Street Songs Research Articles

Was Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto a Hidden Homage?

Shostakovich’s direct quotation from the Odessan street song “Bagels, Buy My Bagels!” (Bubliki, kupite bubliki!) in his Second Cello Concerto Op. 126 (1966) featured an unusual style, even in relation to some of his other compositions referencing popular and Jewish music. The song is widely known as one of the icons of the Odessa underworld. Shostakovich’s use of this melody as one of the main leit-themes of the Concerto can be compared to the use by the non-Jewish Andrei Sinyavsky of the Jewish pseudonym Abram Tertz, a bandit from the Odessa underworld—the only locus of freedom to tell the truth in a totalitarian society. The time of Shostakovich’s address to this song remarkably coincided with the famous Soviet trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel in the fall of 1965 and their final sentencing (February 1966) to years in a Gulag camp. The dramaturgy of Shostakovich’s Concerto, written in the same spring of 1966, demonstrates the transformation of the theme of “Bagels” into a tragic image. The totality of circumstantial evidence suggests that this opus could be the composer’s hidden tribute to the feats of Russian heroic writers.

Mapping Early Modern Parisian Sound Worlds

The digital project which forms the focus of this article is the website www.parisiansoundscapes.org. Both the theory and practice of attempting to recreate the sound worlds and particularly the song culture of early modern Paris are discussed in this article, starting with the research-based background to the project, with the publication of two monographs, and moving to the musical collaboration with the period instrument group Badinage. The importance of the Pont Neuf both as an auditory space and as the location where street songs were most often performed is analysed, followed by consideration of the various challenges that we have encountered in attempting to recreate the sound worlds of the 1600s and 1700s. The three major features of the website - transcription of handwritten manuscripts, song recordings, and song tunes - are highlighted, as are the future plans for the development of the project.

Women's View in Street and Lamenting Songs

Lamenting songs are one of the genres in Tamil literature. Music is intertwined in the life of the village people. Lamennting songs are sung to express the feeling of sorrow that arises in one's heart when a mother, father, husband, child, sibling or relative dies. People who do not know about the history of the dead people they can learn about the dead person’s history through those songs. A musical instrument known as Roar is played in death house. The sound of roar announces the death news in society. The same custom is seen in the streets. The street songs are intertwined with the roar music. This article brings out the hidden lamenting songs of street artists. In addition, we see that the relationship between the artists and the context of the story is revealed through comparison. Also, dictionary description of lamenting, lamenting in literature, structure of street songs is described in this article.

Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800-1925, by Daniel Karlin

Reviewed by: Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925 by Daniel Karlin Lee Behlman (bio) Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, by Daniel Karlin; pp. xii + 195. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, $44.95, $43.99 ebook. In Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925, Daniel Karlin tracks the incursions into poetry and fiction of the extraordinarily vivid and now-lost musical soundscapes of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century London, Dublin, Paris, Florence, and New York. In seven chapters, four of which were Clarendon lectures at an earlier stage, we are introduced to writers' persistent fixations on aural street performances as works ripe for appropriation and restaging as dramatic tableaux. In selecting his examples, Karlin seeks to go "beyond mere reference," or that which only "adds local colour to a realist fiction"; rather, he investigates works in which a song "plays a specific part in an artistic design" (7). As this decision suggests—thematic connections across its chapters notwithstanding—this book as a whole is not thesis-driven. Elizabeth Helsinger's related Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) (which Karlin does not cite) is a useful point of contrast. While Helsinger reflects at length, via Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's aesthetic theory, on both "ideas about song" and "song as a possible model for understanding how poems can be said to think," Karlin resists larger claims about how his writers understand song as a rival or coequal to the lyric, let alone as a crucible for intellection ([University of Virginia Press], 2). He limits himself to actual existing street songs—or made-up ones—that made their way, as subject matter and quoted content, into poems and novels, while leaving unexamined the headier subject of how literary works might function as "song" and the implications of that gesture. He stays close to the ground of his chosen texts in resourceful readings of familiar and lesser-known poems by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Walt Whitman, as well as major twentieth-century novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. As with his earlier The Figure of the Singer (2013), Karlin's critical voice here is charmingly warm and direct, fast on the move but unhurried, as he teases out implications and chains of association. In the opening chapter, for example, he uses Robert Herrick's "Cherrie-Ripe" (1648), which famously incorporates an actual street seller's cry, as the point of departure for reflections on Thomas Campion, Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, the "migrations" of songs into visual art, and then back to poetry with Wordsworth's "Power of Music" (1807), to which much of the chapter is devoted (4). In discussing that poem, Karlin shows Wordsworth's middle-class spectator celebrating a solo violinist's performance before a rapturous working-class crowd, and distracting them from the cacophony of competing street sounds; as he keenly notes, this Orpheus figure "consciously or [End Page 338] unconsciously recalls" William Hogarth's etching The Enrag'd Musician (1741), a comic representation of street music and street life overwhelming a frustrated professional musician (16). (Wordsworth characteristically plays it straight, though.) Karlin later juxtaposes Wordsworth's poem with George Gissing's 1889 novel The Nether World to demonstrate how, in both, the surrounding street sounds constitute an assault on the senses that poses challenges to aesthetic reception and public order. Throughout the book, Karlin's avowed emphasis is not on street songs in their original cultural contexts but rather on how his authors repurposed them for divergent aesthetic and ideological purposes. A standout chapter focuses on Barrett Browning's use of street singers, children and adults in a range of late works that respond to the fluctuating fortunes of the Risorgimento in the late 1840s and early 1850s, including both parts of Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and "The King's Gift" (1862). In the former work, the child singer in the poem's second part "is there not by accident, 'overheard' as he passes beneath the speaker's window," but instead has been obviously planted there in a patently "improbable" gesture (46). The...

Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925 by Daniel Karlin

MLR, .,   of the connection between Edgar Allan Poe and information theory, or Justine S. Murison on Martin Van Buren’s relationship to party politics. Many of the essays refer to popular anthologies for undergraduates, especially e Norton Anthology of American Literature, which have cemented what Robert S. Levine calls ‘microperiods’ (pp. –). While most references to anthologies call attention to the elisions and artificial barriers these anthologies produce, Levine provides a compelling counterpoint, suggesting that the traditional divisions allow critics and their students to ‘illuminate important connections between authors and their historical moment’ (p. ). e collection is varied enough for one to imagine this statement in tension with Russ Castronovo’s argument, which avers that consideration of literature’s transmission across time and space is at least as important as examining its original context. I read Timelines of American Literature with great pleasure, for the essays not only abound in valuable insights but are also written in clear prose. While I share Levine’s sense that the book would not be useful for undergraduates—the disturbing of timelines seems to require a sense of extant timelines in the first place—the collection is invaluable for any academics who think self-consciously about their work in relation to history, politics, or economics. It avoids the Manichaeism of much writing on periodization and instead shows the persisting fertility of literary history. M S U J G Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, –. By D K. (Clarendon Lectures in English) Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Daniel Karlin’s slim volume expands his  Clarendon lectures into an elegant discussion of the presence of street songs in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury poetry and fiction. Karlin offers no general arguments (about the work of music in literature, for example, or the role of street songs in particular), but rather the evidence of a series of closely observed cases, in each of which a writer transforms an ‘appropriation’ to make it part of a literary work’s ‘symbolic’ or ‘artistic design’ (pp. , , ). is leaves plenty of room for what Karlin does best: inspired interpretation grounded in extensive research. In each chapter he unfolds the larger story of a particular song and its variants—where and when it was composed and performed, layers of meanings which have accrued—while attending to the changed contexts which surround it in the literary work. Interweaving these narratives enables him to bring out unsuspected dimensions of a poem or a novel. e book’s six main chapters proceed from William Wordsworth (the blind musician hailed as ‘An Orpheus! an Orpheus!’ in ‘e Power of Song’, which Karlin nicely juxtaposes with the very different view of street song as intolerable noise represented in William Hogarth’s print of e Enrag’d Musician). We then move through Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (the child singing ‘O bella libertà’  Reviews in the opening lines of Casa Guidi Windows, the snatches of stornelli that distract the painter in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’), James Joyce (the one-legged sailor who wanders through Dublin in Ulysses, growling out lines from ‘e Death of Nelson’), Virginia Woolf (the unintelligible singing of an ancient woman, heard by both Peter Walsh and Rezia Smith outside Regent’s Park Tube Station in Mrs. Dalloway), to Marcel Proust (early morning Paris street cries driing up to the windows of the narrator in La Prisonière, volume  of A la recherche du temps perdu). roughout, Karlin pursues complicated strands of meaning borne by street songs or cries to show an author’s triumphant use of them in a different literary design. e volume concludes with a final chapter on Walt Whitman (a knife-grinder in ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’)—the sole American example and the only instance where sight rather than sound provides the design for a literary composition. Perhaps the best way to read this book is simply to take pleasure in what it provides. But if one did want to use the evidence of these seven case studies to think about larger questions, what would these be? I have already suggested one: how do writers translate song (or sound) into a written text? In some...

The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van VechtenKirsten MacLeod

 Reviews in the opening lines of Casa Guidi Windows, the snatches of stornelli that distract the painter in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’), James Joyce (the one-legged sailor who wanders through Dublin in Ulysses, growling out lines from ‘e Death of Nelson’), Virginia Woolf (the unintelligible singing of an ancient woman, heard by both Peter Walsh and Rezia Smith outside Regent’s Park Tube Station in Mrs. Dalloway), to Marcel Proust (early morning Paris street cries driing up to the windows of the narrator in La Prisonière, volume  of A la recherche du temps perdu). roughout, Karlin pursues complicated strands of meaning borne by street songs or cries to show an author’s triumphant use of them in a different literary design. e volume concludes with a final chapter on Walt Whitman (a knife-grinder in ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’)—the sole American example and the only instance where sight rather than sound provides the design for a literary composition. Perhaps the best way to read this book is simply to take pleasure in what it provides. But if one did want to use the evidence of these seven case studies to think about larger questions, what would these be? I have already suggested one: how do writers translate song (or sound) into a written text? In some chapters, Karlin attends to this question more than in others, where the role of song slips into that of the figure of the singer, on which he has written well elsewhere. Alternatively one might ask: can these studies tell us anything about the way people heard street songs and cries in the places and times covered—what they listened to but also what registered on their consciousness, how and why? One would need either to argue that these cases are particularly representative or to examine a lot more of them—including works by popular writers. But those are questions for other studies. is book concludes, with lovely structural circularity, where it began: with ‘the art of appropriation’ (p. ). Building on the work of his chapters, Karlin closes with a tribute to (at least some of) his writers: ‘Whitman—like Wordsworth, or Joyce, or Woolf, or Proust—can afford to be as generous as he is unscrupulous. Only the great artists pay such tribute to the treasure they plunder’ (p. ). U  C E H e Blind Bow-Boy. By C V V. Ed. by K ML. (MHRA Critical Texts) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. . xxviii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. In the past decade, many modernist texts have become available as they move out of copyright and into the public domain. In addition, letters and archival material, also previously underused and kept out of print, have been allowed to become accessible to scholars. As a result, once popular and influential works can now be re-examined and new understandings of oen read and taught novels can be constructed, in turn illuminating the importance of an entire network of long forgotten modernist writers and artists. Because American modernism is so deeply connected to American nationalism, the re-emergence of these understudied and in many cases MLR, .,   suppressed texts forces a reassessment of deeply held scholarly beliefs about not just modernism, but the idea of a national literature as a whole. Kirsten MacLeod’s new edition of Carl Van Vechten’s e Blind Bow-Boy () does exactly that with its extensive and well-researched apparatus thoroughly demonstrating the importance of this once well-known novel. e Blind Bow-Boy follows Harold Prewett, ‘a naïve young man who has led a sheltered life, and his initiation into a life of pleasure-seeking’ (p. xi). His father, who le him to be raised by a harsh aunt, summons him at eighteen years old, presumably to take up the mantle of his cloak and suit business. When Harold blurts out that he has no interest in the business, his father, instead of being upset, praises him and agrees to finance his next years exploring New York with ‘worldly man-about-town Paul Moody’ (p. xi). In a complicated twist of reverse psychology, he expects his son to be so fed up with corruption and...

Songs That Run in the Streets

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Parisian théâtres de la foire (fairground theaters) gave birth to French comic opera with the inception of the genre known as comédie en vaudevilles (sung vaudevilles interspersed between spoken dialogue). Vaudevilles were popular songs that “ran in the streets” and served as vessels for new texts that transmitted the latest news, scandals, and gossip around the city. Already in the seventeenth century, however, the Comédie-Italienne, the royally funded troupe charged with performing commedia dell’arte, began to create spectacles that incorporated street songs from the urban soundscape. In the late seventeenth century all three official theaters—the Comédie-Italienne, the Comédie-Française, and the Opéra—also infused the streets with new tunes that transformed into vaudevilles. This article explores the contribution of the nonoperatic theaters—the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne—to the vaudeville repertoire to show the ways in which theatrical spectacle shaped a thriving popular song tradition. I argue that because most theatrical finales were structured around many repetitions of a catchy strophic tune to which each actor or actress sang one or more verses, a newly composed tune used as a finale had an increased probability of transforming into a vaudeville. Some of the vaudevilles used in early eighteenth-century comic operas therefore originated in newly composed divertissements for the late seventeenth-century plays presented at the nonoperatic theaters. Other vaudevilles began as airs from operas that were also absorbed into the tradition of street song. By the early eighteenth century, fairground spectacles drew from a dynamic repertory of vaudevilles amalgamated from the most voguish tunes circulating in the city. The intertwined relationship of the popular song tradition and theatrical spectacle suggests that the theaters helped to mold the corpus of vaudevilles available to street singers, composers, and playwrights.

Political street songs and singers in seventeenth‐century England

AbstractBallad singers and sellers were unquestionably important contributors to the urban and rural soundscape in seventeenth century England. They brought the popular musical productions of the metropolis to the provinces and acted as cultural mediators between town and country, centre and periphery, orality and print. While ballads dealing with a wide array of topics were performed and sold on early modern streets for centuries, this article specifically explores the nature and significance of street performance to the newly burgeoning commercial trade in political song that emerged in England from the late 1630s. First, the ‘ballad singer’ is historicised as a newly emerging phenomenon, closely related to the burgeoning printed ballad trade from about the 1590s. Second, the article examines the variegated social profile of performers and the significance of the street as a place for performance in the febrile political environment of the mid‐ and late‐seventeenth century. Finally, the article considers the seventeenth‐century printed ballad sheet itself as an important political performer in the English street.

Singing the Fronde: Placards, Street Songs, and Performed Politics

The Fronde generated vast amounts of ephemeral printed media that circulated polemical information and shaped public discourse. Pamphlets, street songs, and placards, known as mazarinades, survive as artefacts of performances that jostled for attention in chaotic urban public spaces. In this article I analyse three placards produced during the Fronde to demonstrate their utilitarian function as a tool of mass communication that sometimes incorporated songs drawn from the repertoires of literary elites and street singers. When a placard was read à haute voix or an inscribed song was sung, these objects engendered performances that filled Paris’s public spaces with political propaganda. Because songs printed on placards set new texts to pre-existing tunes, the layering of songs fostered webs of intertextual and intermusical references. By determining the significance of a particular tune to contemporary audiences, we can enrich textual and visual analyses and begin to determine how different social groups might have responded to the mazarinades. Through song, individuals participated in communal social acts that memorialized contemporary events and forged connections with events in living memory. Placards, then, illustrate how effective political messaging in early modern Paris in part translated to controlling the urban soundscape.

Manet’s The Street Singer and the poets

I claim that Édouard Manet’s painting The Street Singer (1862) has ties to Charles Baudelaire’s poem “À une mendiante rousse.” The poem was included in the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal and became a part of the Tableaux Parisiens in 1861. The young waif who inspired Baudelaire also found herself limned in a poem by Théodore de Banville, celebrated in a song by Pierre Dupont, and painted in oil by Émile Deroy in the mid-1840s at a time when these four men were in close contact with one another in the heady days of their bohemian youth on the cusp of their creative careers. Baudelaire’s memories of the formative years of these friendships of the 1840s were resurrected when he took on the commission to write essays on Banville and Dupont for Eugène Crépet’s anthology Les Poètes français, conceived in 1859 and published in 1862, the year Manet created his version of a street singer. These texts in all likelihood combined with Manet’s own interest in fashion to play a part in his decision to outfit his street singer in attractive attire, but inspiration from Banville’s “À une petite Chanteuse des Rues,” Dupont’s “La Joueuse de guitare,” and Baudelaire’s “À une mendiante rousse” may also have affected Manet’s sartorial designs for his painting. I also demonstrate that the discourse surrounding street songs and their aesthetic import proved even more pertinent to Manet’s choice of subject as he forged his modernist painting.

The Sounds of Enlightenment Paris

What are the relationships between historians and the sounds produced in the spaces and times they study? This article stresses the absence of historiographical interest in noise, due to the silence of the archives regarding matters of sound. It reviews the attempts at devising sonograms of historical periods, such as the eighteenth century. It highlights daily sounds and noises and it seeks out their traces in the domains of work, economy, religion, politics and royalty. Churches and hospitals, in particular, were home to harrowing sounds. Voices are also important data for historical enquiry, such as children's voices, peddlers’ tunes and street songs.

Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif

Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif Adin E. Lears The two elements of subconscious association which form the basis for lyrical melos and opsis respectively have never been given names. We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified enough, babble and doodle. In babble, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and puns develop out of sound-associations. Northrop Frye1 In all versions of Piers Plowman, the poem’s opening lines stress hearing before vision. Will, the Dreamer, sets out on his spiritual quest in early summer, dressed in the rough woolen garments of a hermit. Equipped in this way, he “[Goes] forth in the world wondres to here, / And say many selles and selkouthe thynges.”2 Hearing receives emphasis again at the close of the Prologue, when the last lines devolve into a cacophony of street songs sung by the urban tradesmen and professionals that populate the end of Will’s dream. Piers Plowman draws on and reworks the dream-vision topos of birds lulling a dreamer to sleep (or, in the case of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, waking him up), in any number of places, including in the first dream, when Will falls asleep at the sound of rushing water that “sweye[s] so murye” (A Prol. 10; B Prol. 10), or later on when he confesses that “Blisse of þe briddes abide [End Page 165] me made / . . . Murþe of hire mouþes made me þer to slepe” (B VIII.64–67; C X.63–66; variation appears in A IX.58). In a poem whose genre depends on its narrative of vision, this emphasis on hearing is somewhat surprising.3 It invites us both to attend more closely to what Langland might have to say about the sense of hearing and to listen more ardently to the sounds of his own poetry. In stressing sounds the way it does, the poem figures Will’s pilgrimage for moral and spiritual truth as a process of hearing what the world has to tell him, alongside, even before, seeing its marvels. More pointedly, Will’s early assertion that he is setting out “to hear wonders” suggests that the condition of hearing without knowing exactly or understanding completely is important to the poem. This emphasis on wonder thus underscores a distinction between hearing what people have to say and hearing how they say it. This hearing-how—the process of listening, and not necessarily its end result, comprehending—is an important and as yet unacknowledged means of approaching spiritual knowledge in Piers Plowman. As the emerging field of sound studies has highlighted, historical narratives pitting the “Dark Ages” against the “Enlightenment” have long emphasized visual paradigms for knowledge and understanding.4 This persistent habit of thought has led scholars largely to overlook sound, noise, and hearing in their investigations of medieval sensory epistemologies.5 Yet hearing receives emphasis in any number of biblical episodes and religious sermons commonly recounted and glossed in the Middle Ages. The story of Pentecost, for example, narrates how the apostles perceive [End Page 166] God’s voice by hearing a sudden disembodied sound, which ultimately kindles them with tongues of flame and authorizes them to preach the Word. Similarly, Paul asserts in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes from what is heard.”6 These and other texts laid the groundwork for the importance of sound and listening in medieval devotional culture. Moreover, the study of hearing is inextricably tied to investigations of feeling: both as sensation and as emotion. Sound studies has emphasized the particular synaesthetic capacity of sound and its tendency toward “traversal and transference” with other senses, especially the sense of touch.7 Middle English verbs such as clateren—“to clatter, rattle, resound,” but also “to beat or batter”—remind us that to hear is to feel sonic vibration.8 Moreover, sounds stir feelings, affecting emotions. For the mystic Richard Rolle, whose eremitic way of life has been seen as a precursor to that of Langland’s Will, heavenly sounds (canor) kindle a “fire of love” (incendium amoris) for God.9 I argue that the study of sound proves useful in thinking about...

“Modern-Antiques,” Ballad Imitation, and the Aesthetics of Anachronism

Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings, All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages, Seem to he treasured up here to make fools of present and future. --Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage Writing to the Irish poet and ballad anthologist William Allingham in the summer of 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti explained that he was underwhelmed by the former's poem, Music Master, as it lacked the enticements he expected of ballads: [O]ne can only speak of one's own needs & cravings: & I must confess a need, in narrative dramatic poetry ... of something rather exciting, indeed I believe something of the element, to rouse my mind to anything like the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is shockingly ill-worded, but Keats's narratives would be the kind I mean. (1) One is struck both by the aesthetic feeling that Rossetti attempts to discriminate-the connection he draws between romance narrative and personal emotion-and by the hesitation with which he does so: before he wrote romantic, Rossetti wrote schoolgirl, then crossed it out. The strikethrough has the force of an embarrassed admission about the appeal of ballads to an otherwise high-minded literary reader, particularly when the ballad in question is neither antiquarian artifact nor popular street song but artfully contrived pastiche. This self-conscious mode of genre performance had its roots in such eighteenth-century ballad scandals as Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw's Hardyknute. (2) Ballad forgeries turned eventually to avowed imitations, and, after picking up sentimental, romance, and gothic elements from Thomas Chatterton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and many others, the literary ballad had thoroughly saturated the literary field by the early decades of the Victorian period. This essay explores the ballad aesthetics inherited by Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and, more particularly, those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a less-remarked influence on Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. The ballad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was less a stable form than an evolving discourse-an overlapping assembly of ballad collections and antiquarian scholarship that gathered together metrical romances, broadside ballads, ballad romances, hymns, lays, ballad parodies, and lyrical ballads that variously expanded and chastened the idea of the ballad. The ballad's prominence as cultural form has been given considerable attention, though recent work has focused primarily on antiquarianism, popular balladry, or the ballad's significance within print culture and romantic nationalism. (3) Turning to the relatively neglected form of the literary ballad, I am interested less in specifying what this genre was than in exploring what we might call the historical aesthetics of genre-the kinds of feelings and judgments that get attached to a given genre and their role in its style, rhetoric, and form. (4) What language did nineteenth-century readers use to distinguish their impressions of poetic genres, and what relationship can we see in this language between aesthetic judgment and poetic form? How do aesthetic categories shore up, innovate, or otherwise inflect categories of genre? In particular, my discussion aims to uncover the aesthetic and affective dimensions of the stylistic anachronism-Rossetti called his poems, after Walter Scott, modern-antiques-that characterizes the literary ballad in its tendency to evoke without fully inhabiting the conventions of traditional songs and ballads (Correspondence, 1: 389). (5) The subgenre of the literary ballad represents an important aspect and outgrowth of what Albert Friedman has termed the ballad's museum-life, its abstraction within the discourses of antiquarian revival, sophisticated poetry, and historical scholarship (p. …

Coquetting Females versus Males of Manners: Critical Discourse Analysis of Egyptian Street Songs

The study explores gender differences and the role of the ideological background in portraying the roles of the males and the females. Socio-economic statuses affect the description of gender differences and this is proclaimed within the analysis of a recent phenomenon of poor quality street songs. The study represents a detailed description of male and female relationship, so as to spot the light on the literary and societal implications of this newly propagated genre. The study analyses two common songs spreading among commoners distorting the woman’s image predefined in the Egyptian culture. Negative cultural and societal conceptions are explicitly mentioned about the relation between males and females. Keywords: gender, media representation, discourse analysis

The Representation of Women in Street Songs: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Egyptian Mahraganat

The study investigates the representation of male and female gender identities in Egyptian street songs called Mahraganat . The study discusses the issue with reference to two common songs spreading among young commoners. Since the songs are written by writers who descend from low-standard social group, the analysis exhibits both cultural and societal notions related to how males and females are portrayed in such kind of music. This study attempts to describe how males describe their social group in comparison to the social group to which the women belong. It, thus, constructs the social identity of males and females through the lyrics of this new genre of music. The findings from such an analysis answer the question about such genre within its social context and the ideologies by which it is dominated reflecting the discursive construction representation of gender and sexual identity. Keywords : gender, identity construction, genre, ideologies

A Transactional Approach to “Sing” by Raposo and Lichtenheld

Tom Lichtenheld shares a new story of the power of music by illustrating Joe Raposo’s classic Sesame Street song “Sing.” In addition to lesson suggestions for general music classes, a discussion of and application to the theory of transactional reading are included.

Singing in a New World: Street Songs and Urban Experience in Colonial Calcutta

Singing in a New World: Street Songs and Urban Experience in Colonial Calcutta

Poetry and the police: communication networks in eighteenth-century Paris

Listen to An Electronic Cabaret: Paris Street Songs, 1748-50 for songs from Poetry and the Police Audio recording copyright [copyright] 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. In spring 1749, Francois Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an 'abominable poem about the king.' So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense? In this captivating book, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton brilliantly traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society. This lucid and entertaining book reminds us of both the importance of oral exchanges in the history of communication and the power of 'viral' networks long before our internet age.

The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts (review)

Reviewed by: The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts Virginia Anderson The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts. By Pwyll ap Siôn. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. [xviii, 232 p. ISBN-13: 9781859282106. $99.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographical references, index. The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts is the first book-length publication on any British experimentalist since Michael Nyman’s own Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (2d ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; first edition, London: Studio Vista, 1974). For that reason alone, it is welcome: the British musical establishment has not exactly embraced British experimentalism and its associated postmodernism. America eventually celebrated its own experimentalism and minimalism, especially from Ives to Cage, and from Young and Riley to its own “post-minimalists,” as part of American studies. Thus, although there are experts in American experimentalism working in British universities, there are no full-time specialists in British experimental music, bar Keith Potter (whose major work centers on American minimalism). In fact, experimental music has not always been accepted in Britain as music; although Schirmer Music published Experimental Music in the United States in 1974, its first British publisher, as noted above, was the visual arts firm Studio Vista. Michael Nyman came to his own post-minimal style through a wide range of experiences. He studied composition with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music, but disillusioned with the composition styles prevalent at the time, studied musicology with Thurston Dart at King’s College, London, where he specialized in seventeenth-century music. In the late 1960s, Nyman built a reputation as a critic. He became friendly with members of the “Manchester Group,” especially Harrison Birtwistle, for whom he wrote the libretto of Down by the Greenwood Side (1969). Nyman had an almost Pauline conversion while reviewing Paragraph 1 of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968–71): I just fell for it hook, line and sinker. I got personally involved with that crowd [the British experimentalists], and left the Maxwell Davies-Stockhausen new music thing behind (though I probably carried on reviewing it) and became personally involved and involved as a performer with Scratch Orchestra, Portsmouth Sinfonia, [and other experimental ensembles]” (“The Power of the Cadence,” interview by Robert Davidson, London, 1999 [ http://www.topologymusic.com/articles/nyman.htm ], accessed 23 May 2008). Nyman documented British and American experimentalism and minimalism (he coined the term “minimal” in his Spectator review of Paragraph 1), both in Experimental Music and in further articles, mostly in general-interest magazines and visual arts journals. Although Nyman composed some pieces before what he called his “rebirth” as a composer (unpublished interview by the present writer, London, 23 March 1983), notably his album Decay Music (Obscure 6, 1976), his full-time composition work began with a piece of practical musicology, arranging seventeenth-century street songs for a production of Carlo Goldoni’s Il campiello at the National Theatre. Nyman kept the pit band together, writing new music for the Campiello Band (later the Michael Nyman Band). Since the 1980s, Nyman is probably best known for his film music, through his long association with Peter Greenaway and his popular theme for Jane Campion’s film, The Piano (1993). Pwyll ap Siôn brings a careful and enthusiastic eye to Nyman’s music after his “rebirth.” In chapter 4, “Mapping Intertextuality in Nyman,” ap Siôn clearly outlines a methodology with origins in structuralism, and emphasizes materials as the basis for analysis, especially the scores themselves. He notes that Roland Barthes preferred the term “text” to “work” for reasons of provisional relationships (p. 61), which has a direct parallel within experimental and [End Page 87] postmodern aesthetics. Barney Childs, an early writer on indeterminacy, also avoided the term “work” because of its romantic sense of permanence and identity; Jonathan Kramer saw a similar lack of permanence and autonomy in postmodern music (“The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” Current Musicology no. 66 [Spring 1999]: 10). ap Siôn establishes an intertextual typology that is specific to Nyman himself, with categories that cover sources (pre-existing music, separated into music written by Nyman and those written by others...

Italian Novels of Peasant Crisis, 1930-1950: Bonfires in the Night by Brian Moloney

MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 56I fascination of urban night lifeand the effectsof artificial light (subjects explored in various Futurist paintings) are often vividly evoked. Poems such as Dessy's 'Stato d'animo', Jannelli's 'L'arcobaleno dei miei sensi', and Pocarini's 'Cocaina' illustrate explorations of inner perceptions. Marchesi's 'La guerra' and 'Ho visto lamorte' of ferstrikinglydifferentviews ofwar fromFuturism's typical glorification of violence. Inventive wit is displayed in poems such as Dinamo Correnti's 'Gomma da lapis', where the eraser embodies the self-righteous hypocrisy of the 'gente per bene' who stifleoriginality. Translating Futurist experimental writing poses particular challenges, most of which are successfully met here. The infinitivesprescribed byMarinetti to escape restrictions of time and subjectivity are effectively rendered, usually by present par ticiples; and the imaginative links between nouns (often not clarified by syntax or punctuation) can usually be intuited from theEnglish versions. Expressive spellings are preserved bywell-chosen words, as in 'motors panting whirrrrring' forAlfredo Trimarco's 'ansimante turrrrrbinaredimotori' (pp. I32-33). Colourful portmanteau words are cleverly imitated, as in 'phosfreezing' for Corra's 'fosfreddissimo' (pp. I02 03). Bohn explains (p. 9) thatwhere repeated sounds were called for,he occasionally had to eschew literal translation: his version of Carlo Belloli's 'vuoto /vedo /vita / vicino' as 'vacuum/ view /vigour/ vicinity' (pp. 302-03) represents a successful com promise. His policy on visual poetry, however, is not explained: many of the iconic elements in themost typographically complex autoillustrazioni are not reproduced, so that these translations functionmore as guides tounderstanding the original than as self-explanatory texts accessible to readerswith no Italian. Errors, unfortunately, do creep in.For instance,Govoni's 'cantidelle vie' are street corners, not 'street songs' (pp. 30-3 I), D'Alba's 'camini' are fireplaces, not 'roads' (pp. 48-49), Volt's 'assalto ai trams' is an assault on not by the streetcars (pp. I22 23), Folicaldi's 'Feerie' is the French 'enchanted world' rather than an expressive spelling of the Italian 'ferie' (pp. I92-93), and 'perle' inDolfi's unspaced line 'calan dosigiuiperlesartiedifuoco' should be disentangled as thepreposition and article, not as 'pearls' (pp. I6o-6I). The inclusion of biographical information on the (often little-known) poets fea turedwould have increased thevolume's usefulness; but itshould give newcomers to Futurism a stimulating taste of themovement's complexity. UNIVERSITY OF READING SHIRLEYW. VINALL Italian Novels ofPeasant Crisis, I930-I950: Bonfires in the Night. By BRIANMOLO NEY. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2005. 256pp. /55. ISBN 978-I-85182-880-7. This book brings history to literature and literature tohistory, ameeting which one encounters all too rarely. Its particular achievement consists of itsnew readings of themodes of representation of thenation through its rural narratives: the novels of peasant crisis produced from the I930S to the I950S by Ignazio Silone, Carlo Levi, Francesco Jovine, and Cesare Pavese. Moloney's study applies the terms 'peasant' and 'crisis' to a series of novels (Fontamara, Cristo si efermato ad Eboli, Signora Ava, Le terredel Sacramento, and La luna e ifalo) which imply forms of 'protest' offering 'alternatives' (p. 22), which address not somuch thepresent as the future, as well as how differentnarratives and social paradigms can be brought into being. Although mainstream, thesewriters provide social solutions which are conceived both within and without theMarxist paradigm of the day. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how the narratives themselves enter into dialogue with extra-textual elements, as in the case of the detailed discussions of Fascist agricultural policy inChapter 3 and 562 Reviews thatof literary images of rural contentment inChapter 4. Hence the significance of Moloney's claim that 'we interpretwhat we read [. . .] in the lightof our experience and knowledge of history,which in turn leads us to take account, in our reading, of thepolitical and cultural experience of thenovelists concerned' (p. I I). So far,toomany scholars have risked giving toomuch weight to a self-referential and 'author-centred' reading of the texts in question, without exploring the terrain they inhabit. Brian Moloney, on the other hand, begins his book with an incisive, strictlyhistorical, discussion of thevexed 'questione meridionale', which, in rejecting the idea of an exclusively top-down, exoticizing gaze of thedominant North over the South, accounts for the complexity...