Revolutionary Songs Research Articles

Первые спектакли и концерты советского театра на фронтах Гражданской войны в конце 1918 г.

The article reveals as yet little-studied problem of organizing performances and concerts in celebration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution on the fronts of the Civil War in November-December 1918. The author identifies reasons why this topic has fallen out of the sphere of scientific interest of national and foreign historians. The key reason springs from great enthusiasm for studying urban Soviet celebrations of October Revolution anniversaries, May Day demonstrations, etc., which allows to reveal the aims of Soviet leadership in using holidays to legitimize the new state and to enhance their prestige, as well as to throw light on the shaping of masses to be not an independent actor in the celebrations, but an obedient performer of the festivities scriptwriters’ and directors’ will. Meanwhile, the study of the issue allows not only to shed light on the early period of organizing cultural and educational work within the ranks of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army, but also to reveal some features and difficulties of early Soviet holiday culture as an element of the emerging Soviet ideology and a means of interaction between the state apparatus and the population. The source base for the article has been provided by the archival fond of the People's Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR (fond A-2306) stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and by the archival fond of the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (fond 8) from the Russian State Military Archive (RFVA). Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of the scope of concerts and performances; the article reveals theater troupes’ reasons for choosing their repertoire and difficulties they faced when conducting concerts and performances. The author gives examples of organization and design of performances and concerts; these often included an opening speech followed by revolutionary songs and appeals, dramatic as well as satirical. Moreover, the author assesses the contents of concerts and performances and specifics of their execution by certain artists and troupe directors as reflected in their reports and explanatory notes and also in certificates and commendations from military and civilian institutions that hosted performers. The article ends in representation of main results of performances and concerts in Soviet military units and formations, comments of soldiers and their commanders on professionalism of the actors and importance of organizing these cultural events. It is suggested that the campaign to commemorate the October Revolution on the lines was a major factor in the formation of systematic cultural, educational, and ideological work in the Red Army.

Rewriting Gender in the New Revolutionary Song

AbstractThis essay examines the meanings of gender in the music of Cuba’s Nueva Trova, an important expression of what came to be known as the Nueva Canción (New Song) that flourished throughout Latin America between the 1960s and the 1980s. The continent-wide movement sought to challenge the commercialization of the airwaves by raising profound, revolutionary, and deeply Latin American themes while revaluing traditional instruments and styles. Music played an important role in articulating a rejection of capitalist and colonial values, a turn to popular and indigenous roots, a commitment to continent-wide revolution, and a vision of a better world. Through festivals, gatherings, and conferences, mass concerts and radio, international travel, and, under dictatorship, clandestinely circulated cassette tapes, the Nueva Canción exemplified a generation’s search for multiple meanings of liberation. In participating in radical critiques of Latin America’s social order, the Nueva Canción rewrote gender norms embedded in society and its music. Revolutionary singer-songwriters explored the meanings of human emancipation in ways that challenged traditional gender roles and ideologies. Political, personal, and love songs upended gender stereotypes to offer new, revolutionary meanings to romantic love. Songwriters linked the Cuban Revolution to other Latin American revolutionary processes and imagined how the new society would liberate the human spirit and human potential. Socially committed art reflected, explored, and contributed to imagining the new world, and reimagining gender played a role in the process and in its music.

The activities of the Chinese orchestras of the traditional instruments of the new type in the 1960s - 1970s

The activities of the Chinese orchestras of the traditional instruments of the new type in the 1960s - 1970s

The activities of the Chinese orchestras of the traditional instruments of the new type in the 1960s - 1970s

The activities of the Chinese orchestras of the traditional instruments of the new type in the 1960s - 1970s

Revolutionary songs in a gentrifying city: stylistic change and the economics of salvage in southern Mexico

AbstractThis article explores the case of a musician performing pro-Zapatista revolutionary songs in a restaurant in a city in southern Mexico which has undergone rapid gentrification since the turn of the century. It highlights the particular set of constraints on, and possibilities for, musical creativity that emerged in an urban setting in which space was increasingly ordered around the accumulation of rents. Exploring relationships between commercial strategy and musical detail, it examines tensions arising around the performance of a revolutionary body of song in such a setting. To conclude, and drawing on the recent work of Anna Tsing, it introduces the notion of musical ‘salvage’ to make sense of the relationship between protest and commerce. Recognizing the incompleteness of revolutionary songs’ translation into the rapidly gentrifying context of San Cristóbal, it is argued here, may help to underline performer agency and creativity.

Family Therapy and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Therapeutic Use of Songs in Apartheid South Africa

A central issue for family therapy is the critical question of how to define its role in influencing social change. Family therapy has tended to focus on how to liberate and empower individual clients, not communities, from the travails of tradition. This article highlights social change mechanisms implemented by the oppressed majority in South Africa during the apartheid period. It draws inspiration from the pedagogy of the oppressed articulated by Steve Biko and other members of his generation. This enabled the Black majority in South Africa ‘to name their world by reflecting on their conditions, imagining a better world, and then taking action to create it’ (Freire, 1968, p. 253) through the use of revolutionary songs that resulted in the collapse of the cruel apartheid system. The implications for family therapy are discussed.

The Role of Folk Songs in Social Movements: A Case Study on the Separate Telangana State Formation in India

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The Khmer Rouge, Ritual and Control

On April 17th 1975 the communist party of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, took power and evacuated the cities forcing citizens into the countryside while killing many in an attempt to eradicate members of the previous government of the Khmer Republic, as well as former soldiers, intellectuals, and artists. The Khmer Rouge employed various tactics to increase their power during this time including the elimination of ritual practices such as dance dramas, family ceremonies, and religious activities. Drawing upon memoirs, autobiographies, and other sources as well as structural ritualisation theory these developments are analysed using the concepts of strategic deritualisation and strategic ritualisation. After the elimination of important rituals the Khmer Rouge implemented new propaganda based rituals in an attempt to instill their beliefs into the minds of peasants and youth while creating a debilitating fear in the previous city dwellers. These rituals included attending speeches, singing emotionally charged revolutionary songs, and attending dance dramas depicting the glory of the revolution and its leader “Angkar.” Implications of the study are discussed especially in regard to the role ritual dynamics can play in social control and extremist (sometimes genocidal) regimes.

Sound Systems

Sound Systems

The Experience of L’Internationale in Modern China

Abstract During the 20th-century Chinese revolution, L’Internationale was one of the most important political symbols. After the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871, Eugène Pottier wrote the poem titled “L’Internationale” which was published for the first time until 1887. It was set to music by Pierre Degeyter in 1888 and introduced into China from both France and the Soviet Union (USSR). Qu Qiubai and Xiao San made great contribution to the work of translation that influenced the official version in 1962. From a hymn for the International Workingmen’s Association to the revolutionary song of all the proletariats, L’Internationale was the historical witness of the National Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution and the Continuous Revolution, whose symbolic meanings were connected closely to the tensions between nationalism and internationalism.

Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales

Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before an individual totally adopts the new song. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 9,300 phrases recorded during two song revolutions across the South Pacific Ocean, allowing fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. In hybrid songs the current and new songs were spliced together in two specific ways: (i) singers placed a single hybrid phrase, in which content from both songs were combined, between the two song types when transitioning from one to the other, and/or (ii) singers spliced complete themes from the revolutionary song into the current song. Sequence analysis indicated that both processes were governed by structural similarity rules. Hybrid phrases or theme substitutions occurred at points in the songs where both songs contained “similar sounds arranged in a similar pattern.” Songs appear to be learned as segments (themes/phrase types), akin to birdsong and human language acquisition, and these can be combined in predictable ways if the underlying structural pattern is similar. These snapshots of song change provide insights into the mechanisms underlying song learning in humpback whales, and comparative perspectives on the evolution of human language and culture.

Listening, resistance and mobile phone playlists: musical listening practices of Syrian women living as refugees in Northern Jordan

In 2011, when the Syrians poured into the streets in nation-wide protest against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, they did so in song. Public places became filled with the voices of men, women and children who gained courage and determination through an increasing repertoire of songs shared through social media and learned in the homes and on the streets. Later as the violence intensified in the street, the women returned to their homes, their songs playing now from behind closed doors. When their homes, were destroyed, many took their children and walked to the safety of neighbouring Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, songs saved on SIM cards tucked into their bras. This paper looks at those living in the border towns of Northern Jordan and at the role the revolutionary songs play in their lives. Through analysis of the songs on the mobile phones of 45 women and interviews with them and their families on the role these have in their day-to-day life, British ethnomusicologist Karen Boswall and Jordanian social anthropologist Dr Ruba Al Akash ask how the songs are contributing to the women’s sense of self and their connection with the country they left behind.

La Marseillaise , hymne russe

In Russia, the national anthem is considered as a powerful symbol of identity and a mean for the power to bolster adhesion to its values. The use of the Marseillaise as a national anthem in this country is both a landmark of its international diffusion since 1792 and a significant event in the history of Russian political culture.Before 1917 this song was in Russia a hymn standing both for revolution and France. As the national anthem of a strategic ally it was played officially at the turn of the century, with a peak just before the Great War. As a revolutionary song, it inspired the worker’s Marseillaise, a Russian revolutionary song. During the first revolution, the provisional government used it as a temporary national anthem. On January 10th, 1918 it was superseded by the Internationale as the national anthem of the Soviet Union, but remained amongst the official songs and marches.The fate of this hymn in Russia reflects the tensions in this country between European influences and its own identity.

La Marseillaise , chant d’adhésion et de contestation pour les libres penseurs

From 1940 and until 1944, La Marseillaise is diverted, instrumented by the Resistance fighters to challenge Germans and collaborators, by music and images.The Free Thought movement viewed itself as the spearhead of the Republic and the body asked to uphold secularism, supreme republican value. Free thinkers used La Marseillaise to express their support of the Revolution and the Republic, but also to dispute the role and the place of religion in the State and the society.The attachment of the activist free thinkers with this anthem, that it is the music and the words or only the music (anticlerical versions abound), highlights the strength of the link existing between the Free Thought, the Great Revolution and the Republic. However, in the course of the decades, this link tended more and more to express itself through another revolutionary song, The Carmagnole, that never became an anthem, whereas was born the bigger desire of a world scale Revolution, that what translated by the recourse to the Internationale.

The non-aligned humanism of Rudolf Bruci: The composer and the society of self-management socialism

In 1979 the oratorio We Are All a Single Party was performed, composed by the Yugoslav composer Rudolf Bruci, who in an interview for the Novi Sad daily newspaper Dnevnik explained his driving motives in the following way: ?I wanted to preserve the spirit of our revolutionary songs and to speak in a modern, familiar way, understandable to everyone, about the decades in which our revolution was born and grew; about the legendary activities of pre-war communists, the difficult days of the War of National Liberation, the liberation and reconstruction of the country, about Tito and his invaluable contribution to the development of our selfmanagement socialism and non-aligned humanism? (Dnevnik, 10 April, 1979). In this article I argue that the syntagm ?non-aligned humanism? is suitable for identifying the connection between the aesthetic and the political in Rudolf Bruci?s creative output, observed as a consistent author?s opus. At the core of this thesis lies the assumption that non-alignment in regard to the West or East was a major political and aesthetic orientation of Yugoslav self-management socialism. The intersubjective field of this self-management socialist pluralism produced creative entities - composers such as Bruci - whose works were created under the principles of direct political engagement and modernist aestheticism as different manifestations of the same ideology. Within the specific rationality of non-aligned humanism, the concrete poetic-morphological characteristics of Bruci?s compositions become coherent subjective (Bruci?s personal) and objective (social) achievements.

The Second Life of Master Jan Hus and Hussitism in Music of Bohemia and Around the World – The Revolutions of 1848

As part of his research on development of the traditions of “Jan Hus” and “Hussitism” as musical subject matter, the author of the article has concentrated on 1848, the Year of Revolution. The first part of the text introduces the texts of revolutionary songs and outlines the circumstances that led to the transformation of the reception of historical traditions, and thereby led to the new form of their influence on music. The second part is based on the contents of songbooks in which songs about Jan Hus and Hussitism were given a place of prominence. The concluding third part offers a retrospective of the development of (musical) theatre. Playing a dominant role is the music to the drama Žižkova smrt (The Death of Žižka), which was composed by Frantisek Skroup and has recently seen a revival in contemporary dramaturgy.

Song learning in humpback whales: Lessons from song hybridization events during revolutionary song change

Humpback whale songs are one of the most startling examples of transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any non-human animal. Here, we investigate extremely rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a novel, revolutionary song, to understand how songs are learnt. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 800 phrases recorded during a song revolution (French Polynesia 2005), to allow fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. Clustering of song sequences (i.e., phrases) using the Levenshtein distance indicated songs clustered into three song types; a single hybrid phrase was identified representing the transition of one singer between two of these song types. A predictive model was fitted to the data and tested against the only other known recordings of humpback song hybridization: the eastern Australia 1996-97 song revolution. Songs change during revolutions through combining multiple complete phrases and themes from one song type, before ...

The mobilising of the German 1848 protest song tradition in the context of international twentieth-century folk revivals

AbstractThe rediscovery of democratic traditions of folk song in Germany after the Second World War was not just the counter-reaction of singers and academics to the misuse of German folk song by the Nazis. Such a shift to a more ‘progressive’ interpretation and promotion of folk tradition at that time was not distinct to Germany and had already taken place in other parts of the Western world. After firstly examining the relationship between folk song and national ideologies in the nineteenth century, this article will focus on the democratic ideological basis on which the 1848 revolutionary song tradition was reconstructed after the Third Reich. It will look at how the New Social Movements of West Germany and the folk scene of the GDR functioned in providing channels of transmission for this, and how in this process a collective cultural memory was created whereby lost songs – such as those of the 1848 Revolution – could be awakened from extinction. These processes will be illustrated by textual and musical adaptations of key 1848 songs such as ‘Badisches Wiegenlied’ (Baden Lullaby), ‘Das Blutgericht’ (The Blood Court) and ‘Trotz alledem’ (For all that) within the context of the West German folk movement and its counterpart in the GDR.

Chinese Netizens’ Reactions to Red Classics Cinema Animation A Case Study of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (2011)

<p class="1Body">‘Red Classics’ can be considered as an important subgenre of Chinese cinema animation, which is often adapted from war novels, revolutionary model opera, songs and live-action films<em>. </em>Animated film <em>Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (2011)</em>, as a Red Classics cinema animation production, has provoked heated discussion among Chinese netizens in two largest online film communities and review aggregator sites <em>Douban Movie </em>and <em>Mtime</em>. This paper reveals the Chinese netizens’ reception process of this movie before and after public screening by analysing the relevant brief comments and longer film reviews from the above two websites. Chinese audiences’ expectation on <em>Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy</em> was relatively negative before exhibition in cinema. This can be partly attributed to the emotional discontent over the previous Chinese animation and government intervention on artistic creation. However, there has been a gradual shift in the attitudes of netizens towards this movie after the public exhibition, the reviews have become more objective, rational and positive. This article aims to identify the reasons behind such attitude change by applying reception studies approach, and how and to what extent these elements have affected Chinese netizens’ evaluation process.</p>

Whose Voices? The Fate of Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.