Musical Idiom Research Articles

Turbo-Folk as the Agent of Empire: On Discourses of Identity and Difference in Popular Culture

Turbo-Folk is a cultural phenomenon which finds itself at the crossroads of numerous academic disciplines (from which I indiscriminately borrow for the purposes of this article), including musicology, anthropology, sociology, literary, media and urban studies, political science, history, and philosophy. What makes it such an intriguing object of study, however, is its absence from the maps of official academic “geography”: turbo-folk has no academic history, theory, curricula, conservatories, institutes and archives, museum exhibits or public collections. Although recognized as a highly influential and most widespread cultural model in Serbia, it is persistently kept at the fringes of academic concerns. While exploring the complexities of turbo-folk, I have encountered diverse (and sometimes fascinatingly antithetical) definitions of the phenomenon: a) fake folklore—or, rather, “fakelore”—also labeled as kitsch or schund on the grounds of its utter lack of value, as an arbitrary blend of local (traditional) and global pop music idioms; b) “Anatolian howling,” a derogatory term for the characteristic melismatic singing style associated with the Orient; 1 c) a form of mass culture prevalent in socialist Yugoslavia/post

Moby-Dick by Jake Heggie (review)

Reviewed by: Moby-Dick by Jake Heggie Ryan Ebright Jake Heggie. Moby-Dick. DVD. Patrick Summers / San Francisco Opera. With Jay Hunter Morris, Stephen Costello, Morgan Smith, Jonathan Lemalu, and Talise Trevigne. Directed by Leonard Foglia. Berlin: EuroArts, 2013. 2059658. $24.99. Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, based on Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century epic sea novel of the same name, has achieved significant critical and popular acclaim since its premiere in 2010. Commissioned by the Dallas Opera to commemorate their inaugural season at the new Winspear Opera House, Moby-Dick promises, like Heggie’s earlier opera Dead Man Walking, to remain a staple of the modern repertory, and this video makes it easy to understand why. This production, recorded in San Francisco in 2012 during the final leg of the opera’s initial co-commissioned runs, captures the visual and musical aspects of the opera that made it immediately successful. Despite—or perhaps because of—its immense literary stature and equally daunting length, Moby-Dick has long eluded opera composers (notwithstanding Armando Gentilucci’s 1988 offering). Playwright Terrance McNally, who initially proposed the subject to Heggie but did not continue with the opera, hit upon an ideal solution for adapting the novel to the stage: setting the opera entirely at sea, aboard the whaling ship Pequod. Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer had the additional idea of placing the novel’s famous first line—“Call me Ishmael”—as the opera’s last, therefore situating it as a kind of precursor to the events of the novel and providing them with the freedom to condense and adapt the story as needed. Scheer and Heggie, then, distill the action of the book down to its essentials, foregrounding the conflict between the revenge-driven captain Ahab and his first mate Starbuck, and the blossoming friendship between the exotic harpooner Queequeg and Greenhorn, a new crew member who later assumes the name Ishmael. Heggie’s ability to compose for singers is evident throughout Moby-Dick. The arias, duets, quartets, and choral ensembles are eminently lyrical, suspended over an orchestral [End Page 140] accompaniment firmly rooted in an accessible, neo-tonal harmonic language that occasionally gives hints of Debussy, Britten, Barber, and Glass. Dramatic tenor Jay Hunter Morris brings an appropriate degree of madness and a steely vocal quality to his rendering of Ahab, which contrasts fittingly with Starbuck’s earthy baritone (sung by Morgan Smith). Their Act II duet, “The Symphony,” is one of the stand-out pieces in Moby-Dick, as is the earlier duet between tenor Stephen Costello (Greenhorn) and Jonathan Lemalu (Queequeg) that opens the second act. The initial production of Moby-Dick owes much of its success to the uniformly strong singing, effective dramatic structure, and ear-pleasing musical idiom. Its visual aspect, however, plays an equally important role. The set design and projections infuse Moby-Dick with a bit of high-tech spectacle that gives the opera a cinematic feel, particularly when experienced via DVD. At certain moments, such as the musical interludes, the video projections fill the frame of the screen entirely, making the viewing experience more filmic and less like watching a recording of a theatrical event. Throughout, the camera work is ideal, providing a balance between close-ups, midrange, and wide shots that adapt to the realities of live performance. A second disc includes interviews with Heggie, Scheer, and a number of the performers, as well as a fascinating time-lapse sequence of the San Francisco Opera stage during the twenty-four hours surrounding the opera’s performance. Ryan Ebright University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Copyright © 2014 Music Library Association, Inc.

Stravinsky's Ballets. By Charles M. Joseph * Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. By Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness

Stravinsky's Ballets. By Charles M. Joseph * Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. By Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness

The Musical Faces of Pirate Camp in Hollywood (Part I)

Abstract Traces the evolution of the swashbuckler musical idiom in The Pirates of Penzance and examines some musical faces of pirate camp from the early sound era. In The Pirate, the governing camp sensibility of director Minnelli manages the interplay of multiple camp sensibilities, several specifically musical. The audio and video examples referred to in this article can be found here: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/mmi/media/musical_faces_of_pirate_camp/

Exilic Suffering: Music, Nation, and Protestantism in Cold War South Korea

In Cold War South Korea, the unmarked term “music” (eumak) came to signify Western classical music, and a host of ambiguous terms, including “folk music” (minsogeumak), “traditional music” (jeontongeumak), “indigenous music” (hyangtoeumak), and “national music” (gugak), emerged to categorize traditional practices that were rapidly disappearing from everyday cultural terrain. This West-centric development in musical culture has been euphemistically called “cosmopolitanism,” and in some cases, considered an index of national progress in the “race to modernization.” This paper attempts a critical reckoning of a specifically Cold-War form of cosmopolitanism by examining musicians who were at the center of this mid-century development: Christian Korean composers who left the North to flee the persecution of Christians by communist officials between 1945 (Korea’s independence from Japan) and 1953 (the end of the Korean War). I argue that the exiled composers were strategically positioned to construct secular and sacred music practices that reinforced the official cultural policy of the nascent U.S.-South Korea coalition. This exilic cultural work involved not just reconciling anticommunist nationalism with Western music idioms but also a related project of discouraging alternative conceptions of national (and nationally important) music. I first investigate how Christian exiles became the poetic voice of Cold War official culture through their elevated status in this culture’s institutions and narratives. Secondly, I consider the politics of this official culture, examining the music styles, genres, and compositions that were promoted or repressed. As I will show, Cold War music culture in South Korea was shaped by a confluence of mid-century international and intra-national politics, and Christian exiled composers were situated at the convergence of these mid-century concerns.

A Robust Parser-Interpreter for Jazz Chord Sequences

Hierarchical structure similar to that associated with prosody and syntax in language can be identified in the rhythmic and harmonic progressions that underlie Western tonal music. Analysing such musical structure resembles natural language parsing: it requires the derivation of an underlying interpretation from an unstructured sequence of highly ambiguous elements—in the case of music, the notes. The task here is not merely to decide whether the sequence is grammatical, but rather to decide which among a large number of analyses it has. An analysis of this sort is a part of the cognitive processing performed by listeners familiar with a musical idiom, whether musically trained or not. Our focus is on the analysis of the structure of expectations and resolutions created by harmonic progressions. Building on previous work, we define a theory of tonal harmonic progression, which plays a role analogous to semantics in language. Our parser uses a formal grammar of jazz chord sequences, of a kind widely used for natural language processing (NLP), to map music, in the form of chord sequences used by performers, onto a representation of the structured relationships between chords. It uses statistical modelling techniques used for wide-coverage parsing in NLP to make practical parsing feasible in the face of considerable ambiguity in the grammar. Using machine learning over a small corpus of jazz chord sequences annotated with harmonic analyses, we show that grammar-based musical interpretation using simple statistical parsing models is more accurate than a baseline HMM. The experiment demonstrates that statistical techniques adapted from NLP can be profitably applied to the analysis of harmonic structure.

Post-War Trauma and Postmodern Love

What biblical critical insights might re-reading the Song of Songs through its contemporary musical afterlives produce? I propose that certain offbeat musical settings of the Song participate in the discursive composition of specifically postmodern versions of love (e.g. those of Berlant, Belsey, Illouz), and thereby disrupt the transmission of normalizing socio-romantic energies within what Lauren Berlant calls “the intimate public sphere.” In this intertextual case study, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1925Flos campi– a work usually praised for its harmonious reconciliation of sensual and spiritual musical moods and idioms – becomes a dystopic allegory of postmodern love. Gestating during WWI as Vaughan Williams served in France and Greece, then composed during a post-war decade of collective disenchantment with the Great War’s socio-political balance sheet,Flos campiconstitutes an ambivalent response to both the composer’s individual as well as a more collective experience of national post-war trauma. With help from Roland Boer’s Lacanian reading of the Song (2000), I locate this ambivalence in the composer’s enigmatic treatment of musical pastoralisms and modal-tonal harmonies as well as his expressive deployment of formal, motivic, and thematic repetition. The dissonant erotic semiotics that these techniques produce inFlos campican be enlisted today to challenge religio-rhetorical co-optations of the Song to bolster heteronormative institutions of love, sexuality, marriage and family by way of the Song’s supposedly timeless message that “Love Conquers All.” Correlatively, readingFlos campias a product of post-war trauma and an allegory of postmodern love invites biblical critics to hear the text’s pastoralisms with fresh “ears.”

창극 <메디아>의 절충주의 음악어법

작곡가 황호준은 창극 <메디아>를 통하여 ▲작창의 오선 기보 및 모음보표의 배치 ▲성-쓰루(Sung-through) 형식의 도입 ▲다양한 독창 선율의 시도 ▲코러스장과 남녀 코러스에 의한 도창의 극대화 ▲불협화음과 협화음을 통한 긴장과 이완의 추구 ▲전조와 차용화음에 의한 길바꿈 효과 달성 등의 절충주의 음악어법을 선보였다. 기악부는 창자(唱者)의 소리를 방해하지 않는 수성반주를 하였다. 창자가 이면(裏面)을 그리는 방식 또한 노래 아니리 발림 중 노래에 치중하였고, 극 전체를 하나의 음악으로 이끄는 성-쓰루 형식을 도입하였다. 자주 통곡 한탄 환호 조소 비명 등과 같은 구음(口音)이 활용되었고, 분창(分唱)의 형식답게 배역의 성격에 따라 다양한 독창 선율이 효과적으로 시도되었다. 불협화음과 협화음이 극의 전개와 분위기에 따라 적합하게 사용되었다. 그리고 전통적인 조바꿈을 하지 않고, 서양음악의 전조와 차용화음을 과감하게 시도하여 길바꿈의 효과를 무난히 달성하였다. Through Korean traditional opera (changgeuk) Medea, composer Hwang Ho-jun showed eclectic music idiom by 1) writing music (jakchang) on manuscript paper and score, 2) introducing the "song-through" format, 3) including various solo melodies, 4) maximizing the effect created by a singing narrator (dochang) with the chorus master and a mixed chorus, 5) seeking an interplay of tension and release by using both discord and chord, 6) achieving the effect of kil-bakkum, the Korean traditional method of modulation, through modulation and borrowed chord of Western music. In Medea, instrumentalists adopted suseong-banju (Korean traditional accompaniment) which does not spoil the voice of singers. Hwang adopted song for the way how singers express various hidden sides of play among song, aniri (narration) and balim (gesture) and introduced the Sung-through format in which the play is comprised entirely of song. In Medea, oral sounds expressing wail, lament, cheer, sneer and scream are often used and various solo melodies appear that fit for personalities of characters, clearly showing what bunchang (singers' singing songs divided according to characters) is all about. And discord and chord are effectively used according to the development and mood of play. Hwang also achieved successfully the effect of kil-bakkum by abandoning the traditional modulation method and boldly introducing modulation and borrowed chord of Western music.

Composing with Types and Flexible Modules

Creator of more than one hundred film scores, John Williams is one of the world’s most successful film composers. In his long career, Williams (b. 1932) has written music for practically every genre from science fiction to comedy. The question arises: how does he create his highly differentiated scores so quickly? One answer lies in his componential system of riffs and motifs he develops like building blocks—basic patterns that are varied and adapted from film to film, depending upon the specific situation at hand. These building blocks can be traced back to musical idioms originally formed in the nineteenth century, subsequently adapted for silent films and then for talkies.

Music Theory Through the Lens of Film

The encounter of a musical repertoire with a theoretical system benefits the latter even as it serves the former. A robustly applied theoretic apparatus hones our appreciation of a given corpus, especially one such as film music, for which comparatively little analytical attention has been devoted. Just as true, if less frequently offered as an motivator for analysis, is the way in which the chosen music theoretical system stands to see its underlying assumptions clarified and its practical resources enhanced by such contact. The innate programmaticism and aesthetic immediacy of film music makes it especially suited to enrich a number of theoretical practices. A habit particularly ripe for this exposure is tonal hermeneutics: the process of interpreting music through its harmonic relationships. Interpreting cinema through harmony not only sharpens our understanding of various film music idioms, but considerably refines the critical machinery behind its analysis. The theoretical approach focused on here is transformation theory, a system devised for analysis of art music (particularly from the 19th Century) but nevertheless eminently suited for film music. By attending to the perceptually salient changes, rather than static objects, of musical discourse, transformation theory avoids some of the bugbears of conventional tonal hermeneutics for film (such as the tyranny of the “15 second rule”) while remaining exceptionally well-calibrated towards musical structure and detail. By examining a handful of passages from films with chromatically convoluted scores—Raiders of the Lost Ark, King Kong, and A Beautiful Mind—I reveal some of the conceptual assumptions of transformational theory while simultaneously interpreting the scenes and films that these cues occupy. Ultimately, it is the notion of “transformation” itself—as a theoretical keystone, an analytical stance, and an immanent quality of music—that is most elucidated through this approach.

Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom by John Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness (review)

REVIEWS 889 Naroditskaya deftly shifts the focus of attention to a new and unexpected field. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage provokes as much as it illuminates; its confident and successful fusion of methodologies borrowed from literary criticism, musical analysis, historical reconstruction and gender studies means that it repays repeated rereading from a number of different perspectives and should be of considerable interest to scholars working in all of the above fields. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness, John. Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. Music since 1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012. xi + 324 pp. Tables. Figures. Music examples. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £60.00: $99.00. This is a useful book. It complements Pieter van den Toorn’s The Rite of Spring (Berkeley, CA, 1987) with two long chapters each on Les Noces and Renard, and one on Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There is a wealth of forensic detail about familiar van den Toornian topics like the octatonic scale or referential collection, in particular the interaction between octatonic and diatonic collections; rhythm and meter, in particular metric displacement; the construction of ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ readings of listening (p. 20 n. 29); and the relationship between borrowed folk melodies and Stravinskii’s own ‘powers of fabrication’ (p. 120). The book is vintage van den Toorn: slow to read but rewarding if one perseveres and acclimatizes oneself to the style. One finishes it having survived ‘octatonic fever’ (p. 167), though there is an introduction to the topic in chapter two. There are perceptive insights into the structure of the infamous bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring (pp. 132–33); the interval patterning in Les Noces, which was loosely modelled on the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral as transcribed in a sketch (p. 69 n. 51, ex. 3.5); and the use of neo-Riemannian theory to produce Tonnetz graphs of pitch space in Les Noces and Renard (pp. 141–47, 216–20) — a brilliant idea deserving more work. As with van den Toorn’s earlier writings, the underlying ideology is that aesthetic ‘Immediacy and the world of reflection and analysis are complementary, of course, symbiotic as an ideal’ (p. 302). The ‘complexity of the invention’ (p. 172) remains a marker of value, and more complex musical textures attract more hyperbolic analytical writing. It is also unsurprising that, despite eclectic references to music psychology, listening is still configured as ‘reading’ (e.g. p. 278), and that van den Toorn and McGinness make extensive assumptions about what the listener sees in the score while listening. This is less a Freudian slip than an acknowledged axiom — theirs is a particular type SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 890 of listener. This said, while citing Dahlhaus is hardly empirical proof of the listening process (p. 133), the references to music psychology are welcome, for they open suggestive avenues for further inquiry (Stravinskii is rarely used in empirical studies, no doubt for the reasons discussed in chapter ten). One subject broached by van den Toorn and McGinness is that of upbeats. This runs throughout the book but is only properly thematized when mentioningKeller’scritiqueofStravinskii(pp.249,299–301).Inseveralrespects Stravinskii’s (re-)introduction of real upbeats into his music during the 1920s (the Serenade in A was the turning point) was his other ‘rejoicing discovery’ (p. 173), and a major factor in the development of his mature Neoclassicism. In the earlier music considered by van den Toorn and McGinness, the upbeat had a more radical function: ‘In a giant form of displacement, upbeat figures identified with development and forward movement were shifted to the downbeat’ (p. 249). The final two chapters are on ‘Issues of Performance Practice and Aesthetic Belief’ and ‘Stravinsky and His Critics’. The argument in chapter nine is in essence a simple reversal of the convention that Stravinskii’s formalist aesthetics and strictures about performance directed his musical language. Rather, say van den Toorn and McGinness, ‘Stravinsky’s formalism and performance directives have been viewed here as a logical outgrowth of those processes, above all of processes of displacement, juxtaposition, and...

New Zealand Glimpsed through Iceland: Music, Place and Psychogeography

Psychogeography has been applied to music in relation to the way in which music can express both a ’spirit of place’ and a topographical dimension in which musical forms, idioms and modes of expression mirror features of landscape and cityscape. This article explores analogous geomorphic aspects of Icelandic and New Zealand music, both emphasizing the two countries’ similar geographical features and the ways in which music has reflected them, as well as examining geopolitical affinities between the two countries.

The sound of Broadway’s mean streets: Setting New York City’s ‘edge’ in show songs

Abstract Broadway has historically played directly to its home crowd of New Yorkers and suburbanites, providing musical stylizations that would gratify or (sometimes) challenge that audience. Thus, even for its more remote or exotic settings, Broadway has honoured audience expectations more than historical or ethnographic accuracy. But Broadway has also provided local audiences with a different kind of mirror, reflecting their native city more directly and often aiming more to disquiet than to gratify. This study considers some of these more troubling musical cityscapes across the end of the ‘golden age’ and beyond, including the comic underworld of Guys and Dolls (1950), the upbeat cynicism of Wonderful Town (1953), the playful angst of Saturday Night (1954), the incipient violence of West Side Story (1957), the sleazy underside of Gypsy (1959), the street-savvy innocence of Sweet Charity (1965), and the alienated sophistications of Company (1970) and Follies (1971). After sketching the trajectory of these diverse representations, involving five composers and an array of perspectives and moods, I focus particularly on the scores of West Side Story and Company to show how their edgy critiques inspired their composers, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, to explore similarly edgy musical idioms that blend familiar Broadway musical practices with an assortment of musical modernisms.

Beyond the badass: Electronic Dance Music meets film music practice

Perhaps the most recent resource made available to film music is the popular musical idiom and practice known as Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Three typical categories of interaction and influence can be traced out: non-EDM practitioner film composers who make use of the EDM idiom in their scores, the EDM practitioner as composer, and the use of pre-existing EDM tracks. Little scholarly attention has been given to an analysis of the way these three categories of EDM interaction play out in films, particularly in terms of the formal construction of the music and the diverse functions they serve in the film. Relying on close formal analysis of multiple films and the work of music theorist Mark J. Butler, this paper identifies a key set of EDM practices incorporated into film music practice: sampling, beat manipulation, and layering and looping. This paper also argues that the use of EDM goes beyond simply signaling excitement or connoting ‘the badass’. Instead, EDM practices have been combined in numerous permutations and placed into multiple and distinct relationships with other aspects of films' soundtracks and visual tracks, in the service of a wide range of nuanced functions.

The Future of Music Education

Professional discussion of curricular change and innovation is essential for maintaining and increasing the positive effects that music education can have on schoolchildren. Much recent discourse about curricular change has focused on critiques of the traditional large-ensemble model of music education, technological innovation applied to teaching music, and the incorporation of popular music idioms. I propose counterpoints to these commonly discussed topics and offer suggestions for redirecting advocacy efforts and for reconsidering dispositions toward large-ensemble instruction. Rather than discard the current curricular models as inadequate, we can exercise patience and reflect while building on what currently exists.

From Art as Stained Glass to Art as Mirror: Addressing a Holistic View of Education

In college I majored in piano performance and music education. I often practiced for long hours—sometimes from morning till midnight—to prepare for exams, juries, and occasional public performances. Upon graduation I taught piano to many students privately and publicly. Piano has always been closely linked to my identity as a musician and teacher. During my graduate studies, however, I was introduced the concept of bimusicality in ethnomusicology (Hood, 1971). Akin to second language acquisition, bimusicality refers to the mastery of a musical idiom other than that associated with one's own culture. Applied in music education, it suggests that music teachers should be acquainted with multiple musical idioms as a prerequisite for licensure.

Negotiating ‘His Master’s Voice’: Gramophone Music and Cosmopolitan Modernity in British Malaya in the 1930s and Early 1940s

AbstractThe label ‘His Master’s Voice’ (HMV) dominated the recording technology, production and distribution of 78 rpm discs in British Malaya in the 1930s and early 1940s. By analysing thelagu Melayuwhich formed a large part of the repertoire recorded by HMV, this article shows that musicians were able to decentre colonial hegemony by combining Anglo-American popular music idioms with Malay and other foreign musical elements. The new hybrid music with texts about progress was a vehicle for disseminating a form of national culturalism that advocated vernacular modernity, rooted cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, and a broader sense of Malayness.

Rhythms of Culture: Djembe and African Memory in African-American Cultural Traditions

An intriguing cultural phenomenon has been developing over the past forty years in dance studios and festivals in the United States and abroad: traditional African culture is being diffused through formal and informal instruction in the African arts. Among the most notable of the cultural arts being taught are drum and dance traditions. Because of the efforts of Africans who have migrated to other countries and the work of their students, the djembe drum has grown from relatively obscure origins (among the Mandingue people of West Africa) to become the most popular African drum of thousands worldwide (Charry 2000). (Master drummer Mamady Keita estimated that just a thousand but a million people listened to his teaching regarding the djembe [Keita 2011]). This phenomenon has not only exposed non-African populations to traditional African cultural practices, it has also become a vehicle by which people of African descent have reconnected with African roots--values of ancestors from which there has been significant separation due to the transatlantic slave trade. In the United States, few African Americans are aware of the extent to which they participate in the stream of African culture. However, through African-American musical forms, African musical idioms have become dominant in world music (Chernoff 1985,3). African Americans have taken a leading role in establishing African cultural influences in the world. One reason for this is that many musical realizations contain elements that are directly related to African cultural practices. In addition, many connections with core values of the culture were established through early involvement with movements that emphasized African drum and dance in the United States. By examining certain developments in African-American music with an emphasis on African drumming (and an added emphasis on the djembe), I will substantiate some of the recognized connections between African and African-American musical practices. My perspective will be that of a cultural anthropologist who studies the cultural products of the African Diaspora and who is also a practitioner--one who has performed as a drummer for the better part of her life, with experiences ranging from playing drum set (gospel, jazz, and reggae) to intense studies with a renowned master drummer from the Malinke tradition. This perspective has informed my readings of African cultural continuities in significant ways. The History and Location of Mandingue Djembe and Dunun Drumming Traditions In West Africa, the contemporary center of the djembe and dunun (three bass drum) orchestra runs along the upper Niger River from Faranah, Guinea, to Segou, Mali, with extensions stretching east into Burkina Faso; south into Cote D'Ivoire, southwest into Conakry, Guinea; and west toward the Malian cities of Kita and Kayes (Charry 2000,214). The primary urban centers of djembe drumming are the capital cities of Guinea (Conakry) and Mali (Bamako); however, one also finds djembe orchestras in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Dakar, Senegal (Charry 2000, 214). The djembe is associated with a large ethnic group collectively known as the Malinke or Mandingue. This ethnic group migrated throughout a large region of West Africa associated with the old Mali Empire, a kingdom bordering the Sahara desert in the northwest region of Africa that reached the apex of its development between 1300 and 1500. Although I focus on the djembe/dunun orchestra, it is noted that Mandingue musical culture incorporates a variety of musical instruments that have also been influential in the spread of African music in the West. These instruments include the krin (a tuned wood drum), the balafon (an African predecessor to the marimba or xylophone), flutes, and horns. Also included are a rich variety of stringed instruments such as the harp-like kora (a twenty-one stringed harplute), the bolon (a three-stringed instrument connected to a gourd drum), the ngoni (a purported ancestor of the African-American banjo), and a variety of other instruments (Charry 2000, 10; Allen 2011). …

Wedding songs’ melodic models of eastern Sumadija and Pomoravlje regions: A contribution to Serbian vocal dialects and identity studies

Extremely complex picture of Sumadija region musical tradition(s) could be explained not only as the result of long-lasting encounters and overlapping of different inhabitants? groups, but also by the fact that in this region even three dialects of Serbian language meet. Moreover, there is a basis for an assumption it is about cultural dialects in wider sense, comprising musical culture as well. Structural-typological analyses of wedding melodic models (glasovi) and identifying of their morphological dominants (term coined by V. Maciewskii) provided the basis for comparative insight in the elements of vocal tradition in the area in focus ? on the first place within wedding genre, but within other genres as well. The cartography technique, applied in melogeographic researches (Goshovskii), provides insight in certain musical phenomena in their territorial dissemination, so that the regularities that could be in direct connection to dialectal features of traditional culture could be seen. The paper is about geographical and cultural space intersected by folklore dialectal borders, and thus it is also the region where the transitory areas between the consistent cultural spaces are placed. This situation has been explained and illustrated through the application of ?fuzzy? concept. Musical material from this region and its elements geographic distribution shows it could be about the ?fuzzy? border between two cultural and vocal dialects. This paper could be the basis for future research and analyses, including more data from this and surrounding regions, primarily in the East, South and Southeast, which would lead to the differentiating of the musical idiom that characterizes great part of central, Eastern, Southern and Southeastern Serbia.

The Political Resonance of Nixon in China

Contemporary hopes for China’s peaceful rise, the continuing global reverberations of the end of the Cold War, and, most importantly for an opera crafted in a distinctly American musical idiom, profound questions concerning the systemic power and role of the United States – all help Nixon in China draw an expanding audience. That the opera has entered the canon is partly because the complexity of Nixon’s character suggests the insecurity of global political leadership in our own day. Understanding the context within which it was first created may be useful, but the opera’s broader themes resonate more deeply with the human experience in a rapidly changing world.