Vernacular Musics Research Articles

Cultural Interactions in Sunda Karawitan Vernacular Music Practice: Forms of Cultural Adaptations among the Chinese Community at Padepokan Pasundan Asih, Bandung, Indonesia

Cultural Interactions in Sunda Karawitan Vernacular Music Practice: Forms of Cultural Adaptations among the Chinese Community at Padepokan Pasundan Asih, Bandung, Indonesia

American Vernacular Music Manuscripts, ca. 1730–1910: Digital Collections from the American Antiquarian Society and the Center for Popular Music

American Vernacular Music Manuscripts, ca. 1730–1910: Digital Collections from the American Antiquarian Society and the Center for Popular Music

Popular, Informal, and Vernacular Music Classrooms: A Review of the Literature

The purpose of this literature review is to examine research in popular, informal, nontraditional, out-of-school, and vernacular music education from 2012 to the present in order to concentrate on recent literature and make suggestions to inform current practice. Researchers have indicated that these classrooms can provide creative and collaborative opportunities and can help students connect with out-of-school music experiences. In addition, these classrooms seem to align with culturally relevant and student-centered pedagogies and an inclusive curriculum. In contrast, researchers have discussed a perceived dissonance concerning the validity and use of vernacular music in the classroom (i.e., the musical genres considered acceptable in the classroom and how they support or hinder the learning outcomes).

The longer revolution: The rise of vernacular musics as ‘new channels of general learning’

Abstract This article takes as its point of origin an extract from Apple’s (2013) book Can Education Change Society? Beginning with the concept of ‘radical democratic egalitarianism’ the author examines the extent to which many current models of music education meet the criteria for ‘robust egalitarianism’ with reference to their inclusion of popular culture. With reference to Williams’ (1961) seminal work in cultural studies The Long Revolution, consideration is given to the extent to which progress towards cultural, musical democracy has been made in music education. These considerations are juxtaposed against the thought of key sociological theorists Apple; E. O. Wright; Bourdieu; Marx and Engels; and Day. The article then discusses research in the area of youth and popular music and surveys international approaches to popular music education. Finally the article turns to pedagogical considerations in relation to popular music. Utilizing Bennett’s (2000) assessment of popular music as one of the primary cultural resources of contemporary social life for young people, an analogy is drawn between Williams’ heralding of the democratic benefits of the introduction of vernacular language as the new channel of general instruction and the possibilities of extending popular music as the new channel of general musical learning. It is suggested that such a change might move the Long Revolution forward in music education and in the cultural lives of young people.

Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis Collection ed. by Kevin C. Karnes (review)

Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis Collection. Edited by Kevin C. Karnes. (Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music, 11.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2014. [Pref., p. xi-xii; introd., p.xiii-xxxi; about the edition, p. xxxii-xxxvi; part 1. Songs from Keidan, 1899, p. 3-13; part 2. Songs from Latvia and Lithuania, 1924-1931, p. 16-29; part 3. Songs of Uncertain or Unknown Provenance, p. 32-109; references, p. 111-16; indices, p. 117-18. ISBN-13 978-0-89579-794-0. $150.] Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music holds curious yet crucial place in A-R Editions' catalog. Under Philip Bohlman's editorship since the late 1990s, the series offers vibrant gloss on orality as function of societies with long literate traditions: perspective more intuitive than paradoxical upon reflection. Each volume in the series functions on two levels: as conventional documentation of specific mode of cultural production, and as methodological treatise on presenting extra-literate practices in graphic form. Especially this second aspect takes advantage of A-R Editions' expertise in score production, allowing scholars to match the editorial integrity of explanatory texts with meaningful interrogations into notation as fundamentally human endeavor. Through such scholarly analysis, the series offers rich discussion about ontologies of intellectualism, shedding light on the layered nature of musical production and preservation along the way. The volume under review here, Jewish Folk Songs of the Baltics, deepens the series' engagement with Europe and Jews--topics factor into three and six, respectively, of the series' twelve published volumes--while continuing to interrogate entrenched conventions of folk song scholarship. As editor Kevin C. Karnes implies, the vast and rather fraught literature on folk song collection and publication, especially in the interwar period, reinforced pressures to study both Jews and Latvians as separate national groups. Karnes argues, however, the urge toward national identity lay in tension with quieter yet equally important reality: these so-called national narratives had to be distilled from rather more heterogeneous population. Consequently, Karnes's focus on narrow, curious case of crossover--a small collection of songs by Jewish informants gathered by nonjewish investigator--shines spotlight onto complicated questions of motivation and expectation in the larger project of folk song collection, potentially subverting assumptions about the nature of collection itself by looking under the hood. A mystery surrounding prominent Latvian folklorist, composer, and choral conductor Emilis Melngailis (1874-1954) comprises the volume's case study. While recognized for his many published collections of Latvian folk song, Melngailis credited a chance encounter with Yiddish folksong in 1899 as the event that sparked his lifelong passion for collecting vernacular musics (p. xiii). Although he reportedly collected about 120 folk songs from Jewish informants around time, almost no Jewish material appeared in his publications, eventually leaving the impression it had been lost. More than half century after his death, however, increased post-1990 access to Latvian archival collections showed otherwise. After pursuing an initial lead, Karnes, working with the late Israeli musicologist Joachim Braun and others, combed through major collections of Melngailis's papers in Riga's Archive of Latvian Folklore and Museum of Literature and Music. The sixty-four songs reproduced here, painstakingly reassembled and extensively annotated, comprise the fruit of research. Karnes takes classic approach to his material, starting with well-researched and thoughtful introduction triangulates Melngailis's life and career with concurrent trends and practices of both Latvian and Jewish folk music collecting. …

Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia by Fiona Ritchie and Douglas M. Orr Jr. (review)

Reviewed by: Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia by Fiona Ritchie and Douglas M. Orr Jr. Travis D. Stimeling Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia. By Fiona Ritchie and Douglas M. Orr Jr., with the assistance of Darcy Orr, and foreword by Dolly Parton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. [xx, 361 p. ISBN 9781469618227 (hardcover), $39.95; (e-book), $34.99.] CD, illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. In his landmark study of Appalachian history, John Alexander Williams observed that “the Irish migration proved one of the formative influences in Appalachian history, though it has created additional problems for historians,” who must work to capture the complex nature of Irishness in the British Isles and North America (John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002], 43). Paul F. Wells and Sally K. Sommers Smith have noted similar issues arising from efforts to trace the influence of Irish music on North American vernacular musics, remarking that “the nature and significance of this impact is widely acknowledged but poorly understood, resulting in frequent oversimplification of complex historical threads” (“Irish Music and Musicians in the United States: An Introduction,” Journal of the Society for American Music 4, no. 4 [November 2010]: 395). Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia, written by National Public Radio host Fiona Ritchie and Swannanoa Gathering founder Doug [End Page 378] Orr, attempts to trace these “complex historical threads” by telling a story of a musical, dancing, and storytelling people who were almost perpetually on the move, making an indelible impact on the cultures of the people they met along the way. Lushly illustrated with images of traditional musicians, stunning rural landscapes, and maps, and filled with the voices of contemporary musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, Wayfaring Strangers offers a useful general introduction to the relationships between Irish, Scottish, and Appalachian traditional musics. Ritchie and Orr cast their narrative in three broad chapters: “Beginnings,” “Voyage,” and “Singing a New Song.” “Beginnings” explores the origins of the impulse to combine story and song, beginning with the troubadours, trouvères, and minstrels of the Middle Ages and continuing to the Scottish courts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before moving onward to Scandinavia. Particularly compelling is the careful attention that the authors pay to the specific cross-cultural interactions that occurred within individual council areas and the ways that those interactions may have influenced particular musical practices. Ritchie and Orr frequently draw upon ballad texts in their treatment of these histories, treating them as valuable sites of cultural memory. The second chapter—“Voyage”—documents the migration of the Scots to Ulster and onward to North America, using song texts to discuss the factors that encouraged such movement, including Scottish colonial efforts, rent-racking, population expansion, and religious persecution. In this chapter, one gets the sense that the Ulster Scots were faced with the prospect of ever-widening distances between their ancestral homelands and the new frontiers they settled, first crossing the North Channel from Scotland to Ulster and later crossing the Atlantic Ocean to a land of unknown promise. Not surprisingly, Ritchie and Orr spend a fair amount of this chapter exploring the ways that emigrants and the people they left behind captured the complicated emotions of these constant departures in song and rituals such as the “American Wake,” a multiday sending-off party that they describe as “heartfelt and harrowing in equal measure” (p. 95). In the last chapter, “Singing a New Song,” Ritchie and Orr continue this story of Ulster Scot migration, this time from the burgeoning urban center of Philadelphia—one of the most significant ports of entry for Scots-Irish immigrants in the United States—down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road and the Wilderness Road into southern Appalachia. Along the way, the authors offer a cursory examination of the musical products of interactions between the Scots-Irish and German settlers (the dulcimer) and African American slaves (the adoption of the banjo), as well as their engagement with native Cherokees. Ritchie and Orr then attempt to offer brief discussions of many of the primary genres...

Australian Folk Song: Sources, Singers and Styles

Australian folk song and music have been created as unified genres by activists, enthusiasts and performers. Various commentators have discussed ways in which the genre is the product of unacknowledged selectiveness, conflations and exclusions of historically-situated genres. While acknowledging the strategic selection by which folk collectors created the genre, this article describes the vernacular musics from which Australian folk was assembled. It is argued that behind processes of genre construction was a body of songs created and performed in an objectively identifiable musical style. The melodic structures and performance styles of these songs are discussed, with reference to typical melodic families, the adaptation of popular tunes and the singing styles of the most prolific informants. While this song style is now little practiced by singers in domestic vernacular social contexts, its adoption by performers in folk movement contexts is discussed.

“The Faint Plinking of a Guitar”: Faulkner’s Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Faulkner Journal .Tim A. Ryan “The Faint Plinking of a Guitar”: Faulkner’s Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem W hile F. Scott Fitzgerald is renowned for having defined Americas metropolitan Jazz Age in his novels and stories, Faulkners ear­ ly fiction emphasizes instead the vernacular music of the rural South, most especially the blues. Soldiers’ Pay boasts the appear­ ance ofa band performing such staples as “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Shake It Break It,” as well as the singing of a gospel choir (156-59, 255-56).1 In Flags in the Dust, the Sartoris family’s black servants croon blues as they work, a street musician performs in the town square, and young Bayard enlists a Negro band to help him serenade the unmarried women of Jefferson (560, 573-74, 638-39, 659, 664-65). Erich Nunns recent analysis of Sanctuary, meanwhile, highlights the previously unappreciated centrality of both black and white popular music in Faulkner’s most notorious novel. Finally, “That Evening Sun” famously derives its title and some ofits plot elements from that celebrated adaptation ofSouthern musical traditions, W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”2 Although such early works established Faulkner’s enthusiasm for South­ ern—and, especially, black—popular music, references to the blues, gospel, and jazz largely disappeared from the author’s fiction after 1931. H. R. Stoneback suggests that “Pantaloon in Black” alludes to the lyrics of the blues song “Easy Rider” (241-43), and Handy’s band gets a passing mention in The Town (64), but Faulkner largely ceased portraying black singers and vernacular music after his first few novels and stories. Consequently, some readers have been more sur­ prised at “the scarcity ofblues description” in Faulkner’s work than intrigued by its presence (Evans qtd. in Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations” 54). Critics have tended to explain the disappearance of the blues and other Af­ rican American music from Faulkner’s fiction as a form of growth on the part of the author: instead of including black musicians in his stories for mere local color, the later Faulkner presents black people whose bluesiness is an inherent qualityofcharacter. In other words, ifsome ofFaulkner’s early African American characters play and sing the blues, his later black protagonists have the blues. Following Thadious M. Davis’s pioneering work, for example, Adam Gussow ‘See Adam Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations and Meaningless Strains: Faulker’s Blues Understandings,” and Thadious M. Davis for examination of these elements in Faulkners early fiction. 2For analysis of blues elements in “That Evening Sun,” see Ken Bennett, Carol B. Gartner, Charles A. Peek, and Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations.” 3 4 Tim A. Ryan Faulkners Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular persuasively argues that the blues in Faulkners early fiction is largely “ener­ getic, repetitive, sexualized, and profitable background music made by black performers to support dramas of white self-articulation.” In later instances, however, Faulkner uses the blues to create “dramas of black self-articulation ... in which overwhelmed subjects suffer” because of the inability ofwhite people to understand black experience (“Plaintive Reiterations” 64).3 If Faulkner was generally familiar with the blues as a folk tradition and pop culture phenomenon, it is unlikely that he knew the specific artists and works of the Mississippi Delta blues that we now think of as canonical. Al­ though the mainstream adaptations of black music purveyed by the likes of Handy in the 1910s and 1920s were popular with diverse audiences, the con­ sumers of country blues records were almost exclusively African American, at least until World War II. Faulkner enjoyed Handy’s commercialized ver­ sions of the genre, listened to the singing of black farmhands on his Green­ field Farm (Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations” 62-63), and even played records by the “Empress” of the urban blues, Bessie Smith, on an old windup Victrola at Rowan Oak (Haynes 441). Like most of the nation’s white population, how­ ever, Faulkner probably was not aware of the now-legendary recorded works of such country blues avatars as Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, Son House, or Robert Johnson—even though they were virtual neighbors of the Oxfordbased author. Such artists were largely...

Songs and Intellectuals:

Songs and Intellectuals:

Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab (review)

VERNACULAR MUSICS Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab. By A. J. Racy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. (Cambridge Middle East Studies.) [xiv, 248 p. ISBN 0-521-30414-8. $60.] Illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. One of the most powerful and compelling aspects of is its ability to tap into and move human emotions. Yet because of its subjective, elusive, and highly personal nature, as an emotional experience is difficult to isolate, and therefore analyze. A. J. Racy , performer, composer, and ethnomusicologist with strong foundation in historical analysis, has committed lifetime of work to the ecstatic elements of musical expression in the Arab Near East. In this book, Racy draws on multiple perspectives and experiences to reveal the emotionally evocative and affective dimensions of Arabic as they manifest through complex musical and cultural phenomenon known as tarab. Roughly translated to mean musical ecstasy, the word is also used as reference to (1) certain styles of urban, secular or art music, found throughout the Arab Near East; (2) musical aesthetic associated with the early twentieth century; and, (3) an emotionally ecstatic state that is evoked through musical practices emanating from within genres. As musical phenomenon, however, is much larger subject, with no exact English translation or equivalent. Racy describes the phenomenon as a multifaceted domain within which the and its ecstatic influence conceptually and expericntially linked (p. 7). He explains as a complex that embraces an aestheticexperiential core, but also intertwines with thick network of cultural values, economic relationships, and social hierarchies (p. 10). Reflecting on the multidimensional aspects of tarab, Racy skillfully weaves historical research, theory, the thoughts and experiences of individual performers, and personal experience in such way that one organically spills into the other, leaving the reader with visceral sense that elements interconnected. All the while, Racy maintains strong sense of organizational integrity, meticulous research, and clearly presented ideas. The book is organized into five broad categories, or chapters, that simply titled Culture, Performance, Music, Saltanah, and Lyrics. There is short introduction detailing the multiple dimensions of as phenomenon, and the nature of as an ecstatic experience. The concluding chapter, Tarab in Perspective, looks at these and related aspects of the tarab as they are viewed in their broader social and expressive contexts and reinterpreted against related theories and comparable world models (p. 191). Racy begins the first chapter, Culture, by suggesting that exists as specialized cultural domain, which encompasses artists, repertoires, and related ideologies, attitudes and behaviors, including ways of listening and reacting to music (p. 15). In support of this claim, the chapter explores various roles and processes that occur within culture: the role of gender; the role of the student; the role, or expected social etiquette, of both musicians and listeners; and the importance of the sammi' ah, or musically informed, die-hard listeners. Racy illustrates the ways in which culturally accepted reactions to the musical experience, such as physical and verbal responses, reveal the emotional and ecstatic components that define the experience. This chapter also addresses the cultural implications of learning, and the process of becoming artist. According to Racy, each individual within this process has unique story, and each generation has new inlluences that effect musical expression. For instance, unlike artists of the early twentieth century, artists today often trained in both Eastern and Western phenomenon that Racy refers to as bi-musicality. …

Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary, and: Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (review)

Historians, folklorists, and English professors were the first to venture into the somewhat eccentric area of country music scholarship—a study that only slowly won its place within the conservative purview of musicology. The precariousness of country music's respectability within that world makes the potential impact of new works all the more powerful. Country music scholarship, along with that of other vernacular musics, raises another related issue in that audiences outside academia find it interesting. Richard Carlin's Biographical Dictionary and the Biblio-Discography by Meade, Spottswood, and Meade take directly opposite aim in relation to these two audiences: the former toward a popular audience and the latter toward scholars, collectors, and other serious researchers. As concerns their relative appeal to readers, the two works seem almost entirely mutually exclusive.

Music, Memory, and Cultural Identity in the Jazz Age

DEBATES OVER MODERNITY HAVE LARGELY IGNORED MUSIC, AS PAUL GILROY wrote ten years ago, and yet African-American vernacular musics have signified cultural opposition for modem intellectuals since W. E. B. Du Bois's essay on sorrow songs staked out music as central sign of black cultural value, integrity, and autonomy.'1 One could easily make same claim for Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and (especially) Toni Morrison, who claims to reconstruct texture of . . . writing to reflect repetition, profound simplicity, and aesthetic (and emotional) immediacy of black vernacular musics.2 Literary scholars who directly address influence of music on African-American literature have recently suggested existence of an Orphic mode of self-affirmation and self-validation in the agency of

'Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette': Reflections on the Emergence of Post-colonial Britain

This chapter uncovers a whole world of half-forgotten ideas and activities seemingly a small world, but one with huge implications for national, imperial and postcolonial histories. As readers will know, postcolonial theory was often theory-with-a-vengeance, locked into the kind of abstraction which is inimical to historical thought. Translating these concerns into a properly historiographical mode, as the notion postcolonial Britain requires, has proved the source of much dispute. The movement of vernacular musics from the West Indies to Britain – most especially of Trinidadian calypso and of ska, the specifically Jamaican rendition of rhythm and blues – proved to be of historic significance, creating within Britain a new syncretic culture. Lamming poses this in a manner which domestic critics of cultural hierarchies at that time did not: in terms of colonialism.

Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western

O n ene of the more interesting aspects of the Western is the way southerners have figured centrally in the genre's development. Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, for instance, is widely credited with introducing Americans to the cult of the cowboy in a story that features a transplanted southerner who joins forces with a group of powerful Wyoming cattle ranchers in order to make the West safe for frontier capitalism. Philip French long ago attempted to account for the genre's interest in the southerner, pointing out that a large part of the new itinerant labor force in the post-Civil War West was made up of former Confederate soldiers. For French, this development partly explains why the dispossessed Southerner has come to figure so prominently as the model for the chivalrous cowboy (94). More recently, Peter Stanfield has traced the southern origins of another western icon, the singing cowboy. Emerging out of the Dixie medicine shows of the 1930s and 1940s, the singing cowboy served an important function in American culture, ridding southern vernacular music of its racial connotations in order to

Into the ivory tower: Vernacular music and the American academy

This paper examines the historical methods and motives for the incorporation of select vernacular music idioms into the American university system. We look at the history of four music genres — choral music, bands, piano music, and jazz — whose cultural status has been debated and manipulated in order to render them acceptable pedagogical topics. Drawing on the extensive literature which accompanied these debates, we present a model for the dualistic philosophical debate between utilitarian and aestheticist perspectives, and suggest that the incorporation of vernacular idioms into university curricula consistently reflects this debate. Finally, we show that the value and meaning of vernacular musics have been significant philosophical issues throughout the history of American university education.

Constructions of Tradition: Vernacular Architecture, Country Music, and Auto-Ethnography

Constructions of Tradition: Vernacular Architecture, Country Music, and Auto-Ethnography

William Dawson, "The New Negro," and His Folk Idiom

William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony is characteristically because of manner in which it fuses previously established sociocultural hierarchies: so-called high-brow and low-brow, black and white, and European, sacred and secular, to name only most Prominent.(1) These conflicts will be readily apparent in discussion below (as well as in even quickest perusal of work itself), but these conflicts do not fully explain aesthetic crux of this composition or situation of its composer, for same list of cultural codes can be found quite similarly in countless other works of art music.(2) The more pressing issue that Dawson's symphony poses today is best put as a question: Why has a work so seemingly consistent with enormously rich and elsewhere fabulously productive cultural dogma of its time (the Negro cultural renaissance(3) of 1920s), so well crafted, and so well received at its first performances failed to enter living repertory of great through performances and recordings (see Crawford 1975), while others that are similar have done so? Some may say that this is a simple matter of survival of (musical) fittest. While that may be true, before embarking down slippery slope of subjectivity, one should examine more objective reasons that concert works of composers such as Dawson, James P. Johnson, and Florence Price are largely forgotten now (except as they are discussed in history books), while those of Copland, Gershwin, and even William Grant Still continue to be performed. A thoroughly truthful but largely reactionary answer is simply that African-American composers of 1920s and 1930s were not afforded sort of widespread pre- and post-premiere publicity campaigns that would promote their careers and works. In this light, these black composers were severely handicapped, struggling to win favor on one hand from a white audience skeptical about such uppity blacks who were writing art music and, at same time, from voices within black community who perceived as Uncle Tom-isms their choice of predominately white venues, Western concert music genres, and ironically, use of black folk material--a choice seen by some as a failure to embrace integration unabashedly.(4) Dawson, however, seemed both ideally placed and well suited to accomplish Renaissance goals; but in end, his work stood out more than it came to stand for movement, despite fact that none other than Alain Locke (1969, 114) recognized in his work for symphonic music in Negro idiom.(5) But by 1934, with Negro Renaissance more than a decade old, mere hope was no longer adequate. The Harmon award-winning artists--writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, performers such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, and popular musicians such as Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, and many others--had already found a way to make their mark and elevate themselves.(6) For creation of concert music, however, things were rather different, namely because whites too were struggling to define an American art music.(7) One may surmise that black precedents were fine, provided that they were judged against backdrop of a tradition of white accomplishments. The lineage of art music--from Yankee tune-smiths through second New England school to Charles Ives--was not yet resurrected, and only isolated examples (Edward MacDowell and so-called Indianists) provided this benchmark. Thus, at same time that George Gershwin (1926) and other whites were constantly commenting on the voice of American, Still, Dawson, and others were likewise searching for musical identity. The mainstream solution came to be found first and foremost in jazz, which, although a concept (as term and musical practice) several decades old, had yet to achieve profile in public consciousness as an improvisational instrumental art that would delineate it from other forms of black vernacular musics, namely spirituals and blues. …

The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University: Documenting the Broad Range of American Vernacular Music

HISTORY The for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) was established in 1985 as one of of in Tennessee's public university system. The aim of Centers program was to create institutes that would foster advanced research and scholarship in fields in which various schools had existing strengths. MTSU's location in Murfreesboro, thirty-five miles from Nashville, makes it a logical choice for a center related to popular-music scholarship. The university's Department of Recording Industry offers a successful music-business training program; in fall 1997, department had an enrollment of approximately thirteen hundred majors. The MTSU Department of Music offers a bachelor's degree with emphasis in music industry, and several members of MTSU faculty - notably Charles Wolfe in English Department - engage in scholarship related to popular music. Another important factor is prominent role that Tennessee has played in history and development of virtually all genres of popular music in twentieth century, making state a marvelous laboratory in which to study popular music. An interdisciplinary committee drawn from departments of Recording Industry, English, Music, History, and Speech and Theater, and headed by dean of College of Liberal Arts, drew up proposal for a Center of Excellence in Music Archives and Research in 1985. The Tennessee Higher Education Commission approved proposal in April 1985, and officially came into being on 1 July 1985. The committee that created proposal served as search committee for Center's first director. I was offered position in September 1985 and began work in November.(1) When I first learned about plans to create a new research center for popular music, I realized that this represented an extraordinary opportunity for someone to build an archive and program from ground up. Just how true this was became abundantly clear when I reported for work to an empty office. The first several months were devoted to such essential tasks as establishing an administrative office, hiring a secretary, and laying foundations for Center's physical and intellectual development. The committee that first drafted proposal and then conducted search for a director assumed a final incarnation as a faculty advisory board. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, is not part of any of five undergraduate colleges at MTSU, and director of reports directly to Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. The board functions as a peer advisory panel that includes representation from various campus factions. I met with them frequently in early days, and members provided sound guidance, especially in matters of university policy. They did not dictate details of Center's day-to-day operations, but rather allowed me considerable flexibility in shaping all aspects of collections and programs. Their one clear mandate was that should establish a large archive to serve as a major resource for region. The board also agreed to my suggested name for new enterprise: for Popular Music. The first home of was in MTSU's Learning Resources (LRC). The collection was assigned space in what was originally Environmental Simulation Laboratory, a large cylindrical structure - approximately thirty feet in diameter by thirty feet in height - attached to one end of LRC; staff referred to it, with mock affection, as the silo. The laboratory was a type of multimedia theater in which various environmental conditions supposedly could be replicated, but capability of facility had never been fully utilized. Plans for converting this space to an archive and library were drawn up with help of Michael Sniderman, set designer for Speech and Theater Department. …

Crazy for Ragtime

Publishers of CD-ROMs about vernacular music are finally starting become competitive. last few years have seen the appearance of products about specific artists such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Prince, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, and David Bowie. Some are more broadly conceived, purporting introduce the history of blues, country music, jazz, folk music, rap, and rock - or even teach aspects of music theory through these genres. It is not surprising then that two discs regarding ragtime appeared during 1996. Crazy about Ragtime takes a broad view of the cultural and musical history of ragtime, its predecessors, and successors, while Total Joplin focuses on Scott Joplin, who is often referred as the King of Ragtime. two programs share similarities in approach, but there are also differences that are worthy of special attention. Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime was the first CD-ROM produced by Calliope Media, which the author founded with Jay Heifetz, son of violinist Jascha Heifetz. According the information on Calliope's Web site (http://www.calliope.com/about), the company's mission is to change the way people experience interactive media titles. Winter has taken significant strides in helping Calliope fulfill its mission with Crazy for Ragtime, which both entertains and educates in a fascinating manner. Those familiar with Winter's earlier products for Voyager, such as Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony, will again experience the author's golden touch with multimedia and will be reminded why he is so highly respected as a teacher, performer, and historian. curtain frame begins by showing an old map of the United States as a ragtime piece plays in the background. From the map's location of St. Louis, Missouri, often regarded as the birthplace of classic ragtime, emerges an image of a maple leaf, an obvious reference Scott Joplin's popular Maple Leaf Rag. A video box displays a series of brief excerpts from very old black-and-white silent movies, starting with rare footage of the dance known as the cakewalk. Still images of illustrated sheet music title pages and portraits of musicians flash across the motion-picture panel as the title frame opens. Users who want proceed directly the title frame can simply hit a key escape from the curtain frame. title frame displays an interactive table of contents on the U.S. map, which now also contains a multiplicity of blinking city names. Clicking on a city displays a captioned illustration of a musician or a piece of sheet music associated with ragtime there. A collapsible menu bar offers options for a glossary, for a Find tool that allows keyword searching of practically the entire contents of the program, for an excellent contextual help function, for back-tracking, and for a table of contents for the CD-ROM's seven major sections. The Ragtime Craze, which is the historical portion of the program, traces the sociocultural and musical context of ragtime from minstrelsy, Victorianism, and salon music dancing, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz. Winter does not neglect the influence of ragtime on vernacular music and on the works of such composers as Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Charles Ives. stimulating and lengthy audiovisual presentation is accompanied by a script that one can peruse separately. Among the strengths of the seven subsections of The Ragtime Craze is Winter's treatment of coon songs, a turn-of-the-century genre that stereotypes African-Americans in a way that is now very offensive. author approaches the subject clearly and cogently without being squeamish. Those unfamiliar with the history of dance will be enlightened by the subsection titled Animal Dancing, which discusses the cakewalk, turkey-trot, grizzly bear, and chicken scratcher, not mention the foxtrot, which was named after the movie mogui Harry Fox. Accounts of ragtime performance at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago are examined in an inquisitive manner without breaching the bounds of musicological objectivity. …

Lessons in the Vernacular

Classical music related in some way to vernacular models is, if not a commonplace by now, at the very least nothing new. The fascination early jazz held for classical musicians in the 1920s is one example. One could perhaps point as well to Vaughan Williams's folk-musicinto-the-concert-hall ideals and the nineteenth century's insatiable appetite for sets of variations on popular airs and opera tunes of the day. Even in centuries previous to the nineteenth, European composers found ways of integrating popular elements into their work without going beyond the resources of their respective art music traditions. That may no longer be a possibility. At least from an American perspective, an ever widening gap has opened between the multiplicity of vernacular musics and the increasingly isolated institutions of the classical concert hall. Paradoxically, the effort to bridge that gapalong with other gaps, such as the one separating Western music from others of the world-has become a characteristic feature of new music of the last few decades. Two pieces available on recent recordings offer insight into this effort as it reflects on the relationship between new music and institutions of the musical establishment. Somewhat resembling Berlioz's Le'lio (the sprawling sequel piece to the Symphonie fantastique) crossed with Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, Frank Zappa, and Hooked on Classics, Todd Levin is a composer's selfnarrated odyssey motivated by the question, What kind of music do you write? The text interacts with an aggressively pedestrian orchestral soundtrack of often disorienting and jarring contrasts, most of which is set to a tireless backbeat. Yo Shakespeare is a luxuriant but lean chassis of impulsive rhythmic strata driven by accumulation. It begins soberly but later reveals a more playful side to its personality.