Music Press Research Articles

A day for preserving things: Activism, technology and the politics of preservation in the Sarah Records archive

Sarah Records was an independent label active in Bristol from 1987 to 1995 famous for its many contributions to the UK indie pop scene from bands like Heavenly, the Field Mice and the Orchids. In 2015, the same year that NME named Sarah as the second-best independent label of all time, the founders launched a digital archive to share photographs, press-clippings and other artefacts. While Sarah releases were often dismissed by the popular music press at the time as ‘twee’ – perhaps due to the label’s name and the gender of one of its founders – the archive provides a compelling counterstory (Martinez) of the label as an activist organization advancing political causes through its releases, advertisements and more. This article examines the political legacy of Sarah Records, a label that regularly advocated for feminism and socialism through its releases, by considering how its engagement with the press, its use of technology, and now its archive have worked to enact its political ideals and subvert dominant cultures.

Screaming, Crying, Writing Up: Literary Music Journalism Books as a Legitimization of Contemporary Fangirl Practices

ABSTRACT In light of the increased commercial awareness of fangirl culture in the last decade, this article critically analyses three books written by prominent woman music and culture journalists: Fangirls by Hannah Ewens (2019), Larger Than Life by Maria Sherman (2020), and Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany (2022). Examining book content as well as promotional author interviews in the music press, I explore themes of legitimacy, emotionality, and academic capital, and consider how authors re-position both fangirls and themselves as “knowledgeable” within participatory music culture.

(Post)Yugoslavian Music Press in Transition

The development of the Internet and digital technologies has influenced the ever- greater migrations of printed content to the digital sphere (blogs, online media, Internet portals, social networks), which has also brought with itself changes in readers’ habits and in the concept and format of texts as wells. Music press is no exception in that respect. In the context of South European states, these processes coincide with the period of political, social, cultural and economic transition, giving rise to the development of numerous regional and local specific forms of popular culture. The existence of the SFRY as a shared state enabled the creation of an authentic cultural space, which continued to develop even after its disintegration. This paper endeavors to shed light on one segment of that local authenticity through an analysis of music press. The aim the authors of this paper aspire to achieve is the presentation of the development path of the printed media in the first place inthe Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then in Serbia, as well as the reconstructions of the modality of the transformation of this media in the transition period from an anthropological perspective. The wish is to identify the perception and significance of music as a local culturalphenomenon through the qualitative analysis of the archival material and the available Internet sources as well, then to trace the cultural changes that have been going on over time as a result of global and local social and cultural turmoil. We do not refer to press only as the medium which has an informative role, but rather as the medium that reflects the local community’s attitudes, simultaneously constructing narratives on popular culture that are incorporated in our everyday life.

La famiglia svizzera and Operatic Genre in Dresden and Milan

Abstract: A year after Joseph Weigl's sentimental Viennese Singspiel, Die Schweizerfamilie , premiered in 1809, it appeared in translation as La famiglia svizzera at the summer palace of the King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus. It soon became a mainstay of Dresden's Italian opera company. When a version of this adaptation appeared at Milan's La Scala in 1816, however, it was a catastrophic failure. The stark contrast between the two productions emphasizes the different ideals of the opera's creators, adapters, and audiences. The linked processes of transmission, adaptation, performance, and reception are a growing topic in opera scholarship, although studies of the early nineteenth century have generally considered cultural translations into German, rather than the other way around. La famiglia svizzera provides a valuable addition to our understanding of how operatic genre and its implications were conceived. In this essay, I trace how Dresden's adapters Italianized this opera and explain its divergent reception. The adapters—most likely Adolph Wagner and Franz Anton Schubert—barely changed Weigl's music but dramatically altered the tone, imagery, and characterization of the opera through a thoughtful Italian translation and newly composed recitatives. A reviewer nevertheless praised the opera's artistic unity and hoped for more such translations, "since German art agrees with German feelings." Milanese critics, however, specifically identified aspects of the adaptation that contributed to the opera's failure. These reviews fit within contemporary debates in the musical press about national operatic genre. I argue that La famiglia svizzera offers a microcosm of these debates, which mirrored both its creators' and its viewers' preconceptions.

“Let’s See If We’ve Been Missing Out!”

Contemporary music analysis podcasts are engaged in an ongoing project of deconstructing pop songs and recoding them as valuable cultural objects. In this article, I understand podcasting as an extension of the popular music press and trace the affective strategies hosts use to elevate and evaluate pop songs new and old. I argue that music podcasts have seen a slow but steady departure from the conventions of critical distance and affectless, disembodied engagement to adopt an embodied, emotive response to the music that moves them. Drawing on theories of feminist affect, fan studies, and reactivity, I read the incorporation of fannish affect and the celebration of male creators’ emotive response to pop music as a continuation of a middlebrow sensibility that informs the popular music press writ large. Popular music analysis podcasts, on their surface, are a project of taking pop music seriously. When we scratch this surface, however, what we find is a mixed bag of tactics that seek to affirm the majority white, majority male creators as uniquely positioned to analyze, evaluate, and respond to music, much of which they are encountering considerably after it has already achieved the success that codes these songs as “popular” in the first place.

Canonic Repertoires and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner by William Weber with Beverly Wilcox (review)

Canonic Repertoires and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner by William Weber with Beverly Wilcox (review)

Negotiating girlhood in rock music: Nandi Bushell, prodigy discourse and adult mentor-fans

Abstract Nandi Bushell (b. 2010) is a British-Zulu drummer and multi-instrumentalist whose early career has garnered much attention from audiences and the international music press. In this article, we investigate the case of Bushell as a point of entry for understanding children's participation in mainstream popular music culture and the broader public sphere. We explore Bushell's social media presence, creative output and public reception in relation to three interrelated themes: (1) the functioning of social media and the music press as arenas for the (re)negotiation of ideas about child prodigy; (2) child musicians’ political activism; and (3) the role of adult ‘mentor-fans’ in sponsoring girls’ participation in rock culture. In grappling with the complexities of these themes, we place a particular emphasis on querying how dominant conceptions of girlhood inform the press coverage of Bushell's music and social media output, as well as on examining her highly visible relationships with established male rock artists serving as mentors, fans and industry brokers. Ultimately, the article sheds new light on how notions of girlhood as a cultural identity are negotiated by young artists and their (often adult) audiences in relation to musical genre boundaries.

THE ROLE OF THE DARMSTADT CONCERTINO IN THE COMPOSITIONAL OUTPUT OF ZDZISAW SZOSTAK

Both in academic publications and in the music press, little attention has been paid to the figure of Zdzisaw Szostak a conductor and a composer, who spent most of his professional life at the d Philharmonic and the Academy of Music in d. Prof. Szostak was seen by the musical community mainly through the prism of his great achievements in the field of film music. The artists later autonomous works had to contend against the success and recognition of his previous compositions. In the article, however, the author focuses on a specific autonomous work by Szostak the Darmstadt Concertino for violin, piano and orchestra, with the title clearly associated with the important 20th century centre of European avant-garde. The resulting connotation seemed particularly interesting due to Szostaks reluctance to radical compositional means used by artists associated with the famous Internationale Ferienkurse fr Neue Musik. The intriguing contradiction encoded in the title and the rudimentary knowledge of the work led the author to investigate its history based on the collected sources. These were limited to a piano reduction assembled in parts, some orchestral voices and completely amateur, poor quality recording. The only possible way to obtain information about the genesis of the piece was interviewing soloists, the violinist ukasz Baszczyk and the pianist Mariusz Drzewicki. The musicians participated in the premiere performance, which was conducted in Darmstadt in November 1998 by Zdzisaw Szostak himself. The concert crowned the celebration of the sixth edition of the Polish Music and Culture Week in Darmstadt organised by the German Chopin Society.

Totally inspired by punk: An interview with Martin Bowes and Alan Rider

This interview contextualizes the music of two bands, Stress and Attrition, their relationship to time and place (Coventry in the early 1980s) and the zines produced at the time by both interviewees. Bowes and Rider consider DIY zine and tape culture, their bands’ relationship to punk, post-punk and indie labels, other contemporaneous music which was often the focus of the music press’ interest in the city, as well as their current music and publishing activities.

'Rory Gallagher's Leprechaun Boogie': Irish Stereotyping in the International Music Press

This paper seeks to explore the presence of Irish stereotyping in the international music press using a case study of the Irish blues rock musician Rory Gallagher. Using a dataset of 600 articles about Gallagher published between 1968 and 1998, it draws upon a combination of corpus and thematic analysis to identify frequently occurring Irish stereotypes and how they were used to describe him, embedding arguments in postcolonial theory, particularly the work of Homi K. Bhabha. The analysis identifies five major themes—the Irish as violent troublemakers; the Irish as heavy drinkers; the ‘Irish’ way of talking; the Irish as ‘dumb Paddys’; Irish folklore and traditional ways of life—highlighting the different roles into which Gallagher was unwillingly cast by the music press. These references often wrapped Irish prejudice in a cloak of fun and frivolity, which made it seem harmless and trivial. However, such disparagement humour fostered discrimination by moulding (negative) public opinion of what it meant to be Irish at a time when Anglo-Irish tensions were already high and ignored the deeply emotional impact of the Northern Irish conflict on Gallagher. It also took attention away from Gallagher’s music and, in doing so, downplayed the important contribution he made to the world of blues and rock. Keywords: Rory Gallagher; music press; Irish; Ireland; stereotypes; disparagement humour; postcolonialism

Кинематографические приемы в оперном театре России 1920-х годов

The article examines cinematography’s influence on the Soviet opera theatre of the 1920s. By the beginning of this decade, cinema rapidly gained popularity and began being perceived as a serious competitor to theatre. Awareness and comprehension of the new “threat” reasonably led to appeals for upgrading theatrical language with the help of new technical means. There were several innovations in the operas on stage: the use of intense straight lighting with the help of floodlights, montage as a director’s technique, the use of film screen in opera productions. It all confirmed that the process of cinemafication of the theatre had also affected the opera stage. The new trends expressed themselves in the productions of Sergey Radlov (“Vozzek” by Alban Berg), Nikolay Smolich (“The Golden Cockerel” by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, “Johnny Plays” by Ernst Krenek), Iosif Lapitsky (“Salome” by Richard Strauss, “The Queen of Spades” by Petr Tchaikovsky). Thus, in his version of “The Golden Cockerel” (1923), the opera director N. Smolich used a film projection, and then, staging E. Kshenek’s opera “Johnny Plays” (1928), he used animation. In the “The Queen of Spades” (Experimental Theatre), I. Lapitsky while trying to make the action cinematically dynamic, divided it into forty small episodes. The influence of cinema can also be traced in opera performances of the 1920s. The most vivid example is Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera “The Nose” with his special montage style of action. Opera cinemafication didn’t reach such heights as in dramatic theatre and faced a different, not always approving, reaction from the musical press. The time of ambitious experiments ended in the 1930s with a change in the country’s cultural policy.

Performing ‘Art for the People’: Politics, Spectatorship, and Schoenberg’s Music at the Berlin VolksbÜhne

ABSTRACT In early 1920, a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony sponsored by the Berlin Volksbühne (People’s Theatre) set off a dialogue of remarkable vehemence and duration in the musical press. Writing as spectators of what they imagined to be a working-class audience, professional music critics framed the event as a musical performance that itself was a carefully staged piece of political theatre. Their accounts detail and debate the use of casting, symbols, and rituals to enact a ‘leftist’ agenda in which Schoenberg’s music was not the subversive project of a radical few, but a legitimate exemplar of ‘art for the people’—the motto of the Volksbühne. By engaging with the recent ‘performative turn’ in studies of the Weimar Republic, this article presents a rich microhistory of this experimental concert and its afterlife in the press, revealing vital connections to broader practices of political performativity in Weimar democracy.

Sounds of Accompaniment

Sounds of Accompaniment

Does Spotify Create Attachment?

This paper seeks to measure the extent to which algorithmically generated playlists, conceptualised herein as cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu 1984), create ‘attachment’ between consumers of music and producers of music. This was undertaken following debates in the professional music press problematising the ability of streaming platforms to create relationships between artists and listeners and, in a wider discussion, to generate sustainable income for musicians (Chartmetric 2018, Mulligan 2019 in Griffiths 2019, Music Ally 2019). We develop the idea from cultural and economic scholars that intermediation results in ‘attachment’ on behalf of consumers (Callon et.al 2002, Smith Maguire & Matthews 2012) by formulating a definition of the term informed by insights from consumer psychology and applying this framework to a 115-question survey completed by listeners to Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ Playlist for a one-week period. The findings suggest that the playlist was able to generate close to no attachment for those considered poorly-involved new music consumers, and only minor to mid-levels of attachment for those participants considered heavily-involved new music consumers. We therefore propose that algorithmically curated playlists can influence low-cost audience attachment behaviours while their overall impact on the economic success of artists may be limited. This paper contributes towards academic debates concerning the role and impact of cultural intermediaries and lends early empirical support to discussions within the professional music industries and wider public policy (GOV 2020) concerning the uncertain ability of playlists to influence the artist-fan relationship. In addition, by developing a methodologically precise definition of ‘attachment’, it is hoped that the framework provided by this modest study can act as a guide for other researchers to explore the concept of intermediation and attachment with larger sample sizes on alternative playlist types and on other digital platforms.

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to WagnerWilliam Weber Beverly Wilcox

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to WagnerWilliam Weber Beverly Wilcox

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner

Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner

Fashioning the “People’s Guitarist” The Mythologization of Rory Gallagher in the International Music Press

ABSTRACT This paper traces how the international music press used the clothing and appearance of the Irish blues/rock musician Rory Gallagher to mythologize him as the “People’s Guitarist.” I explore how this image was constructed and developed over time, as well as Gallagher’s own response to this mythologization and how it has consolidated since his death in 1995. I argue that Gallagher’s unwillingness to compromise his integrity and shift his music or clothing to fit changing trends made him an anomaly in an image-conscious music industry. Thus, his appearance became an easy target for the music press who focused overwhelmingly on his clothing in interviews and articles. This focus unfairly drew attention away from his music and downplayed the important contribution he made to the world of blues and rock.

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura

Reviewed by: We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura Alison Mandaville Frank Abe & Tamiko Nimura We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration Illus. Ross Ishikawa & Matt Sasaki. Seattle. Chin Music Press. 2021. 151 pages. FOR DECADES, THE stories of over 112,000 Japanese American individuals incarcerated in the United States during World War II were framed through just one public narrative: if Japanese Americans were wrongly “interned,” it was a “mistake” born of wartime security concerns; Japanese Americans went quietly and were eventually released. No great harm was done. Silence about this economically ruinous, violently dislocating, and deeply shaming experience also held in the Japanese American community. [End Page 67] At the time of the incarceration, the powerful Japanese American Citizens League urged complacency and worked with the US government to tamp down resistance in the community. But, as this narrative profiling three young people who resisted the incarceration in different ways makes visible, resistance there was. When faced with the infamous “loyalty questionnaire,” Hajime Jim Akutsu, a twenty-two-year-old studying electrical engineering in college, answered “yes” regarding being willing to serve in the US military (though he had already twice been rejected for having flat feet) but gave an unequivocal “no” to the second question, to “forswear allegiance” to the Japanese emperor. He saw the Catch-22. A “yes” here implied a prior allegiance to forswear. Hiroshi Kashiwagi, a nineteen-year-old high school graduate from a farmworker family, having already registered for the draft, at first refused to answer both questions. Finally, under pressure, he wrote “no” to both questions—as many did (the “no-no boys”); he became one of thousands segregated into different camps by their answers, ostensibly to cool violent tensions between factions—tensions created, in fact, by the conditions of an inhumane incarceration. As a woman, Mitsuye Endo, a twenty-one-year-old typist for the State of California, was not required to complete the loyalty questionnaire. However, she worked with lawyers and others as the face of a civil lawsuit that would, after years of litigation, force the courts to declare the incarceration illegal. How is it I had never heard the name of the woman whose court case led to the end of this incarceration? This is a closely researched project. Amid engaging and detailed personal stories and beautifully rendered images, the scattered reproductions of actual historical documents carrying the names of the young people startle and remind us: these are real people. Documented quotes from prominent community members, politicians, and the judiciary make clear that the racism in which this injustice was rooted was endemic in the United States. The incarceration was no “unfortunate mistake.” This graphic narrative reframes the experience of incarceration as anything but monolithic—and gives body and voice to some of the many individuals and groups of Japanese Americans who were neither silent nor complacent in the face of injustice. Alison Mandaville California State University, Fresno Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, a Ballet and a Film by Hugh Macdonald

Reviewed by: Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, a Ballet and a Film by Hugh Macdonald Clair Rowden Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, a Ballet and a Film. By Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. (432 p. ISBN: 978-1-108-44509-2. Paperback. £24.99) Hugh Macdonald's mammoth tome Saint-Saëns and the Stage, published first in hardback in 2019 before the 2021 paperback version to coincide with the Saint-Saëns centenary year, is Herculean in every sense. He begins by stating the [End Page 59] obvious: that Saint-Saëns's extensive dramatic works are seriously in need of critical re-examination, which he goes on to do with heaps of insightful detail, gleaned from many sources but, in particular, through close and erudite examination of librettos and scores. This is one of those 'life and works' books that mentions the other outputs of Saint-Saëns's career alongside detailing his weekly (and sometimes daily) movements (which in Saint-Saëns's case were many), before focusing on in-depth examinations of the staged works, whether opera, ballet, incidental music, or the music for open air pageants. I take my hat off to the scholars who can immerse themselves in the daily work routines of historical figures to the extent that Macdonald has achieved here. Each chapter, proceeding chronologically, is dedicated to a work or works and each employs a similar formula: 1. Historical and contextual description on the genesis of the work 2. An erudite 'listening guide' that takes readers through the whole work 3. An overview of the various cuts, revisions, and editions that the score went through 4. Observations on staged revivals and recordings, where they exist. The first section is generally elegantly accomplished, providing details of Saint-Saëns's life, career, and other compositions around the time of the dramatic work under study; the second would work excellently as a 'listening guide' if, as Macdonald points out himself, it were not for the paucity of recordings of most of Saint-Saëns's operas. The third section betrays the preoccupations of the former general editor of the New Berlioz Edition and is informative but quite dry, if brief; the fourth section highlights that Saint-Saëns's operas are definitely in need of some sort of a revival to which the Palazzetto Bru Zane–Centre de musique romantique française is making a valuable contribution. Macdonald is well-known for undervaluing contemporary press reports from any other than composer critics and unashamedly makes this point upfront (in the preface and chapter 1). I can only follow him so far down this path, before noting that while he manages to decipher some press comments, he does not seem to comprehend the range of 'code words' or 'shorthand' used by the Parisian press to denote very specific musical practices that critics were often (pace Macdonald) unable to describe in more musically literate terms. Macdonald recognises that an accusation of a score containing 'no melody' comes from a hankering after the 'good tunes' with four-square periodic structure of the opéra-comique of a former generation by Adam and Boiëldieu (p. 89). But other criticisms that actually pertain to musical forms, internal musical coherence, and the general crisis of confidence, both artistic and political, when faced with Wagnerian models in the 1870s and 1880s are swept under the carpet as 'bizarre prejudices' (p. 80). But then, as will be become apparent, these concerns are not really those of Macdonald anyway. The 'listening guides', peppered with musical examples, are both informative and frustrating. Despite his disdain for the nineteenth-century Parisian musical press, Macdonald's choice of chapter structure nevertheless echoes that of the opera review he describes at the outset, whereby the second half is dedicated to an analysis of the best musical numbers. His versions are, of course, more exhaustive and the musical detail more persuasive, but for me (and this links to Macdonald's lack of engagement with the contemporary press), they omit contextual detail of musical and dramatic forms and the ways they were...

Teaching qualities in piano works by Henryk Pachulski in the context of the development of piano technique in children and youth. Part 1

Henryk Pachulski (1852-1921) – a Polish composer, pianist, and teacher. He graduated from the Warsaw Institute of Music, having studied piano with Rudolf Strobl. His harmony and counterpoint teachers were Stanisław Moniuszko and Władysław Żeleński. After that, he studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Nicolai Rubinstein and then Pawel Pabst. He learnt harmony from E. L. Langer, then Anton Arensky with whom he also had a special course in counterpoint. In 1886 he started his teaching career at the Moscow Conservatory, which lasted over 30 years. He also performed as a pianist in Moscow, Petersburg, and Warsaw. Pachulski was acknowledged for his technical aptitude, but he gained the greatest recognition as a teacher and a composer. He created over a hundred piano works, including three sonatas, two cycles of variations, two polonaises, two mazurkas, three waltzes, preludes, studies, impromptus, and more. He also wrote chamber, vocal and orchestra compositions, as well as piano transcriptions for orchestra and chamber pieces. This article presents the composer’s music and teaching activity, it also touches on teaching qualities of his piano works. It pays special attention to technical aspects, and the analysis also covers the formal side of these compositions. While preparing the text, the author used information included in the Polish music press from the turn of the 20th century, music collection of the National Library in Warsaw, archive documents, and foreign sources.