Musical Innovation Research Articles

Unifying stylistic syntheses in the late compositions (1939–1945) of Béla Bartók

Bartók’s later works from the years 1939–1945 present an impressive synthesis of his musical innovations. Beginning with the Divertimento and Sixth String Quartet (both composed in 1939), the Hungarian composer starts with a freely tonal, neo-Classical foundation. Above this initial compositional level he then superimposes Beethovenian formal structures gleaned from the latter’s opp. 53 and 135, in addition to a prominent Stravinsky quotation from The Rite of Spring, part two. In both works Bartók achieves an impressive large-scale cyclical unity, frequently through wholetone scalar integration. The Concerto for Orchestra (1943) blends pervasive quotation techniques with analogous cyclical intervallic patterns, such as major third cells on F–A–D4. One is again distinctly reminded of the F Major Divertimento. Like the latter work, the Concerto is especially notable for its expansive codas, which function in the manner of Beethovenian second developments. Similarly, the Sonata for Solo Violin (1944) fuses neo-Bachian counterpoint with the expansive forms of the Concerto for Orchestra. Finally, the interrelated last two Concertos for piano and viola (both penned in 1945) present a cumulative synthesis of Bartókʼs later style, emphasizing the tertial (and modal) degrees of VI and flattened VI. Here, too, we encounter elaborate quotational systems that distantly recall the 1910s and 1920s music of French composers as Debussy, Ravel and Satie.

Dizzy à la Mimi: Jazz, Text, and Translation

AbstractThis article addresses issues of translation and transnational exchange, taking as a case study the two-pronged collaborative relationship between the French jazz singer, lyricist, and translator Mimi Perrin (1926–2010) and the African American trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), whose memoir Perrin translated into French and with whom she collaborated on a 1963 jazz album. Perrin, who is the article's principal focus, founded the successful vocalese singing group Les Double Six in 1959 and then, after abandoning her musical career for health reasons in 1966, forged a new career as a literary translator. The article begins by examining her work as a translator of African American literature and demonstrates that her French edition of Gillespie's autobiography lacks some of the original's connotative cultural signification, in particular meanings conveyed through the book's use of black dialect. The article then turns to Perrin's work as a vocalese lyricist, which is notable in that she conceived of her lyricization of jazz improvisations as a sort of translation process, one that involved carefully selecting words in order to mimic the sounds of musical instruments. Her musical innovations are exemplified by a series of original French texts, set to Gillespie's music, on science fiction themes.

Modernism and Opera ed. by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith

Reviewed by: Modernism and Opera ed. by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith Allan Hepburn Modernism and Opera. Edited by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 378. $45.00 (cloth). Modernism and Opera should be required reading for every scholar of modernism. Finely edited and persuasively introduced by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith, this superb collection of twelve essays offers lucid, thought-provoking insights on modernism as an intermedial and interdisciplinary practice. Various aspects of modernism are taken up by the contributors, with the result that "modernism" emerges as a complex, plural, and adaptable concept. The essays, arranged chronologically, brim with pertinent historical information. National operatic traditions—Czech, German, French, British, Finnish—are handled with scholarly care. All the essays in Modernism and Opera elaborate the meaning of "modernism" as it takes up different operatic instantiations from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century. As Begam and Smith state in their Introduction, collaboration "across the arts—indeed across the media of language, music, and visual representation—played a decisive role in the definition and development of modernism" (3). The essays in Modernism and Opera work out the implications of this statement. In his essay on Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1878), Smith argues that a gestural vocabulary, in which on-stage singing bodies are increasingly detached from abstract consciousness, inaugurates a discourse that "will become central to the development of theatrical modernism, taken up and transformed by [August] Strindberg and thereafter by [Frank] Wedekind and the artists of the expressionist stage" (33). In other words, Wagner cannot be ignored by theater historians or by modernists of whatever stripe: he makes a central contribution to concepts of modernist selfhood. Wagner casts a long shadow over both opera and modernity. In his discussion of Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron, Begam speculates on the possibilities of reconciling Schoenberg's [End Page 414] musical modernism with his Jewishness in light of the Nazi stigmatization of so-called "degenerate" art and Wagner's infamous, anti-Semitic essay, "Judaism in Music" (1850; revised 1869). As Begam demonstrates with well-chosen musical examples, Schoenberg ironically cites Wagner's leitmotifs to reconfigure their meaning. Bryan Gilliam defines a post-Wagnerian, "third-way modernism" based on aesthetic content rather than musical innovation; as one example of this practice, Richard Strauss rejects nineteenth-century idealism for "the seemingly ordinary and everyday aspects of modern life" (131). In her revealing analysis of Béla Bartók's opera, Bluebeard's Castle (1911), Klára Móricz picks up on the gender implications of Wagner's histrionic female characters. Comparisons between the two composers "not only show Bartók's debt to nineteenth-century Romantic paradigms, but also reveal the modernist transformation of woman from Wagner's redeeming female into Bartók's paradigmatic fin-de-siècle femme fatale" (103). Wagner also influenced ideas of temporality in music. Claude Debussy's enthusiasm for Wagner in Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) was tempered by French hostility to all things German after the Franco-Prussian War. Debussy, working from Maurice Maeterlinck's eventless play of the same name, creates static tableaux, in which the explicit subject of the opera is stillness. The atmosphere of this symbolist opera is dream-like, in the manner of a painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes or Odilon Redon. In Debussy's score, time almost stands still. In one passage from Pelléas et Mélisande, Daniel Albright hears an English horn that "quietly, insistently traces a four-note figure that becomes a kind of soft clock, a drift of sand through an hourglass, as if the castle's stones were making a faint sound of crumbling" (93). Other composers and librettists follow through on Debussy's slowing down of operatic temporality. Gertrude Stein conceived the libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts as a suite of motionless tableaux. As Cyrena N. Pondrom notes, "When [Stein] turned to a play (or libretto), she sought to generate a 'landscape,' which she believed should simply be 'there,' a performance without chronological progression, having existence in the present moment" (250). Pondrom, quite rightly, identifies Virgil Thomson's...

L’avant-garde musicale russe (1914­1921) : vers une révolution politique ?

Organized in the context of centennial celebrations of the 1917 Revolutions , the titled “ About 1917 : Russia , from Wars to Revolutions ” endeavored to into question the specificity of the 1914­1921 period . The artistic and musical has been shaken up by the historical events of 1917 . To what extent can we about a musical revolution ? How about the Russian musical avant­garde ? The Russian musical avant­garde of the 1910 ’ s and 1920 ’ s gathers various movements whose goals and esthetical principles subtly differed from one . Thus , it would be misleading to talk about a single “ Russian school ”. Avraamov ’ s constructivism is next to Georgi Rimski­Korsakov ’ s microtonal ; Ivan Vyshnegradski is close to Nikolaj Roslavets ’ s , Arthur Lourié ’ s and Golyshev ’ s atonal opuses , or the Theremin . Some of those musicians left after the Revolutions and went on working on their musical innovations in other countries (Vyshnegradski , Obukhov and Lourié in France ; Lourié and in the United States ). Some other remained in Russia (Roslavets , ) and ended up playing key roles in the musical life of the country . The event of that generation of composers lays in the quest of a filiation with aesthetics of Scriabin , who died suddenly in 1915 and who appears as a real as well as philosophical model . Numerous composers will claim his by seeking an echo of the resonances issued by the Scriabin ’ s harmonical in his last opuses . Through the study of three composers – Lourié , and Roslavets –, we will look into the various and many forms of the musical avant­garde , as well as the way it was intertwined with the political of 1917 .

Traditional Musician in the Nowadays Lithuanian Village or Small Town’s Community

Folk musicians belonging to the older generations and playing various instruments have been subject to rather exhaustive research in Lithuania since the end of the 20th century until the present. Various aspects of their music making, including the repertoire, changes in the style of their performance, the musician’s image, role and place in the community have also received considerable attention. However, traditional musicians belonging to the younger generation and their music making have scarcely fallen into the focus of study so far. The modern ethnomusicologists researching and appreciating the traditional music making devote considerable attention to the perspectives of the musicians and their surrounding community. Such a two-fold research, taking into consideration both the musician’s and the community’s approach, enables evaluating the general situation of the traditional instrumental and vocal instrumental music making in the community. By comparing the expressed views of the Lithuanian traditional musicians belonging to the younger generation and the perspectives of the surrounding community, the author of the article attempts establishing the kind of musicians that is in demand in the Lithuanian villages and small towns of the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st century. The author of the article combines qualitative research (the in-depth partly structured multiple interviews) with documentary and biographical methods.According to the analysis, not only the roles of the traditional musician and the community, but also their mutual relationship has suffered considerable shifts in the nowadays culture. The functions of the musician as bearer, promoter and reviver of the tradition have become much more prominent. By adapting to the altering wedding traditions, the musician does not decline performing not only the functions of the former main participants of the wedding, but also those of the presenter of the whole event. The individual musical faculties and skills do not bear such importance in the eyes of the community members, as they do to the musicians themselves. The community mostly appreciates the universal capacities of the traditional musician, also ascribing importance to his tight relationship with the local traditions. The latter quality is important to the musicians as well; it includes the inherent feeling of the local music and its appreciation (from instrumentation and familiarity with the traditional local repertoire, to the live music making, and to the knowledge of customs and rituals, which are particularly important during various festive events and weddings). Since the tradition of the ritual communal singing is increasingly in decline, the capacity of the musicians to sing well and to start the appropriate songs as means of preserving and supporting this tradition is especially meaningful. It is safe to maintain that traditional musicians are currently people sensitively reacting to the changes in the traditional musical culture and actively participating in the local musical life until nowadays. To the contrary, rejection of the musical innovations renders the traditional musician incapable of competing with the requirements of the modern musical market. In such case, the musician may even have to stop playing and surrender his place to the professional or semi-professional wedding musicians with virtually no knowledge of the local musical customs, or even to the sound recordings.

Persepsies oor die sinodebesluite en aard van die psalms binne die GKSA

Perceptions regarding synod decisions and the nature of psalms in the RCSA. Since its inception in 1859, the Reformed Church in South Africa has been singing only psalms, scriptural hymns and Biblical songs. Currently, there are two official versifications of the psalms in use within the Reformed Church, namely the so-called Totius versification of 1936 and the 2001 rhymed version of psalm texts, mainly by T.T. Cloete. A study of members’ perceptions of synod decisions and the nature of the psalms in the Reformed Church shows that the psalms are not fully utilised. Synods decide what type of songs, type of songs, including psalms, are approved, are approved for use. Members believe that many psalms are no longer suitable for the 21st-century churchgoer, that synod decisions appear to be out of touch with members’ musical needs and that synods oppose musical innovation. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of ministers, organists/music leaders and parishioners’ perceptions regarding the nature and use of psalms during worship in the Reformed Church of South Africa as well as synod decisions pertaining to the psalms. Die Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika sing vanaf die kerk se ontstaan in 1859 slegs psalms, Skrifberymings en Skrifgetroue liedere. Tans is daar twee amptelike psalmberymings in gebruik binne die Gereformeerde Kerk, naamlik die sogenaamde Totius-beryming van 1936, asook die 2001-omdigting met psalmtekste deur hoofsaaklik T.T. Cloete. ’n Studie van lidmate se persepsies oor sinodebesluite en die aard van die psalms binne die Gereformeerde Kerk toon aan dat die psalms nie optimaal benut word nie. Sinodes besluit watter tipe liedere, insluitend psalms, vir gebruik goedgekeur word. Lidmate glo dat talle psalms nie meer geskik is vir die 21ste-eeuse lidmaat nie, dat sinodebesluite uit voeling is met lidmate se musikale behoeftes en dat sinodes musikale vernuwing teenwerk. Die doel van hierdie artikel is om ’n oorsig te gee van die persepsies van predikante, orreliste/musiekleiers en gemeentelede met betrekking tot die aard en gebruik van die psalms binne die erediens van die Gereformeerde Kerke van Suid-Afrika, asook sinodebesluite wat hiermee verband hou.

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea

Light rhythms and heavy spirits: entertaining listeners through gnawa musical and ritual adaptations in Morocco

ABSTRACTMoroccan musicians conflate sacred and popular sounds within diverse and malleable rituals across the country. Their efforts are aimed at negotiating and appeasing their various audiences: clients in need of healing, family and friends looking for an evening of entertainment, and spirits building relationships with possessed bodies. Drawing on ethnographic research from Fez, Meknes and Sidi ʿAli, I show how gnawa musicians blend the boundaries between ritual and entertainment through musical innovation. Often at the behest of audiences, they perform a contemporary version of the ritual repertoire, adapt dance music rhythms into the ceremony’s music and highlight the presence of spirits that are adopted by the gnawa from other traditions. These changes demonstrate pragmatism within ritual that counters common understandings of authentic spiritual practice, blurring lines between religious and secular experience. Professional ritual musicians navigate audience expectations within a contemporary possession healing ritual by adapting their practice, subtly and overtly manipulating the event itself. The resulting innovations illuminate the nexus of listener taste and performer creativity as it influences even the most allegedly conservative musical and religious settings. They show performers reaching out to changing audiences and redefining authentic performance practice within the ritual.

Power, agency, deference and difference Examining the politics of composer–performer relationships in the wake of recent innovations

With a view to uncovering the political implications of notational, technological and musical innovation in composer–performer relationships within Western art music, this paper examines three disparate works: Christian Wolff’s Duo for Pianists II (1958); Brian Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule (1975); and Georg Hajdu’s Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). By first exploring two innovative 20th century works, Duo for Pianists II and Unity Capsule, the paper establishes a framework for a discussion of the political and ethical dimensions of composer–performer relationships in relation to the 21st century innovation manifest in Schwer… unheimlich Schwer (2009). This multidimensional examination draws on Warren’s (2014) examination of the relationships between ethics and music, Godlovitch’s (1998) philosophy of performance, and research carried out by practitioners such as Couroux (2002), Schick (2006) and Eigenfeldt (2011; 2014). The paper concludes that all three pieces demonstrate the potential for notation to have strong political implications, and that composers are ultimately responsible for the political implications of the performance experience.

On the Recent Diversification of Bāul-Fakir Musical Repertoire in West Bengal: Spiritual Music in a Crowded Marketplace

In recent years, Bengali Bāul-Fakir music has become popular among affluent, educated Bengalis. Increased commercial demand, professional competition among performers, and the availability of inexpensive audio recordings have sparked a marked diversification of individual Bāul-Fakirs’ musical repertoires. I illustrate this diversity through detailed transcriptions and discuss other recent innovations, including the use of large performance ensembles, the use of “modern” instrumentation, and the blending of melodic elements from East Bengal with rhythmic elements from West Bengal. More broadly, I suggest that the commodification of a spiritual music can serve as a catalyst for musical innovation, and I provide ethnographic evidence suggesting that such innovations need not threaten the efficacy of the music in spiritual settings.

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea

“A Disturbing Lack of Musical and Stylistic Continuity”? Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, and Musical Borrowing

Elliott and Charles Ives shared complex personal and professional relationship. Ives supported Carter's musical pursuits as young man and remained guiding influence throughout his career. As Jan Swafford writes, however, Carter, whose mature music would owe great deal to Ives ... would pay back his mentor with baffling mixture of admiration, advocacy, and cold repudiation (Swafford 1998: 334). Although he eventually softened his early criticism of Ives and acknowledged his musical debts, was consistently puzzled by the stress in Ives's music on musical borrowing--i.e., the procedures by which composer includes material from or refers to pre-existing musical pieces in the context of an original work. (1) As put it, Ives's reliance on quotations accounted for a disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity (Perlis 1974: 145). On another occasion, described Ives's inclusion of popular songs and hymns as constantly (Edwards 1971: 63). (2) In view of these and numerous other statements, it is equally perplexing that borrows from Ives's music on several occasions, most overtly in his 2001 Figment No. 2 (RememberingMr. Ives) for solo cello. This composition contains literal snippets and gestures from, as well as stylistic allusions to, two Ives pieces: the Concord Sonata and Hallowe'en. In what follows, I explore the ways in which borrows from Ives both literally and figuratively; how he incorporates those quotations into his music; and how he evokes Ives's memory and musical style in several works. Along the way, I illuminate some contradictions of Carter's aesthetic stance and connect them to broader problematics in late twentieth-century modernism. The Quotation Problem In nearly all of his writings on Ives, acknowledges and admires Ives's musical innovations, particularly those in rhythm and temporality. For example, in 1973 letter to John Kirkpatrick, observes: What is interesting about Ives, today, are the many different procedures he thought up, so it seems, to produce his polyrhythmic and dissonant (quoted in Meyer and Shreffler 2008: 210). Several scholars have previously investigated Carter's interest in Ives's abstract compositional techniques. Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler explain that Carter the composer continued to find solutions for the same musical problems that Ives had posed: the combination of different groups of instruments moving at different speeds, new formal concepts, new ways to control the flow of time, and ways of orchestrating so that complex polyphonic could be clearly (6). David Schiff also notes that textures reminiscent of Ives's music can be heard throughout Carter's mature works, in abstract form (Schiff 1983: 35). Considering his admiration for such compositional procedures in Ives's music, it is peculiar that seldom comments on the large body of music Ives composed without any trace of musical borrowing. Many of these pieces such as the piano studies were intended as compositional experiments and show Ives's imagination at its most fertile. In them, he creates and solves particular musical problems of rhythm, pitch, and temporality in smaller settings. (3) In fact, majority of these works would have interested in light of their compositional rigor, but he chose not to comment on them, highlighting instead his disagreements with Ives's music that contains quotations. To take an example of his problematic stance toward quotation in Ives's music, consider what wrote in an essay from 1974: As for myself, I have always been fascinated by the polyrhythmic aspect of Ives's music, as well as its multiple layering, but perplexed at times by the disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity, caused largely by the constant use of musical quotations in many works. To me composer develops his own personal language, suitable to express his field of experience and thought. …

Leopoldstadt, Judenplatz, and Beyond

Discussions of Jews’ relationship to Vienna before 1938 tend to focus on their consumption of Viennese culture, including music, art, literature, and intellectual innovation. However, understanding place as a formative aspect of material culture can help us see another crucial aspect of how Jews—individually and collectively—came to terms with their place in the city. This essay examines the significance of place for Jews in Vienna through a variety of primary sources related to the Judenplatz, the square which is today the city’s premier site of Jewish memory, and Leopoldstadt, the district that encompasses Vienna’s most densely populated Jewish residential area. Memoirs, newspaper articles, caricatures, and maps written by both Jews and non-Jews reveal how the significance of these two areas changed over time, as they became deeply intertwined with the self-perceptions of both Jews and non-Jews. Analyzing how the Judenplatz and Leopoldstadt engaged Jewish difference over time helps us understand how the presence or absence of Jews remained a persistent dialectic in determining the meaning of place in Vienna.

Listening to Intergalactic Sounds – Articulation of Rastafarian Livity in Finnish Roots Reggae Sound System Performances

Rastafari is an Afro-Jamaican religious and social movement, which has since the 1970s spread outside of the Caribbean mainly through reggae music. This paper contributes to the academic discussion on the localization processes of Rastafari and reggae with an ethnographic account from the Nordic context, asking how Finnish reggae artists with Rastafarian conviction mobilize this identification in their performance. The paper focuses on one prominent Finnish reggae sound system group, Intergalaktik Sound.The author sees reggae in Finland as divided between contemporary musical innovation and the preservation of musical tradition. In this field, Intergalaktik Sound attempts to preserve what they consider to be the traditional Jamaican form of reggae sound system performance. For the Intergalaktik Sound vocalists, this specific form of performance becomes an enchanted space within a secular Finnish society, where otherwise marginal Rastafarian convictions can be acted out in public. The author connects the aesthetic of this performance to the Jamaican dub-music tradition, and to the concept of a ‘natural life’, which is a central spiritual concept for many Finnish Rastafarians. The article concludes that these sound system performances constitute a polycentric site where events can be experienced and articulated simultaneously as religious and secular by different individuals in the same space.

Versions, Dubs and Riddims: Dub and the Transient Dynamics of Jamaican Music

Dub emerged in Jamaica in the early 1970s, and, for a decade, it became a prolific and intensely innovative dimension of Jamaican popular music. Yet, during the mid-1980s, while dub flourished at the international level, influencing popular music in general, the genre of dub declined in popularity in Jamaica. How could this musical innovation, so evidently associated with Jamaica, expand and develop internationally while at the same time decline in Jamaica itself? In this paper, I explore the modalities and evolution of Jamaican music production and consumption. Through a description of the Jamaican music industry context, with reference to individual artists’ paths and a summary of Jamaican dub production, I show that even as the Jamaican music milieu was highly favorable to the emergence of dub, dub proliferated as a genre only by developing ties to a diaspora of international audiences and practitioners.

Reviews: The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics

The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics , by Gretchen Peters. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. x, 288 pp. In its title and approach, this book bears a family resemblance to Keith Polk's German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages: Players, Patrons, and Performance Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics , Gretchen Peters asks what we can know about urban musicians and the work they did, based solely on the traces they have left in the local archives of some twenty important communities. These select late medieval “French” cities are mostly large episcopal and/or independent princely capitals (Toulouse, Avignon, Dijon, Reims) but they also include smaller but highly significant mercantile towns like Saint-Omer. While many of them were not “French” in any geopolitical sense during the time-frame of this book—that is, they were not part of the shape-shifting kingdom centered in the Ile-de-France between 1300 and 1500—grouping them together under this rubric allows Peters to trace certain commonalities among them, as well as to highlight significant regional differences. And by not including Paris, which has been the object of so much attention by scholars of late medieval musical culture, she provides a relief map that puts Paris in perspective. In one sense, this book is meticulously organized. Its six chapters fall into two equal parts: the first three survey archival evidence derived from the three major territories into which Peters divides her study (southern, central, and northern France); the second three are topical studies of the varieties of work performed by musicians, their professional relationships, and, as the title of Chapter 6 puts it, the “conflicting images of the medieval minstrel” that emerge from the records. Each of the first three chapters unfolds in a similar way. As in a travel guide, the reader is given a brief history of …

Plastic Beach Utopia: Gorillaz' Multimedia Concept Project in the Context of Contemporary Popular Music Culture

The paper aims to provide analysis of the most general problems of the music industry in the digital age. It poses a question about the possibility of innovation and conceptual development in contemporary popular music, overflowed with retromania. A growing popularity of such form as a and its transformation into concept multimedia projects is regarded as a positive sign of the changes in music production and distribution. Detailed cultural analysis of one particular case, the multimedia concept project by the British band Gorillaz, demonstrates how a substantial cultural and musical innovation can exist today in the framework of popular entertainment. The last studio album by Gorillaz, called Plastic Beach (2010) works with the concept of Utopia and utopian imagery, presenting music as a space for free and meaningful collaboration among musicians and for the creation of the diverse community of listeners.

Foetus-art-terrorism: Deciphering genre, intertextuality and noise in J. G. Thirlwell’s early musical corpus (1981–1988)

Abstract Postmodernism as a state of mind, as a state of art: the fall of the grand universal narratives, the conflation of high/academic and low/popular forms of art. The cultural sphere’s commodification explicitly changed the way in which we see, feel, listen or even speak after World War II. Postmodernism, which can be conceived either as a condition or a new theoretical paradigm, lacks all sense of historical continuity and memory. Initially, postmodernism challenges what is actually perceived as Modernism, signifying a process of conflicts between old and new cultural and economic ‘modes’, or the artistic neologisms of the 1950s and the 1960s, which adopted a critical attitude towards the commodities while trying to overcome them. Thus, facing the postmodern reality could be a constantly demanding interplay between the author and the reader, the composer and the listener, and finally, the nature of the production of the artistic texts and the work of art in the realm of late capitalism. Postmodernism appeared in many manifestations in art; particularly in music, it can be located in the rise of composers such as John Cage after World War II. This work underscores not only a reaction to Modernism in music, but also stands as a sign of liberation and progress against established musical forms. This tendency can be traced in the divergence of popular music and styles in the 1960s and the 1970s, as expected by the ‘effacement of some key boundaries or separations’, which instantly dissolves the former distinctions between mass culture and highly academic modes of expression. Notably, the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s marked a very interesting transgressive period: a stage for a constant battle between popular forms of artistic expression and their respective mature academic competitors. The purpose of this article is to examine and analyse in brief Australian composer J. G. Thirlwell’s early musical experiments from 1981 to 1988 within the context of postmodernism in popular music, his diversity in genres, sounds and techniques, and to present his contribution within the realm of experimental music. Furthermore, the article addresses aspects of musical innovation, examining originality in an era associated with experiments in the sonic field and intertextuality as a creative process.

Innovation and Diversity Redux: Analyzing Musical Form and Content in the American Recording Industry, 1990–2009

Using the American recording industry as a case study, this article analyzes innovation and diversity concurrently and outlines the analytical purchase gained from doing so; examines the effects of performer incumbency and combinatorial role patterns, thereby offering an empirical application of the “role as resource” perspective (Baker and Faulkner ); and provides data on an underexplored era in which the emergence of digital technology has had wide‐ranging repercussions. Regressing measures of innovation (form) and diversity (content) on incumbency status and combinatorial role patterns reveals that innovation and diversity operate through distinct collaborative patterns. New artists are found to be carriers of musical innovation, and while performing artists with autonomy over the roles of songwriter and producer are more likely to be progenitors of musical diversity, innovation emerges from role specialization. Artistic roles and performer attributes, moreover, come together in particular ways to influence diversity and innovation depending on the environmental context. Post compact disc (CD) format era, innovation wrought by producer specialization is predominant, but the music is devoid of diversity. I conclude by arguing that the manner in which configurations of diversity and innovation interact has implications both for cultural production and reception.

“What Happens in the Cabin . . .”: An Arts-Based Autoethnography of Underground Hip Hop Song Making

AbstractTaking an autoethnographic perspective that foregrounds the interplay between the author's artist-self and researcher-self, this article explores the relationship between agency and structure in the activities surrounding underground hip hop music making within a home studio recording space. It aims to demystify the aura of in-studio music creation by focusing on the nexus of oral/written, pre-composed/improvised, and pre-recorded/live creative practices as experienced within the context of performance. Utilizing Harris Berger's notion of stance, I discuss how hip hop recording artists transcend performative self-consciousness in the pursuit of creativity. Ultimately, this article presents hip hop home recording studios as spaces that facilitate particular kinds of musical innovation through a mix of collective and individual pursuits, as well as routinized and spontaneous activities.