Musical Norms Research Articles

The semantics of the names of Luo Maishuo’s Piano Etudes as the transformation of traditional national images

The semantics of the names of Luo Maishuo’s Piano Etudes as the transformation of traditional national images

Positively Monstrous!

Positively Monstrous!

Heroic pastoral and its national-style reception IN THE CANTATA “YELLOW RIVER” BY XIAN XINGHAI

Heroic pastoral and its national-style reception IN THE CANTATA “YELLOW RIVER” BY XIAN XINGHAI

Hearing and Feeling the Black Vampire: Queer Affects in the Film Soundtrack

There is very little scholarship that considers questions of queerness in relation to film music, and the scholarship that does (Paulin, 1997; Haworth et. al., 2012; Buhler, 2014; Dubowsky, 2016) tends to approach the subject from a representational standpoint, identifying instances in which the soundtrack participates in the representation of queerness in film. The role that the soundtrack plays in fostering queer engagement with film has been left relatively underexplored. In this essay, I assert that the theories of counteridentification and disidentification as articulated by Jose Esteban Munoz in his groundbreaking queer of color critique text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Munoz; 1999) have much to offer scholars of film music interested in exploring questions of identification and auditory and/or emotional spectatorship. I will begin by laying out Munoz’s formulation of these theories and then briefly sketch counteridentification’s long history within film music criticism, an academic orientation that sets up Hollywood’s musical norms as the product of an oppressive “culture industry” and the disruption of those norms through modernist European musical practices as liberatory counteridentification (Adorno/Eisler; 1947). With these understandings in place, I will move to a discussion of two U.S. films from the 1970s whose soundtracks present Black audiences with audiovisual experiences that invite counteridentification and disidentification respectively: Blacula (William Crain; 1972) and Ganja and Hess (Bill Gunn; 1973).

A qualitative study of attitudes towards, typologies, and drivers of concurrent partnerships among people of black Caribbean ethnicity in England and their implications for STI prevention

BackgroundPartner concurrency, (having sexual partnerships overlapping in time), especially when condoms are not used, can facilitate sexually transmitted infections (STI) transmission. In Britain, STI diagnoses rates and the reporting of concurrency are higher among black Caribbeans than other ethnic groups. We explored attitudes towards, drivers, characteristics, and contexts of concurrent partnerships, and their implications for STI risk among black Caribbeans in England.MethodsPurposive sampling, by sex and age-groups, was used to recruit participants (overall n = 59) from five sexual health clinics and community settings in London and Birmingham, England. Audio-recorded four focus group discussions (n = 28 participants), and in-depth interviews (n = 31) were conducted (June 2014–December 2015). Transcribed data were thematically analysed using Framework Analysis.Results‘Main plus’ and ‘non-main’ concurrency were identified in this population. Main plus concurrency involves an individual having a main partner with whom s/he has a “relationship” with, and the individual and/or their partner secretly or explicitly have other non-main partners. In contrast, non-main concurrency entails having multiple, non-committed partners overlapping in time, where concurrency is usually taken as a given, making disclosure to partners irrelevant. While main partnerships were usually long-term, non-main partnerships ranged in duration from a single event through to encounters lasting several months/years. Condomless sex was common with ex/long-term/married/cohabiting partners; whereas condoms were typically used with non-main partners. However, condom use declined with partnership duration and familiarity with partners. Awareness of partners’ concurrency facilitated condom use, STI-testing, and partner notification. While unresolved feelings, or sharing children with ex-partners, usually facilitated main plus concurrency; non-main concurrency was common among young, and single people. Gender norms, notions of masculinity, and sexual desires influenced concurrency. Black Caribbean popular music, social media, peer pressure, and relationship norms among black Caribbeans were also perceived to encourage concurrency, especially among men and young people.ConclusionsConcurrency among black Caribbeans is shaped by a complex interaction between emotional/psychological, interpersonal, sociocultural, and structural factors. Concurrency type, its duration, and awareness influence sexual health choices, and thus STI risk in this population. Collecting these data during clinic consultations could facilitate offering partner notification methods tailored to concurrency type. Gender- and age-specific, culturally-sensitive interventions addressing STI risks associated with concurrency are needed.

КОНСТАНТНОЕ И ПЕРЕМЕННОЕ В СТИЛЕ РУССКОГО ФОРТЕПИАННОГО КВАРТЕТА

The process of the steady rooting of invariant genre features of a piano quartet is considered through the ratio between stable and mobile features. Here there is either the complete independence of the instruments, but on the principles of equal participation in the embodiment of musical content, or the variability in the relations of instrumental parts. As the main ones in the genre, the musical norms of the classic-romantic style and the stability of the timbre composition are established. It is noted that in Russian music the evolution of the piano quartet passed through different phases: genre stabilization and recovery, temporary stop and subsequent active development. Transformation processes went through different levels: structure, content, instrumental- timbre solutions, rethinking the functional roles of partner instruments. The movement from the traditional normativity of instrumental compositions to the difference of timbre combinations in the XXth–XXIst centuries was primarily predetermined by such factors as polyphonization of texture, the active introduction of polyphonic forms, new techniques of instrumentation. In the modern piano quartet, the central idea of chamber music making, the idea of co-creation generates both an extremely individualized form of embodiment and a free timbre composition. In conclusion, it is noted that the piano quartet genre has the ability to accumulate the leading style trends in chamber music of different eras.

Pop music lyrics are related to the proportion of female recording artists: Analysis of the United Kingdom weekly top five song lyrics, 1960–2015.

Previous content analyses of pop music have considered the prevalence of misogynistic portrayals of interpersonal relationships but have used relatively small samples of music, and often neglected musician gender. Because cultural depictions create individuals' musical identity, we expect the musical norms identified by previous content analyses to be reflected by lyrics produced by males and females. The lyrics of all 4,534 songs that have reached the United Kingdom's top five singles sales chart between March 1960 and December 2015 were computer-analyzed to consider the association between 40 aspects of each and both the proportion of females who recorded each song and the gender of the vocalist. There were few associations between the lyrical content and vocalist gender. However, the proportion of all musicians who recorded each song who were female was associated positively with the lyrics containing words indicative of inspiration and variety and negatively with the lyrics containing different words, and words indicative of aggression, passivity, cooperation, diversity, insistence, embellishment, and activity. Songs recorded by a high proportion of female musicians described a wide range of subject matters in the context of abstract virtues, whereas songs recorded by a high proportion of male musicians were more likely to address stereotyped concepts of adolescent masculinity that were positively and negatively valanced.

Sex, drugs, Satan and rock and roll: re-thinking dark leisure, from theoretical framework to an exploration of pop-rock-metal music norms

ABSTRACTIn modern leisure spaces, nothing typifies dark leisure as a normative rule better than the supposed alternative, counter-cultural space of pop-rock-metal music. In the first half of this paper, I explore dark leisure theory: first, through an analysis of Rojek’s framework for abnormal leisure; then through and exploration of modifications to dark leisure theory in and from leisure studies and cultural studies. I show that the concept remains sadly neglected in both subject fields. Then in the second half of the paper, I construct a new theory of dark leisure for our times, out of a case study of the norms and values associated with the idea of the alternative in pop-rock-metal music. After this mapping of dark leisure through pop-rock-metal music I set out the challenge for leisure studies to embrace the dark side.

Musicals as cultural collisions: Introduction to the 2016 ATHE Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging scholars papers in music theatre/dance

Abstract Each year the Music Theater and Dance Focus Group of the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) sponsors the Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging Scholars panel at its annual conference, held this year in Chicago. The winning panellists present their work at the conference before revising their papers for publication in Studies in Musical Theatre. This year’s panellists Elyse Singer, Arianne Johnson Quinn and Hyewon Kim present their articles on the following pages, introduced in this short essay by the ATHE conference’s respondent, Stuart J. Hecht. In his essay, Hecht considers how American musicals initially featured escapist spectacle that often meant placing action in foreign settings, apart from everyday experience. Composers and lyricists responded by writing songs that incorporated strands of other nations and cultures but which did not alienate American playgoers’ expected musical norms. Many leading composers and the New York audience were assimilated children of immigrants, so productions of such operettas offered reassuring nostalgia along with escapist plots. Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed this dynamic in their productions, assigning larger issues to exotic locales, preaching liberal values of social justice. They and their peers felt comfortable creating foreign settings, places they themselves might never have known, for the entertainment and enlightenment of New York playgoers. In the years following the Second World War American musicals found currency touring England and then beyond, signalling European acceptance of American culture and political might. By century’s end the exportation of culture for prestige was increasingly replaced by American culture as commodity, alongside sales of goods. Yet American musicals have always embodied democracy, as such shows promote diversity and hope. Hence the global exportation of musicals promotes American values as much as American merchandise. The article goes on to introduce the articles of our three debut scholars, placing their essays within this larger historical and cultural context.

Marginal Musical Spaces at St Aldates, Oxford

St Aldates is a large Charismatic Anglican church in the centre of Oxford. The music of the regular Sunday services stands within the tradition of Contemporary Worship Music and the musical leaders cultivate an intentional sense of consistency. Within this environment, individuals are often expected to set aside existing musical tastes and attachments, adopting an attitude of worship regardless of their relationship to the musical environment. Away from the Sunday services there are a number of more marginal musical spaces in which a wider range of musical forms find expression. In this article I draw on third-space theory and my own ethnographic fieldwork to explore the alternative musical dynamics which two such spaces open up and the different relationships which they enable between individuals’ diverse musical attachments and the musical life of the church. In line with divergent streams in the literature, I suggest that these spaces carry both productive and disruptive potential, both challenging and supporting prevailing musical norms.

Sonic Performativity: Analysing Gender in North Indian Classical Vocal Music

Musicians and listeners hear many aspects of contemporary North Indian classical vocal music as gendered: genres, improvisational techniques and even certain ornaments evoke gendered connotations. However, analytical work on this music has failed to take gender into account, so the relationship between gender and musical sound remains unexamined. In this article, I explore how issues of gender might come to bear on the close analysis of North Indian classical vocal music. First, I present an overview of the gendered musical landscape of the tradition. I then draw upon work by Judith Butler in order to theorise this in terms of what I call ‘sonic performativity’: I argue that North Indian classical musicians perform gender sonically and that this influences the subtlest nuances of musical style. Finally, I demonstrate ways in which considerations of gender inform the stylistic decisions of one singer, detailing how she negotiates gendered musical norms.

The reception of nineteenth-century Serbian salon music: Performer, audience and music critic perspectives

The history of Salon Music can be traced through the tense, dynamic relation between the consumers of that kind of music (performers, listeners) and critics. In the early 1930s, and later even more, a designation ?salon style? started to appear in the reviews of the Salon Music. By that fact alone, it was implied that compositions, which were published as Salon Music, or were defined as such in reviews, corresponded to specific musical norms, which, on the other hand, evolved merely from recipient?s needs. In foreign and domestic press from the period, there are many negative epithets referring to Salon Music: ?empty, frivolous, coquette, false?. Nevertheless, aesthetic debates in music literature had no impact on Salon Music admirers. In this study, the focus of attention is on the reception of Serbian Salon Music of the nineteenth century within the context of the Central European cultural practice. Salon compositions were interpreted within the interactive relations among musical work-performers-audience-critics. The goal of musical work analysis was not to evaluate the artistic quality or non-quality of the Salon Music, in order to distinguish more or less successful music compositions. It is far more important to bear in mind that artistic quality with the Salon Music consumers of the time had no decisive role. Musical work analysis no longer seeks for aesthetical values in music facts, but for qualities and features that a piece of music must possess in order to fulfill its purpose and function.

Globalisation Of Popular Culture: From Hollywood To Bollywood

This article examines significant evidence of recent Bollywood influence on the Western movie industry, particularly Hollywood, and explores the implications of such developments in the context of globalisation. Within the ongoing globalisation of entertainment, a process that does not automatically lead to cultural Westernisation and uniformisation, Bollywood has by now become both a symbol of Indian cinema’s circulation all over the world and the embodiment of non-monolithic globalisation. Bollywood is evidently not a homogenising influence that forces non-Indian cultures to embrace its cinematographic or musical norms and practices. Rather, it creates new hybrids. The article offers a framework for explaining the growing cultural and economic changes and movements of such non-hegemonic spreading of popular culture and identifies future agenda for research.

Introduction

For more than a decade, academics have developed an increasing fascination for Asian popular music as a subject for research. This has arisen during a time when popular music studies has gained momentum as a fruitful field of scholarly enquiry, and also coincides with a firm shift away from the privileging of Anglophone- centric popular music from North America or the United Kingdom as the popular music norm.

The Right Mistakes: Confronting the “Old Question” of Thelonious Monk's Chops

Though once considered an incompetent pianist, Thelonious Monk has long been celebrated for his playing as much as for his compositions. Yet his pianism continues to occasion critical unease; a defensiveness is detectable in discussions of Monk's technique even today. This may be because considerations of Monk's playing tend to avoid or finesse peculiarities that raised questions about his ability in the first place. These include the jarring dissonances which strike some listeners as mistakes. Examination of Monk's dissonance usage suggests two analytic categories. “Timbral dissonance” is an aspect of tone, idiomatic to the Black music tradition. The more idiosyncratic “syntactic dissonance” serves, rather, to challenge or subvert musical conventions. An analysis of Monk's 1968 solo recording of “Round Midnight” focuses on syntactic “wrong-note” dissonances. Neither errors nor merely facets of Monk's tone, their significance is bound up with their “wrongness”: they make sense because they sound wrong in a meaningful way, as significations on musical norms. Considered in pertinent contexts—the chord changes, the jazz piano tradition, and the improvisational process—Monk's “mistakes” evince a trickster logic, wry humor, and a precision that speaks directly to lingering uncertainty regarding his technical accuracy.

Echoes of the Guillotine: Berlioz and the French Fantastic

Abstract The fantastic, theorized as an expression of the anxieties, fears, and political beliefs of the generation of young French writers born in the decades directly following the Revolution and Terror, has long been viewed primarily as a literary genre. Observed in light of this artistic movement, Berlioz's most famous work, Symphonie fantastique, emerges as a musical manifestation of fantastic techniques, and Berlioz himself as an important contributor to the Fantastic culture that swept nineteenth-century France. Using Tzvetan Todorov's narrative theory, I identify two techniques fantastic authors exploit that are most useful in understanding Symphonie Fantastique: an intentional ambiguity of form, and a privileging of ambiguous “thresholds” over teleological plot resolution. In pursuing a new explanation of the symphony's strange deviations from musical norms, I highlight the many different ways the symphony has been understood and analyzed by prominent musicologists over the past 180 years. By now, musicologists have effectively demonstrated that Berlioz was not the “incompetent genius” (in Charles Rosen's wry formulation) he was long considered to be; however, the fact that there is still disagreement and debate over Symphonie Fantastique's deviations from normative form and content, as well as what those deviations might mean, demonstrates the highly fraught signifying structure of the music. Locating the symphony's use of fantastic tropes and techniques demonstrates that many of its strangest aspects—those “failures” that have been the subject of musicological debate since 1835—come into focus when we take its title seriously and regard the work as a symphony in the fantastic genre.

Effects of Kindermusik training on infants’ rhythmic enculturation

Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005) demonstrated a link between movement and the metrical interpretation of rhythm patterns in 7-month-old infants. Infants bounced on every second beat of a rhythmic pattern with no auditory accents later preferred to listen to an accented version of the pattern with accents every second beat (duple or march meter), whereas infants bounced on every third beat of the same rhythmic pattern preferred to listen to a version with accents every third beat (triple or waltz meter). The present study compared infants participating in Kindermusik classes with infants not participating in music classes. In Kindermusik classes infants receive enriched experience moving to music. Following Western musical norms, the majority of the music samples in the classes are in duple meter. During the preference test, Kindermusik infants listened longer overall, indicating heightened interest in musical rhythms. Both groups listened longer to the accented version that matched how they had been bounced, but only the Kindermusik group showed a stronger preference in the case of duple bouncing than in the case of triple bouncing. We conclude that musical classes for infants can accelerate the development of culture-specific metrical perception.

IDM as a "Minor" Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by "Intelligent Dance Music"

This piece opens with a consideration of the etymology and application of the term “IDM”, before examining the treatment of normative standards by the work associated therewith. Three areas in particular will be focused upon: identity, tradition, and morphology. The discussion will be illuminated by three case studies, the first of which will consider Warp Records’ relationship to narrative; the two remaining will explore the work of Autechre and Aphex Twin with some reference to the areas outlined above. The writing of Deleuze and Guattari will inform the ideas presented, with particular focus being made upon the notions of “minority”, “deterritorialisation”, and “continuous variation”. Based upon the interaction of the wider IDM “text” with existing “constants”, and its treatment of itself, the present work will conclude with the suggestion that IDM be read as a “minor” literature.

Women, leadership, and power revisiting the Wicked Witch of the West

By examining the cultural images present in the popular musical Wicked, cultural norms and biases toward women in leadership and women’s leadership practices are explored. The discussion rests on conceptions of male and female leadership ‘styles’, how power is obtained and utilised within organisational settings and how resistance and reproduction play key roles in how women as leaders are accepted.

Evropska glasba? – Nemuzikološko vprašanje

The question of the existence of “European music” raises in the field of musicology problems of a different nature than those posed, for example, in the field of comparative literature by the notion of “European literature”. Musicologists are mainly concerned with the differences between European and non-European music, however in everyday life the idea that music is a universal “language” is widespread. We need to distinguish, though, between the various manifestations of music which coexist on different cultural (national), sociological and aesthetic levels. The study of western art music shows that the dichotomy between national/regional, on the one hand, and universal on the other is a paradoxical one –national music is often performed using universal techniques and indeed a typical national style can outgrow its original home territory to become an international style. Thus different musics (“languages”) should be seen as rational musical systems comprising by definition a diversity of musical norms and conventions. European music exists as a historical succession of such musical systems.