Popular Music Research Articles

Playing That Crystal Flute:Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives Kristin Moriah (bio) Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 608 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 408 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $27.00 (paperback). Black women and Black musicians have a contentious relationship with archival practices and popular memory. Take Lizzo, for example, and the moment she played James Madison's previously untouched two-hundred-year-old flute at a concert in Washington, DC, in fall 2022. In that instance, she was, as the kids say, her ancestors' wildest dreams. She certainly seemed to be creating a full circle, reaching toward the eighteenth century and grasping hold of a powerful symbol of the Enlightenment cherished by a founding father whose most notorious achievements would be used to disenfranchise women like Lizzo for generations. Common wisdom tells us that she was not meant to touch it. The crystal flute's very status within the Library of Congress calls attention to its symbolic power and its distance from Black women's marginalized position in society. Can you be Lizzo, a Black musician, and play the flute? More specifically, can you be Lizzo and play that flute? In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. They write from a cultural context in which the roots, nuances, and implications of Black musical life have often been obscured and whose continued existence, in the [End Page 395] case of Black musical archives, is often tenuous. Their scholarship represents a deep engagement with a diverse set of sonic archives and innovators. The need to theorize work so foundational to American popular culture, to mine sounds always seemingly present and in motion, arises from a sense of urgency spurred by the fascination with and furor over Black popular musicians. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne Brooks argues that "Black women of sound" have "a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and simultaneously devalues them" (1). Brooks takes "seriously the centrality of sound in Black women's lives as a foundation for developing and sustaining pivotal, profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another" (12). In doing so, she recalls the work of scholars like Jayna Brown when she argues that "what these Black women musicians offer, in short, is another way of hearing, reading, theorizing, making the modern. Black women of sound sign and sing themselves through their listening such that they reframe archaic philosophies of the 'Self' born out of high Enlightenment—thought that never had them in mind" (17). In Brooks's work, readers will also find echoes of Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye and their interrogations of Western Humanism and modernity. What is more, while rigorously engaging with critical theory from a range of fields, Liner Notes is structured like a vinyl record. Thus the text speaks to the influence of material culture on Black sound studies. Black media form part of the message. Side A of Liner Notes is "a meditation on the importance of intellectual labour and Black women's sonic cultures" (45). Side B is "an exploration of elusive Black women musicians and the critics and artists who have focused their attention on their legacies in a variety of ways" (45). Side B takes inspiration from the experimental nature of B sides and moves more fully into "the speculative terrain of revolutionary possibility" (45). Taken together, each side is a reminder that listening is a central critical practice. Liner Notes is a manifesto that offers a blueprint for the work that Black feminism can accomplish in the field of sound studies. While Brooks is interested in how theory and cultural criticism can...

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Piano art of Ternopil region and one of the main forms of its realization – performance, started, according to scientific sources, in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when in Galicia abolished serfdom in 1848 and began the period of formation of educational and cultural organizations “Native School”, “Prosvita”,“Literary Society” and others. They became the main factors in shaping the national consciousness and culture of the local people.The most important role in these processes in the Ternopil region was played by the “Native School” society, in which groups of choral and vocal singing, artistic recitation, and playing musical instruments were organized. Actually, these circles formed a love of art in different directions, including piano music.The founder of piano art in the Ternopil region is the Polish pianist, teacher and cultural and public figure Vladyslav Vshelyachynskyi, a native of the town of Kopychyntsi, in Ternopil region. It was he who became the brightest representative of the piano movement in our study area initially.In 1876, after completing his studies at the Conservatory, Vladyslav Vshelyachinskyi moved to Ternopil to continue and improve his practical activity. He organized the “Friends of Music” Society and a school for piano lessons with him. He was the music director of these two institutions for twelve years.One of the founders of the creation of piano art in Ternopil region was also Denys Leontovych, born in Lviv in 1868. Denis’s father, Theodore Leontovych, whose family started in the village Novosilka Buchach county (now Buchach district of Ternopil region), was at one time a wellknown Lviv cultural and public figure, pianist, music critic, owner of the newspaper “Osnova”), author of popular songs at that time. He became the first piano teacher for his son.Unfortunately, Denys Leontovych’s short life did not allow him to develop his musical talent to the full, but those few years of concert activity of the drunkard deserve attention from musicologists and point to his invaluable contribution to the formation and development of the piano art of the Ternopil region, he had a special love.An important contribution to the formation and development of the piano art of Ternopil region was made by Denys Sichynskyi as a composer, pianist and accompanist. His creative activity was, first of all, connected with Ternopil region. In the initial stages of being in the land, besides creating musical compositions and managing the countryside and small-town choirs, he was involved in the promotion of piano art through his direct creation and representation as an accompanist.Denys Sichinskyi, as a creator of piano art, has realized himself in three spheres – in writing works for piano, in preparing piano accompaniment for choral and vocal works and in accompaniment for famous singers – Solomiia Krushelnytska, Evgen Gushalevych, Oleksandr Myshuga and others. It was these aspects of his creative activity that determined the formation of piano art in Ternopil region in the first half of the nineteenth century.Thus, the piano art of the Ternopil region of the second half of the nineteenth century represents a stage connected with the birth of its main forms of realization – pedagogical, concertperforming, composer-reproductive. All these forms are clearly traced in the activities of such representatives as Vladyslav Vshelyachinskyi, Denys Leontovych and Denys Sichynskyi. Each of them laid the foundations of piano art for its further development and development to the best of its creative potential. This was, first and foremost, designed to ensure that their successors made a more representative contribution to its transfer. And the piano works of Denys Sichynskyi formed a repertoire performed by the Galician pianists of that time, marked by lyricism, genre linearity and typical harmonious turns derived from traditional folk music. Overall, this stage provided the basis for the subsequent professionalization of piano art in the twentieth century.

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Popular Music Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Popular Music

Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf

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A Preliminary Exploration of How Sarawak Indigenous Popular Music Contributes to the Development of Sarawakian Identity

Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives

대학 고전시가 교육의 선택과 배제

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