Protest Music Research Articles

Not your ordinary drone: odes to the Bayraktar in the Russia–Ukraine war

Abstract‘Bayraktar’, a pop/rap song written by a Ukrainian soldier following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, went viral, spawning various covers, from electronic dance music to hardcore punk. I analyse this digital archive of 19 ‘Bayraktar’ songs, including five that share only the title with Taras Borovok's paradigmatic song, and contextualise it within the broader historical and decolonial frameworks of Ukrainian resistance music, including the protest music of the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan demonstrations, and the anti-war music produced during the Donbas war and in the first six months of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. I apply the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis to highlight the ways that sound, image (videos and stills) and text (lyrics and verbal descriptions on YouTube) forge nationalist and global protest rhetorics, and also function pragmatically to raise awareness, fundraise for the armed forces and humanitarian efforts, and boost morale in Ukraine and abroad.

The Rhymes of Zhina Movement; Content Analysis of Revolutionary and Protest Music of Iran 2022

The Zhina movement that erupted following the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini, under custody for allegedly wearing her headscarf incorrectly, is Iran's most prolonged and pervasive movement since the 1979 revolution—repeatedly referred to as a revolution by the actors who participated in the movement as well as political analysts. This movement has had many cultural, social, and political influences. Music as a critical cultural manifestation, artistic self-expression, and an integral part of people's daily life both affected the movement and was impacted by it. This article takes a closer look at the protest and revolutionary songs published since the beginning of the Zhina movement in September 2022. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, it explores the contents published during the movement concerning meaning-making, collective imagination, and representation of Iran's social and political situation. Ten main themes were extracted, including oppression, resistance, the conflict between good and evil, the connection between previous social movements, representation of slogans, symbols, and victims, woman and embodiment, homeland, nations and ethnicities, religion, action request, and desired future vision.

Revolutionary Songs from Myanmar: Reconsidering Scholarly Perspectives on Protest Music

Since the February 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Burmese musicians have been creating and circulating anti-coup songs, which are usually called “revolutionary songs.” This article describes a representative sample of these songs, explaining how the lyrics reference important tropes in Burmese life and history. Further, the article argues that these revolutionary songs, while they can be understood as protest music, do not fit precisely into categories previously delineated for protest songs. Nor do these songs provide a neat answer to the question that scholars so often pose of protest music, to wit: do these songs work to persuade listeners to take an anti-authoritarian position? Depending on ethnographic findings derived from interviews with musicians, disseminators and listeners, I argue that Burmese revolutionary songs are intended to support those already involved in resisting the military regime. The songs’ reception is complicated, suggesting that scholars must be cautious about making liberatory claims for protest music, even in cases such as this, where the lyrics of the songs are unambiguous and well-understood by listeners.

Defiant Amplification or Decontextualized Commercialization? Protest Music, TikTok, and Social Movements

Protest music has historically been a central part of American social change movements. Although some protest music is used solely to bring attention to the evils of an oppressive group, another purpose it may serve is to foster positive self-definition and feelings of unity in communities of oppressed people, and some songs may even do both. This project aimed to explore how TikTok affords expression and connection in relation to the use of and interaction with protest music in online spaces. A critical discourse analysis of a specific case of TikTok protest music, You About To Lose Yo Job, was conducted through the lenses of personal expression as a feature of connective action and affordance theory. The following three themes emerged: lip-syncing as a tool of defiance and reclamation of space, the use of hashtags to game a commercialized platform, and the decontextualization or loss of essence of protest music. These findings indicated that the social and ideological functions served by protest music as background sounds on TikTok created potential new avenues for agency through spatial defiance afforded by green screens and strategies to amplify users’ content to new audiences. However, dominant ideologies of capitalism were also reinforced through gaming of hashtags that were associated with events and trends of culture, diluting the context and blurring the movement affiliation of users, making unclear the function the protest music may serve.

Managing Dissent in Post-Soviet Authoritarianism. New Censorship of Protest Music in Belarus and Russia, 2000–2018

Drawing on the example of constraints on protest music in Belarus and Russia, the article discusses the political economy of censorship in the everyday functioning of contemporary authoritarianism. Combining the ‘new censorship’ paradigm of critical sociology and studies of post-Soviet authoritarian regimes, this study identifies and discusses structural, invisible or constitutive censorship. While the visible, formal and openly repressive mechanisms of political censorship are formally prohibited and play a minor role, actual constraints on the expression of protest take different shapes.

Songs of the Multitude: The April Revolution, the 6.3 Uprising, and South Korea's Protest Music of the 1960s

The decade of the 1960s is remembered for worldwide political upheavals, with South Korea's April Revolution of 1960 being one early episode. Protesters of the April Revolution appropriated a variety of songs, including the national anthem, Korean War songs, school songs, and children's songs. But these appropriated protest songs have received scant scholarly attention. Four years later in 1964, college students launched a protest movement known as the 6.3 Uprising to stop the military government's implementation of a deeply unpopular normalization treaty with Japan. The movement added a few original songs to the protest music repertoire, but they have since fallen into obscurity. Protest music scholarship in South Korea has largely overlooked the legacy of the 1960s, favoring more polished musical interventions by the pre-Korean War leftist movement and the People's Song Movement of the 1980s. This paper examines the forgotten protest songs of the 1960s from daily newspaper archives and other sources. Recognizing the multitude who pushed forward the April Revolution, I argue that South Korea's protest songs—"people's songs" or minjung kayo—are best understood as songs of the multitude.

‘People have courage!’: Protest Music and Indigenous Movements

ABSTRACT In recent years, a series of Indigenous protest movements have emerged across North America in response to contemporaneous settler-colonial violence, including the #NoDAPL movement and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. These movements are responses to political, societal, environmental, and philosophical incongruities with governments and their non-Indigenous citizenry. Music has been at the heart of these political causes, social protests, and cultural movements. Plains-style powwow vocal music, which emerged as the dominant intertribal performative style in the 20th century, has played a crucial role in contemporary protests as mechanisms for articulating messages of resistance through symbolic embodiments and as intertribal expressions of solidarity directed primarily towards Indigenous people for cultural and spiritual uplift. This style also has a long-standing tradition in Indigenous cultures and has been employed in relation to historic external and internal protest/movements. This paper seeks to understand how Plains-style music articulates messages of protest through the use of semiotics and how music has been employed in protest environments. We will draw upon historic and recent examples to demonstrate the long-standing tradition of Indigenous Plains-style protest music.

Devil Is Fine, Devil Is Kind: Slave Spirituals, Satanic Black Metal, and Cultural Appropriation in the Music of Zeal & Ardour

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between cultural appropriation, musical protest, and African American history, as foregrounded in the music of avant-garde metal band Zeal & Ardour. Under the leadership of mixed-race Swiss-American multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux, the band gained prominence in 2016 for combining the influences of Satanism and Scandinavian black metal with African American spirituals and blues. Such a combination has allowed Zeal & Ardour to creatively engage the violence of African American historical experience and sonically and conceptually explore the possibilities of an alternative account of African American experience under the influence of individualism and self-determination as promoted in Satanic philosophies. This proposition becomes complicated, however, when the Satanic worldview espoused in Scandinavian black metal articulates not only an aggressive critique of Christianity, but also, in a number of instances, the promotion of white supremacist and national socialist worldviews. The resultant combination of these clashing influences is a complex interlinking of musical traditions and ideological positions through which Zeal & Ardour explores cultural appropriation as a form of protest, and ultimately embraces jarring juxtapositions and messy fusion as a necessary mode of artistic expression amid the racial tensions and culture wars of the early twenty-first century.

The Power of Protest Music: Exploring the Role of Songs in Social Change

6 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 84 No.1 THE POWER OF PROTEST MUSIC: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF SONGS IN SOCIAL CHANGE By Katie Rydell and Ally Bienvenu As undergraduate students pursuing teaching certification at a liberal arts college, we received pre-service training integrating experiences that extended our understanding of students’ lived realities. In the fall of 2020, we took a course titled “Teaching for Social Justice” that examined how educators can develop learners who critically engage with the world around them. Unpacking the events of the year, many conversations centered around protests. The summer of 2020 was marked by worldwide protests against racism and police brutality, from Minneapolis to Tokyo. The act of protesting has been part of the American experience since the nation’s founding, and throughout history, it has evolved to support different causes. Conducting research, we became fascinated with the role of music in protest, specifically related to movements within the Black community. We identified that exploring songs can provide an accessible lens through which students can learn about protests and the issues they address. Accumulating our findings in this article, we provide an overview of music as a form of protest to illustrate the longevity of this unique tradition. While seeking to create an inclusive space within their high school that welcomed and valued all students, specifically Black students, they understood there would be several roadblocks. One of those roadblocks occurred when they advocated for a Black History Month (BHM) celebration that highlighted the contributions of Blacks to this country and their communities. Their advocacy elicited gazes of disapproval, and attempts to generate momentum for a shared vision for celebrating it were met with an acknowledgement that the school would continue to celebrate BHM following the past status quo—to only emphasize BHM within the context of slavery. These comments, decisions, and reactions made them feel even more isolated. They recognized that this isolation was not only felt in their high school, but also in ways they experienced the world—as a White student union. The initial and frequent inquiry as to why a Black Student Union was necessaryhelped the students realize just how underrepresented they are in the spaces they inhabit, in the media they consume, and in the history they are taught. Nineteenth-Century Protest Music Hope, music, and social change share a deep-rooted connection. This bond played an integral role in American society throughout the nineteenth century in relation to the abolition of enslavement. Enslaved people and abolitionists alike utilized religious songs known as “spirituals” for protest, activism outreach, communal bonding, and personal strength. Among them were noteworthy leaders like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Hutchinson Family Singers, and Harriet Tubman. BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 | 7 84 No.1 Historically, spirituals served to inspire determination, resistance, and hope in the face of oppression. Thought to be derived from the combination of European psalmody and African musical elements, spirituals personified centuries of overcoming extreme sorrow and immoral hardships, while also inspiring the listeners to anticipate a better future.1 Through the singing of spirituals, enslaved individuals found strength and inspiration while also relaying a powerful message to hold on to dreams of freedom, for a higher power was in control. For example, the song “Ride On, King Jesus” addressed the mistreatment of individuals by their enslavers. This spiritual informed both singers and listeners that enslavers were no match for the Lord who is merciful. Hopeful songs like this encouraged enslaved people to find strength in their faith. Similarly, spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Deep River,” and “Go Down Moses” actively contributed to the abolitionist movement to purge the United States of enslavement. These songs were integral in the success of the Underground Railroad. Since it was illegal for people who were enslaved to read or write, songs were one of the sole information sharing methods available. Secret codes and hidden messages passed along in spirituals were invaluable for people escaping enslavement as they moved along various Underground Railroad points. These songs communicated messages about how to escape and warned of dangerous obstacles along the route, as well as inspiring them...

A Sound Archive

A Sound Archive Alex Lichtenstein (bio) Steven P. Garabedian, A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xii + 240 pp. Figures, notes, index. $27.95. Steven P. Garabedian, A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xii + 240 pp. Figures, notes, index. $27.95. Those of us who have done research on the history of the Communist left in the United States, on the culture of the 1930s, or on the history of southern chain gangs, have almost certainly come across a small 1936 songbook of two dozen "Negro Songs of Protest" compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Graced with a striking cover illustration by Lawrence's more famous brother, the Communist artist Hugo Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest remains a quintessential example of Popular Front culture and a radical complement to the much-better-known material collected by Alan Lomax across the South during the same period and deposited at the Library of Congress. But, as Steven Garabedian's book A Sound History proposes, the Gellert story is even far more complicated—and interesting—than it might seem at first glance. Gellert and his fieldwork, Garabedian shows, experienced a "trajectory of celebration to defamation" (p. ix). During the 1930s, the African American protest songs Gellert collected across the South made a signal contribution to what Michael Denning has called "the cultural front," exposing radicals to a taste of Black vernacular culture aligned with the politics of the moment.1 During the Cold War years, however, Gellert's association with the Communist Party (CP) and its publications—his brother Hugo was an editor at the New Masses, and some of Gellert's material initially appeared in its pages—made his work suspect. Now what had been lauded as an amazing feat of recovery of a buried folk expression was derided as "an example of white leftwing propaganda…rather than Black vernacular creativity and resistance" (p. 9). The CP, once the alleged champion of African American rights, most famously in its global campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys," came to be regarded during the Cold War as preying on Black discontent for its own nefarious ends. Gellert's once-laudable efforts to collect and disseminate an authentic protest culture located among the most oppressed group of African Americans living under Jim Crow was now dismissed as manipulative, at best, and outright fakery at worst. [End Page 583] So, Garabedian's book asks, was the material unearthed by Gellert merely a "product of white propaganda" or rather an authentic expression of "Black vernacular creativity" (p. ix)? Astutely, Garabedian frames his discussion of the early reception of Gellert's work within the trope of "romantic racialism."2 Dating to the nineteenth century, this tradition served equally well the celebrators and the detractors of African American culture. "The romantic racialist mindset," Garabedian observes, made it possible to "favor Black music while still denying Black intellect or agency" (p. 6). As Garabedian puts it, in the romantic racialist tradition, "People of color have been expected [by whites] to sing with open hearts, but not openly speak their minds" (p. 6). Though associated primarily with nineteenth-century abolitionism, the cultural left of the 1930s was not immune to this outlook, and indeed could be said in some quarters to have revived it. Nevertheless, Garabedian resists placing Gellert himself in this camp. Instead, he regards the left-wing amateur ethnomusicologist, "audodidact[,] and self-styled bohemian radical" (p. 21) as "a sincere broker in the cause of racial justice and radical change" (p. 14). Following in the footsteps of southern white collectors of "Negro songs" like Howard Odum, Guy Johnson, and John A. Lomax, Sr. (Alan's father), Gellert's ear seemed attuned to something quite different. "Where they heard primitivism, plantation nostalgia, [or] racial nostalgia," Garabedian notes, "Gellert heard Black resistance" (p. 54). John Lomax in particular had established a template that allowed white collectors to treat Black folksong as an inexplicable expression of "Black self-pity." "Why this should be true," Lomax had written in 1917, "is difficult to say." To this astoundingly obtuse remark in the "romantic racialist" vein...

Vigilante feminism as a form of musical protest in extreme metal music

Drawing on my 2016 ethnographic research on women in New York’s extreme metal music scene, this short article discusses the emerging concept of vigilante feminism; a term first coined by American Studies professor Laura D’Amore in her 2017 study, Vigilante Feminism: Revising Trauma, Abduction, and Assault in American Fairy Tale Revisions. Through interviews with the death metal band Castrator, the role of the female musician and fan in the extreme metal music (EMM) scene is explored. Using the lens of vigilante feminism as a form of musical protest, I analyse lyrical content, performativity and the ways in which female musicians navigate the traditionally masculine-coded subculture. I argue that for some female death metal musicians, vigilante feminism acts as a form of empowerment which enables them to coexist in a liminal space so often dominated by their male counterparts.

Transgressive Leadership and Theo-ethical Texts of Black Protest Music

ABSTRACTLimited academic publications analysing the theologies and ethics of historic Black Freedom Struggles have resulted in minimal inclusion in broader theological and ethical canons. In this article I explore the role of music in Black Freedom Struggles, especially the historic Civil Rights Movement, to argue that such music was a transgressive tool that expanded leadership positions and produced new theo-ethical and socio-political texts. These organic oral texts were published through alternative methods, expanding activists’ theological and ethical beliefs about the social and political struggles in which they participated. Finally, I suggest that protest music in the contemporary Movement for Black Lives offers a view into the lived realities and commitments of participants as they continue the tradition of using music as a theo-ethical and socio-political tool.

"Sluta spela fin och gå loss"

The Polyphony of Original Dunder Zubbis: Ideology and Ugliness as Musical Protest
 Ideas of ugliness are closely intertwined with ideological practices. A contemporary arena for such practices is public debates on ”social exclusion” and ”drug addiction”. Individuals are subjected as excluded through discursive practices where these groups are described in stigmatising ways, as ugly in the broadest sense. This article is an analysis of how ugliness is appropriated in the music of the Swedish group Original Dunder Zubbis (ODZ), a rap group associated with these social problems.The analysis shows that ODZ’s use of themes of ugliness produces a collective. This collective is to a certain extent polyphonic, in the Bakhtinian sense. However, the verbal, audial and visual techniques employed by the group result in a collective without individual voices and perspectives. This can be understood as a way of resisting stigmatising ideological practices. When authority interpellates ODZ as addicts, criminals, and excluded, no single individual stops to recognise this subjectification.

Sound and Movement

As a global financial crisis rippled through the late 2000s and early 2010s, with mass political movements rising in its wake, many journalists and critics in the English-language press asked an anxious question: where are the protest songs? But the question was begged: such songs were already presumed gone. This article reorients the question of where the protest songs are toward a broader inquiry into sound’s relationship to dissent. Protest music is best understood as a genre, limited by its musical structure as well as its era. Phrased as where is the sound of dissent, the question takes on renewed urgency. Sonic dissent is emergent in many places and doing vital work. I argue for an analytic of sonic vernacularism, or vernaculars of sonic dissent, that might attend to the historical specificity of sound’s role in dissent, as well as to the ways that sound’s meanings are deliberately unsettled through performances of dissent. I offer a case study from fieldwork conducted during antigovernment protests in Bangkok, Thailand, in the early 2010s to analyze how sound acts, circulates, and refracts meaning in the performance of dissent, later returning to protest music—now to be understood as provincial and ideological.

Türkiye’de 1960’larda Müzik Alanı ve Protest Müziğin İlk Nüveleri: Anadolu Pop Akımı

It has been widely recognized that a simple, unilateral interpretation of musical phenomena is insufficient. This recognition, in turn, has triggered the search for new methods to improve interdisciplinary approaches. In this context, the question of how to develop the field of music sociology is much debated. In addition, this has also necessitated the interweaving of sociology and music without, however, compromising the nuances of both disciplines. This article mainly examines the rise of Anatolian Pop—a fusion of rock music and Turkish folk—in a holistic manner. A Bourdieusian analysis of art is inherently sociological in nature, and it also involves the analysis of structural history; interactive fields—politics and music, in this context; musical phenomena; and the different structures and agencies that influence a given field. This study, therefore, draws from and is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s holistic approach. This study shows that the birth of Anatolian Pop in the 1960’s was not accidental or spontaneous. In fact, the emergence of Anatolian Pop was made possible by a favorable political environment and the emergence of autonomous art in Turkey in the 1960s; additionally, it was also influenced by protest music, which was popular in the US in the 1960s. Protest music, in particular, encouraged self-expression. 

Seth Brodsky. From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 368 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewSeth Brodsky. From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 368 pp.Eric DrottEric Drott Search for more articles by this author Eric Drott is associate professor of music theory at the University of Texas, Austin. He is author of Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (2011). Current projects include The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music, coedited with Noriko Manabe, and a book titled Streaming Music and the Culture of Digital Capitalism.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 44, Number 4Summer 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698183 Views: 168Total views on this site © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

What I Learned from Gay Country, Communist Disco, and a Choctaw Poet’s Sermon on Immigration

Protest and the Southern ImaginaryWhat I Learned from Gay Country, Communist Disco, and a Choctaw Poet’s Sermon on Immigration Brendan Greaves (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 6] folksingers and journalists As a kid—hell, for much of my adult life too, if I’m being honest—I hated so-called protest music. Weaned on a heady mix of postpunk and indie rock (which I discovered through fanzines, newsprint label mail order catalogs, local college radio, and all-ages shows in Boston and Providence) and classic postwar country, folk, and jazz (which I explored through my father’s dog-eared record collection), the songs and recordings I associated with “protest music” seemed to me ossified, defanged fossils of a bygone era—namely the 1960s, my parents’ generation. As a teenager, I revered Odetta and Nina Simone, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, but I somehow associated any overtly political material with “Kumbaya” singalongs and handholding, anemic acoustic guitars and campfires. I liked some deeply politicized contemporary bands like Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat and Public Enemy and the Ex, but, in retrospect, I was responding more to the anger and profanity, the aggressive sonic assault, than the actual political content, which I didn’t entirely digest. It’s not that I didn’t agree with the substance or the sloganeering, but rather that I found any explicit statements of political position in music gauche, even mildly embarrassing, for what I perceived as strenuous earnestness, stridency, and didacticism. The cloistered cultural corner of the 1990s that I blithely inhabited valued irony and detachment, a position I could afford to assume. Classic American vernacular protest music all sounded to me vaguely medicinal—prescriptive and proscriptive—and insufficiently veiled. All I could hear was sanctimonious self-righteousness, a hermetic resistance to criticism, and engagement that reeked of cloying clouds of church incense and represented to me the opposite of artistry, as if singing unequivocally about actual freedom precluded the exercise of artistic freedom (whatever that might be). I was a white boy living a sheltered, solipsistic, and privileged life in rural Massachusetts, in a family of middle-class Republicans, a provincial product of Catholic and Latin schools. Thick gray veins of ancient, tumbling stone walls ran through the broad woods around my house at the foot of a steep hill; my adolescent taste and my adolescent angst were equally impregnable. I knew nothing about protest. I knew nothing about the South, certainly. (I’ve lived in North Carolina for thirteen years now, and I’m still learning.) [End Page 7] “You’re not a folksinger, you’re a journalist,” Bob Dylan spat at Phil Ochs, before kicking him out of his limo, or so the legend goes. How brave and righteous of Blonde on Blonde Bob, I thought. How noble to value art above politics, to honor interiority over topicality, to keep those realms separate and discrete. I was wrong, reader; I was deaf. I grew up and joined the world, in which music fulfills a myriad of functions and needn’t remain segregated from political speech and action. The songwriter and organizer Si Kahn, whose interview appears in this issue, has succinctly expressed the ubiquity of politics in, and adjacent to, music, even when unintentional: Being “political” isn’t about being “politically correct,” or about taking particular stands. It should never be about having our art subsumed by the political. Rather, through our work, the political is made into art. Particular issues may come and go. But the art we create, individually and together, will persist, and will continue to move people, both into action and into a deeper place of consciousness and hope. All artists are political, whether we mean to be or not . . . If in your art you are silent about the challenging issues of our time, you have by your silence taken a political stand.1 The title of this special issue of Southern Cultures, “Music & Protest,” deploys language that is explicitly additive and equivalent instead of descriptive or possessive. “Protest Music” and “The Music of Protest” both struck me as too specific and constrained, too on the nose...

Squaring with the Truth: Peter Maxwell Davies and <em>Vesalii Icones</em>

SQUARING WITH THE TRUTH: PETER MAXWELL DAVIES AND VESALII ICONES NIRMALI FENN N DECEMBER 4, 1963, THE VATICAN COUNCIL II (VCII) passed a decree permitting the Mass to be conducted in the vernacular.1 Such a reform had the potential of transforming the way in which communicants engaged in worship and challenged the distinctive ritualization strategies of the Mass for which the priest ritualized the traditional Eucharistic meal. In the Mass, the actions of eating flesh and drinking blood are symbolic—a theatrical act to preserve the memory of sacrifice. The language reform favored comprehension of such symbols and provoked widespread debate. For theologians, such as Dom Gregory Dix, the fundamental quality lost by the implementation of this reform was mystery—“the Eucharist is a holy mystery to be experienced, not something to comprehend with the mind and reduce to rational categories.”2 Following a similar logic, the British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies condemned the language reform by writing a powerfully damning response in the form of a music theater piece for dancer, cello and ensemble titled Vesalii Icones (1969).3 The year of the VCII decree occurred during a period when Davies was using music theatre as a vehicle for musical protest. His focus was O 138 Perspectives of New Music on what he perceived as religious corruption within the Catholic Church, which was spearheaded by his opera Taverner (1962–68) that dealt with the forced betrayal of a musician’s artistry for the sake of Church dogma. Through Vesalii Icones, Davies conducted an attack on the Council’s language reform; ultimately, he believed the use of the vernacular as a language to convey the sacred jeopardized the mystery behind the sanctity of the ritual that is the Catholic Mass. The objective of this paper is to unravel why Vesalii Icones heightens mystery, and how increasing mystification increases revelation. First, I will focus on the most ritualistically overt sound in Vesalii Icones—the ringing of the Sanctus bells. These bells mark the boundary points of individual musical movements. However, I will argue that these bell solos are “contaminated” by composed music, which as examples of imported secular music, dissolve the demarcated boundaries between musical movements and the sacred from the profane. Second, I intend to reveal the presence of recursive structures operating at a sectional and macro level. The consequence of these structures is to destabilize the structured ritual framework. To reinforce this observation, I will draw on the anthropological work of Don Handelman, referring to research from his two papers Ritual in its own Right and Models and Mirrors.4 By citing Handelman, I intend to demonstrate that the structure of Vesalii Icones effectuates a curve that is intensified by the lack of demarcated boundaries and the use of recursions. Effectively, the piece folds in on itself, torquing from a point of intense introspection, which represents the point of ultimate concealment. Following the point in which the ritual achieves maximum introspection, the drama suddenly springs outwards in a display of unabashed exhibitionism with the dancer flinging off his garments—this is the moment of revelation. 1) THE VCII LANGUAGE REFORM AND THE PREMISE OF VESALII ICONES The VCII language reform reevaluated the operational nature of the Mass and challenged the communicative function of ritualistic language. The council’s intention was to foster the communal aspects of the liturgy. By supplanting Latin as the language of Catholic ritual, it was assumed that the vernacular language would provide the laity with a means to identify the intention directing the action.5 However, as ritual scholar Roy Rappaport raises, there are distinctions in the communicative capacities of languages. Vernacular languages have the potential to subvert, but liturgical languages are languages removed from “everyday” social systems, thereby possessing the potential to convey the sacred and the timeless: Squaring with the Truth: Peter Maxwell Davies and Vesalii Icones 139 the words of liturgy can connect that which is present to the past, or even to the beginning of time, and to the future, or even to time’s end. In their invariance itself the words of liturgy implicitly assimilate the current event into an ancient or ageless category of events, something that...

Squaring with the Truth: Peter Maxwell Davies and Vesalii Icones

SQUARING WITH THE TRUTH: PETER MAXWELL DAVIES AND VESALII ICONES NIRMALI FENN N DECEMBER 4, 1963, THE VATICAN COUNCIL II (VCII) passed a decree permitting the Mass to be conducted in the vernacular.1 Such a reform had the potential of transforming the way in which communicants engaged in worship and challenged the distinctive ritualization strategies of the Mass for which the priest ritualized the traditional Eucharistic meal. In the Mass, the actions of eating flesh and drinking blood are symbolic—a theatrical act to preserve the memory of sacrifice. The language reform favored comprehension of such symbols and provoked widespread debate. For theologians, such as Dom Gregory Dix, the fundamental quality lost by the implementation of this reform was mystery—“the Eucharist is a holy mystery to be experienced, not something to comprehend with the mind and reduce to rational categories.”2 Following a similar logic, the British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies condemned the language reform by writing a powerfully damning response in the form of a music theater piece for dancer, cello and ensemble titled Vesalii Icones (1969).3 The year of the VCII decree occurred during a period when Davies was using music theatre as a vehicle for musical protest. His focus was O 138 Perspectives of New Music on what he perceived as religious corruption within the Catholic Church, which was spearheaded by his opera Taverner (1962–68) that dealt with the forced betrayal of a musician’s artistry for the sake of Church dogma. Through Vesalii Icones, Davies conducted an attack on the Council’s language reform; ultimately, he believed the use of the vernacular as a language to convey the sacred jeopardized the mystery behind the sanctity of the ritual that is the Catholic Mass. The objective of this paper is to unravel why Vesalii Icones heightens mystery, and how increasing mystification increases revelation. First, I will focus on the most ritualistically overt sound in Vesalii Icones—the ringing of the Sanctus bells. These bells mark the boundary points of individual musical movements. However, I will argue that these bell solos are “contaminated” by composed music, which as examples of imported secular music, dissolve the demarcated boundaries between musical movements and the sacred from the profane. Second, I intend to reveal the presence of recursive structures operating at a sectional and macro level. The consequence of these structures is to destabilize the structured ritual framework. To reinforce this observation, I will draw on the anthropological work of Don Handelman, referring to research from his two papers Ritual in its own Right and Models and Mirrors.4 By citing Handelman, I intend to demonstrate that the structure of Vesalii Icones effectuates a curve that is intensified by the lack of demarcated boundaries and the use of recursions. Effectively, the piece folds in on itself, torquing from a point of intense introspection, which represents the point of ultimate concealment. Following the point in which the ritual achieves maximum introspection, the drama suddenly springs outwards in a display of unabashed exhibitionism with the dancer flinging off his garments—this is the moment of revelation. 1) THE VCII LANGUAGE REFORM AND THE PREMISE OF VESALII ICONES The VCII language reform reevaluated the operational nature of the Mass and challenged the communicative function of ritualistic language. The council’s intention was to foster the communal aspects of the liturgy. By supplanting Latin as the language of Catholic ritual, it was assumed that the vernacular language would provide the laity with a means to identify the intention directing the action.5 However, as ritual scholar Roy Rappaport raises, there are distinctions in the communicative capacities of languages. Vernacular languages have the potential to subvert, but liturgical languages are languages removed from “everyday” social systems, thereby possessing the potential to convey the sacred and the timeless: Squaring with the Truth: Peter Maxwell Davies and Vesalii Icones 139 the words of liturgy can connect that which is present to the past, or even to the beginning of time, and to the future, or even to time’s end. In their invariance itself the words of liturgy implicitly assimilate the current event into an ancient or ageless category of events, something that...

Nostalgic for Utopia: Anne Romaine’s Folk Music Protest in the New Left South

Nostalgic for UtopiaAnne Romaine’s Folk Music Protest in the New Left South Joseph M. Thompson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Romaine did not root her nostalgia in the past to evoke a simpler time of hazy, bygone days. Instead, she wanted to remind southerners of the most radical moments of their history in order to pave a way forward. Front row: Bessie Jones, Jean Ritchie, Anne Romaine, Doc Watson, Rosalie Watson; back row: three unidentified people, and Mike Seeger at far right, ca. 1960s. Photo courtesy of the Mike Seeger Collection, PF-20009/110, Southern Folklife Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [End Page 45] Speaking in March of 1995, shortly before her death, Anne Romaine reflected on the folk music concerts to which she had devoted the past thirty years of her life. At fifty-three years old and with relatively little commercial success to show for her lifetime of effort, the white civil rights activist and musician still held faith in the power of music “to create unity, and to sharpen the spirit of courage.” In 1964, Romaine had joined the Southern Students Organizing Committee (ssoc), a white student group affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc) and Students for a Democratic Society (sds). As an organizer, performer, and tour promoter in the ssoc, she drew on the folk music traditions of her native South. These tours, which began in 1966 and continued through the early 1970s, daringly presented an interracial cast of musicians who shared the stage at the same time on black and white college campuses throughout the South as the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, an organization Romaine maintained until 1993.1 On the surface, Romaine’s tours seem to offer a typical example of how the mid-century folk revival intersected with political activism. Thousands of young performers and fans began embracing folk music in the late 1950s, gradually learning of its ties to the Old Left class politics of the 1930s and even older connections to nineteenth-century academic folklore. Historians have given careful critical attention to the way folk revivalists trafficked in romanticized ideas about the often marginalized communities that created America’s vernacular music. Revivalists could seem naively nostalgic for an allegedly simpler time of organic artistic creation independent of the assumedly compromised ethics of U.S. politics and the superficiality of the pop music business. In contrast to the pop, soul, and rock and roll performers of the day, folk artists believed that their music’s ties to grassroots song traditions added moral authority to their battles for civil rights and various New Left causes.2 Yet Romaine’s use of the South’s musical past defies characterization as generic folk revival romanticism. Romaine sought to create interracial understanding through a hybrid nostalgia that served competing visions of the future: she joined racial liberalism’s proponents in hoping for integration; at the same time, she was sympathetic with an emergent vision of Black Power radicalism. Her position as a white woman activist at the intersection of these two movements reveals the particular challenges of basing progressive racial politics on a history as fraught as the U.S. South’s. Nostalgia indicates a sense of longing for an irretrievable past and a feeling that whatever change has occurred over time does not necessarily signal progress—but Romaine did not root her nostalgia in the past to evoke a simpler time of hazy, bygone days. Instead, she wanted to remind southerners of the most radical moments of their history in order to pave a way forward. [End Page 46] Click for larger view View full resolution Upon returning from New York, Romaine searched for a collaborator and contacted Bernice Johnson Reagon. Reagon had experienced the power of music to galvanize the movement in moments of crisis beginning with her participation in the protests in her hometown of Albany, Georgia. Bob Zellner, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Cordell Reagon, Dottie Miller (Zellner), and Avon Rollins at a mass meeting outside a small church. The gathering would disperse after learning that local police were massing nearby. Danville, Virginia, June 1963. Photo by Danny Lyon...