的音樂史料及圖像中卻幾乎未見「琵琶伎與笛伎」對列的情況。故本文擬就雲岡石窟中「琵琶伎與笛伎」對列的伎樂雕像加以考察，而發現其中仍清晰可辨識的「琵琶伎與笛伎」對列的伎樂雕像至少有41組，實非偶然，然而，這些「琵琶伎與笛伎」對列的伎樂雕像來源為何？本文結合史書及唐詩的記載、同時期其他石窟寺及墓寺壁畫的圖像，還有印度的阿馬拉瓦蒂（Amaravati）的浮雕圖像及其他犍陀羅地區遺址中「琵琶與笛」對列的音樂圖像來加以比對，發現雲岡石窟中「琵琶伎與笛伎」對列有可能是來自西域胡樂與印度的佛教圖像東漸的影響。&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Yungang Grottoes are the most gorgeous and complete preservation remains of the original site in of the the Northern-Wei dynasty Buddhist Grottoes during. The sculpted murals, such as &amp;ldquo;trai-lokya buddham,&amp;rdquo; Prabhūta-ratna and Shakyamuni Buddha, sit side by side??,&amp;rdquo; along with the &amp;ldquo;thousand Buddha&amp;rdquo; which were inspired by the records of the Buddhist Lotus Sutra in the Yungang grottos. This paper aims to examine the sculpted murals in the Yungang grottos showing celestial musical performers of playing &amp;ldquo;pi&amp;rsquo;pa and flute&amp;rdquo;, to see how the people during Northern-Wei dynasty absorbed and expressed the doctrines of Buddhism by through these artistic productions, and how they? [the murals?] provide evidence for the understanding of the Buddhist services of worship following the secularization of Buddhism. In addition, the author will also sorts and identifies all the musical instruments depicted in the sculpted murals of the celestial musical of &amp;ldquo;pi&amp;rsquo;pa and flute&amp;rdquo; performers, to see which shows how they merged the music of the Han people, Xianbei, and Western Regions into a whole, which reflecting the musical culture during of the Northern-Wei dynasty. Finally, the paper will also discusses the Western origin of the ensemble of &amp;ldquo;pi&amp;rsquo;pa and flute&amp;rdquo;, by studying and considers the celestial musical performers in the Yungang grottos through the perspective of musical icons.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;

We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson

Reviewed by: We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson Andrew J. Salvati (bio) We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America. By Kevin Mattson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. $27.95 cloth; $9.99 ebook) There was the apparent end of the "boomer" wave of punk rock in 1979; the conglomeration of the music and entertainment industries; the rise of arena rock, Top-40 radio, new wave, and the "blockbuster" cultural product. There was the great "mellowing out" of the 1960s counterculture and its musical icons. There was the stultifying conformity of suburbia and the disintegration of the nuclear family; the increasing bellicosity of the Carter administration, and the smiling authoritarianism of Ronald Reagan; the worship of wealth and celebrity; the culture of narcissism and Yuppie hedonism; the reinstitution of the Selective Service, Cold War II, Central American adventurism, and the looming threat of World War III and nuclear annihilation. The tensions and anxieties that permeated American society at the dawn of the 1980s are usually concealed by the smooth gloss of nostalgia—by catchy electro-pop tunes, coming-of-age comedies, hip commercialism, and a splash of pastels. But as Kevin Mattson demonstrates [End Page 108] in his richly sourced history, We're Not Here to Entertain, the experience of these cultural and political shifts was intensely important to a new generation of suburban kids—the so-called "teeny punks"—who wanted to rejuvenate the DIY punk ethos of the 1970s, rebel against the conservative-corporatist mainstream, and create a culture of their own. Like previous chroniclers of punk rock (for example, Mark Andersen, Stephen Duncombe, Dawson Barrett, and Dewar MacLeod, among others), Mattson approaches his subject with the care and love of a former participant, opening We're Not Here to Entertain with reflections on his own introduction to what he calls the "punk rock world" as a teenager in the early 1980s: going to shows, discovering MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, and starting a band. But more than just the music, Mattson writes that for him, and for thousands of other kids across the country, punk was an ethos, "a consciousness or vision as much as a movement, fueled by discussions of personal ethics (straight edge, for instance), existentialism, anarchism, and the art of dissent" (p. 287). Mattson's memory of the scene serves as the entry point for what he calls a "history of creativity" that emerged from the punk rock world of the early eighties, and the forms of DIY artistic expression—music, fanzines, movies, fiction, art—that channeled a politics of angst "at a bloated entertainment industry and a president who equated governing with entertaining" (p. xvi). It is this "culture war" between a rebellious youth culture and the entrenched political and industrial powers that at times villainized it (as in anti-punk episodes of network TV shows Quincy and CHiPs, or in Reagan's tendency to interpret dissent, including the punk-infused nuclear freeze movement as communist propaganda), overwhelmed it (the spectacles of the culture industries' synergistic "blockbusters," or increasing police harassment of punk club owners, fans, and performers), or co-opted it (Mattson's prelude charts Blondie's arc from CBGB regular to chart-topping blockbuster) that provides the central conflict of Mattson's narrative. It is a culture war that Reaganism and the entertainment [End Page 109] industry would eventually win. By 1985, and certainly by the success of Nirvana in the early 1990s where Mattson's book begins and ends, punk rock had become just another "style" or "choice" in the corporate buffet. But the strength of We're Not Here to Entertain as a political and cultural history lies not only in its specific argument, but in Mattson's approach to reconstructing the punk rock world. While previous scholarship has focused on DIY cultural expression (for example, Duncombe, Triggs), political activism (Barrett), regional histories (MacLeod), or band biographies, Mattson has integrated each of these approaches in a way that is conscientious of the heterogeneity of punk rock. Rather than a singular narrative, We're Not...

The Idea of an ‘Icon in Sound’ in the Works of John Tavener

Abstract&#x0D; &#x0D; The aim of this article is to present an innovative concept of the ‘icon in sound’ created by the English composer John Tavener. The first part of the article presents the intermedial and intertextual features of Tavener's work, the second shows the genesis of the concept of ‘icon in sound’, to which three factors have contributed: 1) the composer’s interest in religious topics in his pieces, 2) the composer’s conversion to Orthodoxy, 3) collaboration with Mother Tekla, the author of the texts of many Tavener’s works.&#x0D; &#x0D; The last, third part of the article describes issues related to the formal structure and musical symbolism present in Tavener’s musical icons. The composer refers to painted icons by composing works characterised by static form and the expression of spirituality, mysticism and inner peace. These features result from the juxtaposing of melismatic structures, inspired by Byzantine music, with repetitive technique and dynamics often characterised by a low intensity. One characteristic of Tavener’s sound icons is a ‘luminous’ sound, achieved through the use of high registers of voices and instruments, which are combined with contemplative and lyrical expression. An important feature of John Tavener’s musical icons was the introduction of archaic elements, resulting primarily from the inspiration that the composer drew from the musical culture of the Orthodox Church (eg the use of Byzantine scales in Mary of Egypt, the introduction of instruments such as simantron in Mary of Egypt).&#x0D;

Stories of the role musicking plays in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa

The purpose of this narrative study is to explain the role that musicking plays in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic for 11 South African musicians. The research question is: How do the stories of 11 South African musicians explain the role that musicking plays in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic? There have been studies on how music helps in therapeutic and everyday settings, but there has been limited research on the role musicking plays in coping with pandemics. The 11 author-participants in the study have lived through this pandemic, and their stories served as the data. We used a narrative coding scheme to enable co-coding. Our findings are a collaborative interpretation of our analyses and are represented as a fictionalized dialogue. This dialogue revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had a range of psychological effects on the participant researchers. Musicking contributed to proactive and reactive coping strategies, including listening to music actively, making music with others virtually and in their homes, finding solidarity through engaging with musical icons, allowing them to connect with others, escape, focus, relax, and find hedonic well-being and hope. Further research will be needed to understand the roles musicking may play in coping with pandemics.

Controversy: Materializing the Mystique and Mythology of Prince

ABSTRACT Prince’s fourth album, Controversy, anchored the trajectory of his entire career and significantly shaped his status as a music icon. During this era, Prince leveraged his prodigious capacity for placemaking and worldbuilding and sparked his journey as a moving image auteur and film director. During the Controversy tour, Prince began experimenting with the visual language of narrative cinema as a vehicle for his music. He would go on to predate Beyoncé’s concept of the visual album by decades. The ubiquity of smoke from fog machines, combined with backlighting, present on tour and in music videos and album art, would come to mythologize the image of Prince that pop culture, more often than not, depicts—mysterious, otherworldly, and bewitching.

Brenda Fassie and Busiswa Gqulu: a relationship of feminist expression, aesthetics and memory

ABSTRACT Works of art consciously or unconsciously reproduce or reject of the societal norms from which they emerge. Reading artists and creatives as bodies which articulate the social and political experiences (affirmation or rejection implies that the body can also construct and deconstruct particular social readings of itself. In this paper, I explore feminist corporality, aesthetics and gendered performativity in the translation of selected songs ,by South African popular music icons Brenda Fassie and Busiswa Gqulu, into music videos. I argue that both artists construct “the self” and engage gendered narratives of “the self” through audio-visual form. I firstly employ the notion of homology, to compare the common thread in their articulation of black feminist discourse through their lyrics and the self-performativity of their music videos. I then focus on the aesthetic and performative elements of Gqulu’s music videos, notably the queer performativity of the Vintage Cru dancers and the staging of post-apartheid urban spaces. Through this intergenerational analysis I illustrate how popular audio-visual form participates in the representation of multiple iterations of queer and feminist performativity emerging out of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

Aaron E. Lefkovitz, Transnational Cinematic and Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Queen Latifah, 1917–2017. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. 146. $85.96 (cloth).

Aaron E. Lefkovitz, <i>Transnational Cinematic and Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Queen Latifah, 1917–2017</i>. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. 146. $85.96 (cloth).

Introduction

Introduction Judson L. Jeffries and Shannon M. Cochran We can think of no American music icon in recent memory that has generated more scholarly interest in death than most musical artists have in life.1 Already, Prince has been the subject of three major academic conferences, one in Manchester, England, in 2017, another in his hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2018, as well as a two-day symposium at Historically Black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2019. These conventions have attracted people from all over the world. Journal editors have also featured Prince in special issues with the Journal of African American Studies (JAAS) leading the way. Similar projects are slated within the next few years. Dare we say, with Prince's transition, a new fan base has emerged—one that includes individuals who were not yet born when Prince was at his zenith. For 40 years, Prince piqued our curiosity and kept our interest. He shocked us, stretched our imaginations, educated us, titillated us, and, in so doing, enlightened us. Anyone who has studied his music knows there are layers to Prince, layers that cannot be peeled back by just one person. The more layers that are peeled back, the more mutations, one discovers. The study of Prince requires an interdisciplinarity that no one writer or scholar possesses. Writers who embark on single-authored book-length manuscripts about Prince have their work cut out for them. Prince was a multi-instrumentalist whose tastes were wide-ranging and far-reaching. Most people, writers, and scholars alike go their entire lives and never hone their craft, never master their supposed specialty, never step outside of themselves, and never exhibit the kind of intellectual, metaphysical, emotional, or spiritual adventurism that leads to new discoveries not only about their work, but about the world and themselves. Prince, an adventurer, scaled all of these mountains. Because he was a multi-instrumentalist, naturally, his work is, both, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Shannon M. Cochran, whose academic training intersects Africana Studies, English Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies, and Judson L. Jeffries, a political scientist by trade with specializations in Africana Studies, media, and political communication, film, and 1960s revolutionary movements, have set out, first in 2017 in the JAAS and now in 2020 with this publication, to create a body of work that can [End Page 1] be most aptly characterized as PrincEnlighteNmenT: a counterculture, a different way of being, thinking, learning and living. Prince's music encourages us to question the conventional, redefine the firmly established, scoff at the widely accepted, and be unafraid to ignore, if not downright break the rules, as rules are made to be broken. The canon? Rewrite it, but in your own image. Politicians? Stop looking to them for inspiration. The media? Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Way back in 1981 Prince crooned, "I just can't believe all the things people say . . . Controversy . . . am I black or white? . . . am I straight or gay? . . . Controversy . . . do I believe in God? . . . do I believe in me? . . . yeah . . . Controversy." In a world where the majority of us are miseducated and destined to be, in the words of Pink Floyd, "just another brick in the wall," Prince, the oracle, pulled back the veil of ignorance, raised the venetian blinds, and convinced us that there were no such things as dead-ends, blind alleys, or cul-de-sacs. Therefore, when Funkadelic sang "So wiiide, you can't get around iiit, Sooo loow, you can't get under iiit, Get Up, So high, you can't get over iiit," there was a young artist in Minneapolis who, just a few short years later, came at it from a different angle. As far as Prince was concerned, there weren't any obstacles that couldn't be overcome; we are only limited by our imagination. For all of Prince's complexity and depth, for him, it was simple—artistry and life are inextricably linked. His genius was in coaxing his listeners (from the shrinking violet to the tone deaf to the know-it-all) to tap into reservoirs of creativity they never knew they had, to think and...

Cosmopolitan Sounds and Intimate Narratives in P. Ramlee’s Film Music

ABSTRACTThis article illustrates historically, how the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Malay musical practices operated in tandem with the cultural intimacies of vernacular Malay film narratives to express the complex interconnectivities of a fluidly linked and diverse region. The film music icon, P. Ramlee, employed a cosmopolitan approach to making music; merging Anglo-American jazz and Latin American rhythms with regional Malay and Javanese folk music, themes and cultural references. When screened, heard and reproduced in contemporary contexts, such films and music illicit nostalgia for an idealistic era during which the nation was in-the-making. A narrative of pity for P. Ramlee is affectively instrumentalised by the Malaysian state, local cultural producers and multinational corporations; recalling his image and works to appeal to the Malaysian public. An analysis of the film music in Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (1961) directed by P. Ramlee unravels the threads of cosmopolitan musical practices and culturally intimate expressions that challenge the rigid boundaries of the nation-state; expressing a unique inter-regional, multilinguistic and multiethnic collective identity. This paper argues for a conceptual approach that examines the cosmopolitan intimacies of cultural production; revealing the complex cultural, political, national and transnational constestations and connections of a postcolonial Malay world.

Bohemian Rhapsody and the tale of the tragic queen

Freddie Mercury was a singer and music icon whose career encapsulated many of the contradictions central to queer life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Having named his band Queen, he c...