Vocal Style Research Articles

Music and the Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs by Catherine Gordon-Seifert (review)

FRANCE Music and Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs. By Catherine Gordon-Seifert. (Music and Early Modern Imagination; Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. [viii, 390 p. ISBN 9780253354617. $44.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Catherine Gordon-Seifert uncovers a salon culture obsessed with painful pleasure and (mostly) pleasing pain of love in Music and Language of Love: Seventeenth-Century French Airs. Her study focuses on serious airs of four composers active during 1650s and 1660s: Michel Lambert, Benigne de Bacilly, Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, and Sebastien Le Camus. This period is significant for emergence of a new style that combined Italian monody with French courtly love song. Instead of placing their lady on a pedestal, these lovers berate her for her cruelty and faithlessness, all while deploring their inability to eradicate her image from their hearts. The serious air would eventually embody much that was characteristic of French vocal style, and with study Gordon-Seifert seeks to demonstrate what is significant about air as an artistic object, as well as to show how this repertory takes on a collective and significance and offers insight into love, relationships, [and] attitudes toward a woman's place in society (p. 4). Her understanding of music and culture that fostered it is nuanced and penetrating; further, she implements a novel system of stylistic analysis using principles of that will serve as a model to other scholars of French baroque song.Passion for spoken word ran high among some elements of seventeenthcentury French society, and nowhere more so than in ruelles, or salons, where it constituted a primary diversion. This was, after all, a culture that gave us jeux d'esprit and treatises on art of conversation. Gordon-Seifert successfully draws upon contemporary sources on poetics, rhetoric, and music to illustrate not only importance of orality to culture, but also how expressivity, inflection, and tone mattered as much, if not more, than written words themselves. The intent of serious air was, above all else, to move passions, and Gordon-Seifert builds a convincing case for why principles of apply. This music sought to persuade and thrill listener with a logically ordered discourse, containing appeals to senses that salon participants would have recognized as elements of gallant conversation.Gordon-Seifert develops relationship between poetry, and composition of airs over chapters 1-5. As she puts it: the analysis of airs is organized according to four of five components of most relevant to composition and performance: invention (inventio, or an identification of topic and means of portraying it), disposition (dipositio, or arrangement and organization of expressions), style or elocution (elocutio, or syntax, diction, and figures), and pronunciation (actio, or performance) (p. 7). She includes abundant musical examples, which she uses to bolster her argument that particular combinations of musical devices carried specific meaning (p. 57). Seven of principal passions and their textual and musical representations are explored, just as musical idiosyncrasies (meter changes, misplaced bar lines, etc.) are analyzed for their affective significance. Gordon-Seifert persuasively compares double, or ornamented repeat, with what rhetoricians termed confirmation, a portion of a speech in which speaker strengthens propositions set forth in introduction. Chapters 7-8 explore veiled erotic language of airs and chart eventual backlash against them as wider distribution of published collections began to alarm church officials. Interestingly, Gordon- Seifert points out that rhetoric and eloquence were grounds on which air was attacked (p. …

Heteroglossia and Traditional Vocal Genres in Chinese-Western Fusion Concertos

HETEROGLOSSIA AND TRADITIONAL VOCAL GENRES IN CHINESE–WESTERN FUSION CONCERTOS JOHN WINZENBURG Languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways. . . . As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people. . . . They struggle and evolve in an environment of social heteroglossia. —Mikhail Bakhtin 102 Perspectives of New Music INTRODUCTION EARLY A CENTURY AFTER Mikhail Bakhtin observed how languages interact in literary forms, musical languages are intersecting in a similar environment of heteroglossia on a global scale, bringing East– West cultures together in newly hybridized genres. When Bakhtin discussed the concept of heteroglossia in “Discourse in the Novel,” he recognized verbal discourse as a social phenomenon and the need to “overcome the divorce between an abstract ‘formal’ approach and an equally abstract ‘ideological’ approach” in literary analysis.1 Bakhtin was responding at that time to a newfound preference for novelistic discourse in conceiving style. Stressing that form and content are one,2 he used heteroglossia to describe the multiple layers at which discourse unfolds in the novel: they express the intentions of the author and others preceding the author via novelistic characterization. He thereby applied a linguistic metaphor to individual subjectivity and the formation of consciousness, defining heteroglossia as the process of “coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language .”3 To Bakhtin, heteroglossia demonstrated how complex artistic genres like the novel create images of languages which serve authorial intent. However, it has also alluded to non-literary areas, such as music, via the hybrid construction of multiple voices interacting within a single utterance.4 As units of musical language, compositions also represent one type of utterance and are often grouped according to genre.5 Compositions thus serve as intersecting points of generic interaction and socio-historical encounters. In the musical realm, there is more recent evidence of heteroglossic potential that extends beyond previously envisaged boundaries due to wider shifts in political, economic, and cultural capital across the globe. Example 1 below demonstrates one musical manifestation of this phenomenon . The example is from Movement I of And the Moon Winks, for a duet of Chinese huqin (fiddle) soloists and Western orchestra, by Chan Hing-yan.6 In this movement, subtitled “Is the Moon Tired?,” the lower range banhu7 uses idiomatic techniques to imitate the vocal style of northwestern Chinese opera.8 It engages in an interlocking dialogue with trumpets, which are situated in the balcony, over a drone of orchestral percussion and repeated chord progressions in the piano and vibraphone. Here, according to the composer, the goal is to create multiple temporal and spatial worlds—all in different musical languages—in the orbit of the solo banhu.9 N Heteroglossia and Traditional Vocal Genres 103 EXAMPLE 1: CHAN HING YAN , AND THE MOON WINKS , MOVEMENT I, FIGURE 4, MM . 2–7 Used by Permission 104 Perspectives of New Music In this passage, a number of hybrid elements appear: Western and Chinese instruments interact on the same musical score; the solo instrument mimics the Chinese vocal technique; and the Chinese vocal style appears within the genre of a contemporary hybrid concerto for Western orchestra and Chinese solo instruments. I refer to such pieces as “Chinese–Western fusion concertos.” Within the larger repertoire of New Chinese Music, fusion concertos have rapidly developed into a recognizable subgenre.10 Whereas a very limited number were written between 1930 and 1980, they began to appear in greater number from the early 1980s, especially during China’s hyperactive growth period since 1989. I have identified over 400 such works thus far, and new compositions continue to appear every year not just in China, but throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. The Chan Hing-yan example highlights Bakhtinian generic life of overlapping compositional languages and horizons in the rapidly forming repertoire. This novelty arises via the addition of an “East-meets-West” bonding factor in generic formation. A common theme of New Chinese Music scholarship has recognized the importance over the past century of including Chinese cultural associations within compositions that might otherwise seem overwhelmingly “Western” in order to exhibit modernity and validate “Chineseness.”11 Within the literature...

Diggin’ You Like Those Ol’ Soul Records: Meshell Ndegeocello and the Expanding Definition of Funk in Postsoul America

Today's absolutist varieties of Black Nationalism have run into trouble when faced with need to make sense of increasingly distinct forms of black culture produced from various diaspora populations. . . . The unashamedly hybrid character of these black cultures continually confounds any simplistic (essentialist or antiessentialist) understanding of relationship between racial identity and racial nonidentity, between folk cultural authenticity and pop cultural betrayal.Paul Gilroy1Funk, from its beginnings as terminology used to describe a specific genre of black music, has been equated with following things: blackness, mascu- linity, personal and collective freedom, and groove. Even as genre and terminology gave way to new forms of expression, performance aesthetic developed by myriad bands throughout 1960s and 1970s remained an im- portant part of post-1970s black popular culture. In early 1990s, rhythm and blues (RB one part Nina Simone, schooling one about life, love, hardship, and struggle in post-Civil Rights Movement America; and one part Sarah Vaughn, experimenting with numerous timbral colors of her voice. One critic called her a jazzy Odetta with gangster rapper inflections, insinuat- ing that her raw and organic sound and instrumental performances linked her with singer/guitarist who inspired an evolution in racial and cultural consciousness of blacks during height of freedom movement of 1960s and 1970s and explicit in-your-face aesthetic of gangsta rap.2 Oth- ers referred to her as the female Prince, noting strong similarities between two musicians.3 Indeed, both wrote, produced, and played majority of instruments heard on their debut albums. The level of genre-bending musical experimentation in which both have engaged at times has also placed them on periphery of black music trends and black radio formatting. Their respective public images and stage personas reflect how both have challenged mainstream readings of sexuality and gender by creating ambiguity through androgynous dress and lyrics that convey at times spectrum of love relationships. Regard- less of these readings, it was clear that Ndegeocello's entrance and presence on mainstream stage of 1990s popular music challenged perceptions and definitions of performance (musical and otherwise), gender identity, and con- ceptions of blackness as America awaited newness of next century. But what helped propel Prince to new levels of popularity among alternative audiences seemingly stifled career of Ndegeocello.Plantation Lullabies advanced a style that consisted of live instrumenta- tion coupled with street-smart lyrics reflective of influence of 1960s poets Giovanni, Sanchez, and Scott-Heron and a vocal style that harkened back to 1970s soul singers like Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack. However, less than two years after its release, confluence of style heard on album was illustrative of neosoul or alternative R&B style that some positioned as representative of postsoul generation's return to old-school per- formance aesthetics of previous decades. Despite being initially linked with this style and its resulting milieu, by 1997 and 1998, when Erykah Badu's al- bum Baduizm and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, respectively, dropped, Ndegeocello was noticeably absent from discussions about how genre of neosoul was birthing a more conscious female voice and perspective in postfunk black popular music. …

An Interview with H M Naqvi

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. An American rapper, widely regarded as one of the most influential and most skilled MCs. 2. An influential left-wing intellectual, revolutionary poet, one of the most famous Urdu language poets from Pakistan. 3. A world-renowned Pakistani musician, primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufis. He was considered one of the greatest singers ever recorded. Possessing a six-octave vocal range, he could perform at a high level of intensity for several hours. 4. A combination of traditional Yoruba music, jazz, highlife, funk and chanted vocals fused with percussion and vocal styles, popularised in Africa in the 1970s. Its main creator was the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Fela Kuti, who gave it its name. 5. Niggaz Wit Attitudes, an American hip hop group from Compton, California, widely considered one of the seminal acts of the gangsta rap sub-genre, at times even credited as the most important group in the history of hip hop. Active from 1986 to 1991, the group endured controversy due to the explicit nature of their lyrics and was subsequently banned from many mainstream US radio stations. In spite of this, the group has sold over 10 million CD units in the US alone. 6. Part of a hip hop duo with Rakim. 7. From ‘The Hour of Faithlessness’ by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. In The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Trans. Naomi Lazard. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988. 8. An American DJ from the South Bronx, New York, instrumental in the early development of hip hop throughout the 1980s. 9. Josh Malihabadi (5 Dec. 1894–22 Feb. 1982), born as Shabbir Hasan Khan, was a noted Urdu poet born in British India, who was an Indian citizen until 1958 when he emigrated to Pakistan and became a Pakistani citizen. He wrote ghazals and nazm under the takhallus (Urdu for nom de plume) Josh (literally ‘passion’ or ‘intensity’). 10. Iqbal (9 Nov. 1877–21 Apr. 1938), also known as Allama Iqbal, was a philosopher, poet and politician in British India who is widely regarded as having inspired the Pakistan Movement. He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary work in both the Urdu and Persian languages. 11. Ice Cube is the stage name of O'Shea Jackson (born 15 June 1969), an American rapper, record producer, actor, screenwriter, film producer and director. He began his career as a member of the group CIA and later joined the rap group NWA. After leaving NWA in 1989 he built a successful solo career in music, and also as a writer, director, actor and producer in cinema. He was ranked eighth on MTV's list of the Ten Greatest MCs of All Time.

Paradise and Politics in the Music of Blind Willie Johnson

I investigate the politics of paradises in the 1920s African-American gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson. His recordings are apocalyptic vignettes which juxtapose and conflate paradises, using many different voices. I describe the theological and political paradises in Johnson’s songs: the Old Testament journey to Canaan; the post-death heaven in the New Testament; Christ’s kingdom on earth in Revelation; freedom in Northern cities or Canada; and a utopian dream of political emancipation of African-Americans and transformation of society in the South. I outline the various voices present in Johnson’s recordings: vocal styles; accompanying singers; the guitar; grammatical, textual and lexical voices; and the silent voices of technology and time. I suggest traces of a subtle political activism in these voices and paradises, and explore uses of these voices in linking paradises, arguing that the complex transitions enhance the force of signification and frustrate attempts to finalise meanings. Many interpretations of Johnson’s recordings, however, seek to determine final meaning, and I discuss the limitations of such attempts, limitations which not only underestimate the richness of the recordings but deny Johnson any political awareness or agency. In cautioning against this kind of project, I call for a hearing open to plural interpretations, and suggest political potential not only in coded messages, but in radical indeterminacy itself.

Richard Wagner: Self Promotion and the Making of a Brand (review)

Richard Wagner: Self Promotion and Making of a Brand. By Nicholas Vazsonyi. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni - versity Press, 2010. [xii, 222 p. ISBN 9780521519960. $99.] Music examples, bibliography, index. In an 1807 letter, Wordsworth quoted Coleridge's dictum that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create by which he is to be relished. This aphorism gets to heart of an issue that composers as well as writers were forced to confront in nineteenth century. Those who self-identified as progressive figures frequently found way to success beset with roadblocks of various kinds: scarcity of opportunities to secure performances, especially of large-scale works; recalcitrant musicians and singers who often were not up to demands of scores; critical hostility, which was a near constant element in responses to advanced music; vested interests whose favor needed to be curried; as well as usual competition for audiences with other forms of entertainment. Small wonder that matter of creating a taste for one's works occupied so much of these composers' time and effort. This might be done by journalistic proselytizing (Berlioz and Schumann), or by personally directing exemplary performances (Liszt and Mahler). In his monograph, Nicholas Vazsonyi demonstrates that Richard Wagner employed an unprecedented variety of means to win acceptance for his art; or, to rephrase this in business speak he adopts throughout, Wagner undertook a multi-fronted advertising campaign to establish and promote his brand. That he was so successful is what makes a study of his methods so interesting. This accessibly written study highlights extent to which Wagner's activities can be interpreted as deliberate efforts at selfpromotion. The book follows a chronological path, starting in chapter 1, Image, with his unsuccessful Parisian years. Wagner is seen to have instrumentalized his failure by establishing in his short stories and reviews from period idea of financial disinterestedness as a necessary component of true artistry (p. 12). This trait is aligned with Germanness, a mental configuration which is expressed in various jingoistic jibes at French and Italian traditions (p. 19). Beethoven, as archrepresentative of Germanic art, is conscripted to Wagner' s nascent project, most obviously in short story Eine Pilger - fahrt zu Beethoven (1840), where Beetho ven endorses Wagner's dismissal of operatic practices of day in favor of a yet-to-be achieved union of instrumental and vocal styles. However, as Vazsonyi demonstrates in chapter 2, Publicity (perhaps most compelling chapter of this study), even performance of Ninth Symphony in Dresden in 1846 can be read as an act of self-advertisement: Wagner's multifaceted involvement, which included mounting a carefully orchestrated press campaign and was capped by his appearance on podium, ensured that his name was indelibly linked with his great German forebear. Only a few years previously, he had established a potent association with another Germanic icon through his involvement with ceremonies that brought Weber's remains from London back to Dresden. Nowadays it is common to describe Wagner as prime mover in this repatriation, but this is demonstrably false. The inflation of Wagner's role has come about thanks to his having left the definitive account of event (p. 51). This is a vivid illustration of how dull chronicle of history can get overwritten by a compelling narrative, or how spin can [shape] our historical memory (pp. 59, 62). Chapter 3, Niche and Branding, focuses on years around 1850, time of Zurich writings in which Wagner established new parameters for his art. The openly propagandistic nature of these essays has been much discussed, although no one previously has framed this in such overtly commercial terms. …

Michael Jackson and the Expressive Power of Voice-produced Sound

This article focuses on Michael Jackson's vocal style with a particular emphasis on his creative use of different voice colors or sounds. Mapping out some key features of his musicianship in terms of sound-making sets the stage for discussing the issues of subjectivity and agency in relation to Jackson's vocal signature seen as an aggregate of “different voices” displayed in dialogue with historically established types, roles, and styles in popular music. A concept of role-playing is employed to conceptualize Jackson's performativity with regard to 1) the contradictory generic coding in his music, 2) notions of authenticity in popular music, and 3) the sites of identity that bear upon his artistic persona (race, ethnicity, sex, gender).

World War III Just the Highlights

The Solo vocal style should be as “casual” as possible; that is, it should be as much like speech as possible but focused on a sung pitch. This style is a kind of “crooning.” This means that the sounds of “extended vocal techniques” are not appropriate to the meaning of the text. Also, the Soloist uses the microphone rather than “projecting” the voice. This means that the vocal sound is rather softer than in traditional singing.

The tuning and vocal formant features of Chinese folk song singing: a case study of Hua'er music

Hua'er music is one of the representative folk music traditions in China today, designated as part of the world intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2009. Whilst folk music traditions like Hua'er have been promoted in the education of young musicians due to their musical and cultural significance, no in-depth research has analyzed the acoustic characteristics of this vocal style. In this study, studio recordings were made of eighteen folk song examples sung by four four traditional and one formally educated singers. Analyses showed that both the traditional and the formally trained singers used a tuning pattern containing four main anchor-pitches approximating a Pythagorean tuning. The voice source in two different vocal styles ('Zhensheng' and 'Jiasheng'), reportedly used by these singers in performances, were examined by inverse filtering. LTAS of songs performed by the traditional singers were similar and showed a 'Speaker's formant' cluster near 3.5kHz. Implications are drawn for the education of folk music singers in higher education.

How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American YouTube Performance

How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American YouTube Performance Christine Bacareza Balance (bio) On March 15, 2011, just days after University of California–Los Angeles undergraduate Alexandra Wallace posted (and subsequently took down) her incendiary “Asians in the Library” video log (vlog) on YouTube, another video set ablaze Facebook walls and Twitter accounts. Jimmy Wong’s “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song”—a satirical love song addressed to Wallace—distinguished itself from the hundreds of other ranting and remix response videos. Opening with an excerpt from the offending party’s original post—as she mockingly renders a scene of Asians answering their cell phones in the library with an “Ooooh, Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong,” Wong’s video quickly shifts into a style and staging commonly associated with online vlogs. Seated and directly addressing the camera, he is framed by his home studio’s accoutrements: computer and electronic keyboard on his left side and a row of cables neatly hanging on the wall behind him. Stuttering in a thick Asian accent and, in turn, deriding Wallace’s own orientalist rendition, a guitar-strapped Wong introduces his song into a boom microphone that hangs near his face: “Greetings, Miss Alexandra Wallace. I’m not most . . . how you say . . . politically correct person. So please . . .” (head bows quickly) “do not take offensive. Thank you.” Viewers familiar with the “Asians in the Library” video would recognize that this introduction riffs on Wallace’s own preface: while she is not the most “politically correct person,” she does have Asian friends, and hopes, in the end, that viewers do not take offense. Wong strums a single chord, signaling a magical transformation, as the video again cuts to Wong, now guitarless but seated in the same position. This new version of Wong [End Page 138] purrs into the microphone without an Asian accent or tone of deference. With his recording studio–style headphones on, his seductive vocal style recalls Asian American radio disc jockey Theo Mizuhara (“Theo” on Los Angeles R&B/hip-hop station 92.3 the Beat), often assumed to be African American by unsuspecting listeners because of his deep and soothing voice. This sexier Wong calls to Wallace—“Oooh girl”—before launching into his own rendition of her library scene: “Don’t think I didn’t see you watching me talking on my phone yesterday . . . all sexy . . . All Ching Chong Ling Long . . . Baby, it’s just code . . . It’s just the way that I tell the ladies that it’s time for me to get funky.” For Wong, “getting funky” means launching into an acoustic ode to Wallace, a remix and reclamation of words and phrases lifted from her original video post. The song culminates in a repeating chorus, one that “wrings the musicality of the original Ching Chong” bit while satirizing its incommensurability: “Ching Chong . . . It means I love you . . . Ling Long . . . I really need you . . . Ching Chong . . . I still don’t know what that means.” The song’s arrangement of vocal melody and harmony, acoustic guitar, and lo-fi percussion are simple and catchy. Yet the video’s visual elements—the main frame of Wong is surrounded by small boxes or PiPs (picture in pictures) of him performing each portion of the music—requires a professional style of multichannel editing. Here, Wong’s video evidences the unstable divisions between amateur and professional that is characteristic of the video-sharing website YouTube, ones that have helped redefine contemporary media production. Since its initial posting, “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song” has garnered almost 4 million hits worldwide, received coverage from both Asian American and mainstream U.S. press outlets, and landed the twenty-three-year-old actor/musician a role in an upcoming indie film. As a video that was able to spread quickly and across many screens, the “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song,” in all respects, was a viral hit. While its popularity must be characterized as unexpected or accidental, in order for a YouTube video to “go viral,” it must actually incorporate emotional hooks: key signifiers that catch the attention and sensibility of a particular audience. While sites like YouTube, by...

Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond (review)

Reviewed by: Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond Ben Krakauer (bio) Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond. Richard K. Wolf, editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiii + 329 pp., photos, maps, figures, tables, glossary, notes, bibliography, subject index. ISBN: 978-0-19-533138-7 (Paperback). Audio and video on companion website. http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195331387 [accessed August 21, 2011]. Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond is an edited volume of ethnographic case studies that makes significant contributions to South Asian studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology. A collection of “comparative microstudies” (6), the volume highlights local and translocal phenomena in “South Asia and Beyond.” With its broad range of ethnographic inquiry and theoretical analysis, Theorizing the Local is potentially “significant for a larger South Asian understanding of music, practice, and experience” (26), and presents alternatives to the conventional ways of theorizing South Asia based on religion, politics, language, ethnicity, and nationality. The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with a different conception of locality. Susan A. Reed, Amanda Weidman, and Martin Clayton contribute chapters to part I, “Bodies and Instruments.” Reed writes how women’s performance of Kandyan dance in Sri Lanka “simultaneously sustains, challenges, and expands notions of respectability and of Sinhala Buddhist womanhood” (29), as women performers create a niche in what was originally an all-male art form. Weidman writes about the ways in which Karnatak violin accompaniment has influenced Karnatak vocal style, and what this implies for those who consider Karnatak vocal music a purely Indian expression “unaltered by the colonial encounter” (61). Clayton explores guitar music in India as a local phenomenon, and describes its popularity among Christian Anglo-Indians in urban centers throughout India. In part II, “Spaces and Itineraries,” Gregory D. Booth, Shubha Chaudhuri, and Gert-Matthias Wegner work with musical phenomena that are especially linked to the places where they occur. Booth describes the extensive geographic and social networks that itinerant brass band musicians follow in search of seasonal work across huge swaths of north India. Chaudhuri describes musical, religious, [End Page 137] and social activity at three shrines of Rāni Bhaṭiyāṇi in western Rajasthan, and shows how hereditary temple musicians and mediums are affected by the revisionist policies of the religious trusts that control the temples. Wegner likens the processional route of Newar Buddhist musicians through Bhaktapur, Nepal, to “an elaborate maṇḍala that represents their ritual townscape” (115). He describes how the prescribed musical activity at key sites “actualizes the divine energy of the locality” (138) while “the location in which pieces are performed serve as keys to musical meaning” (113). In part III, Rolf Groesbeck, Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, and David Henderson deal with issues surrounding “Learning and Transmission.” Groesbeck describes the pedagogical system for Kathakali drumming at a major performing arts institution in Kerala. He contrasts the rote memorization of fixed exercises that beginners learn from their teachers in drumming class with the fluid and improvisatory style that more advanced students learn by observing their peers while practicing with the full ensemble. He explains that the incorporation of both vertical and horizontal learning “trains the student to be a student and the guru to be a guru” (145). Qureshi describes musical transmission among hereditary sārangī players in north India, arguing that one of the key theoretical features of Hindustani music is the affective, familial bond between the master and disciple (177). She suggests that we rethink locality in “oral and relational” (166) terms, and that we might accordingly retheorize the way that art music is transmitted in the West (183). Henderson combines phenomenological and ethnographic approaches as he writes about his experience studying tabla and Newar barrel drums with two different teachers in Nepal. He describes the ways in which tactile and emotional memory are linked, and foregrounds the importance of the teacher’s verbal input and feedback as the student strives to internalize musical knowledge, aesthetics, and technique. Of all the chapters in Theorizing the Local, Henderson’s stands out as particularly insightful and well written. In Part IV...

Universals in the world’s musics

Many decades of skepticism have prevented the field of musicology from embracing the importance of musical universals. When universals have been discussed, it has generally been in the form of meta-critiques about the concept of universals, rather than in positive proposals about actual universals. We present here a typology of four categories of musical universals and a listing of 70 putative universals in musics cross-culturally. These universals span a wide variety of features, including pitch, rhythm, melodic structure, form, vocal style, expressive devices, instruments, performance contexts, contents, and behaviors.

Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan (review)

Reviewed by: Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan Nathan Light (bio) Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan. (Chinese Turkestan. The Muqam of the Dolan. Music of the Uyghurs of Taklamakan Desert). Pierre Bois. Trans. Frank Kane and Mukaddas Mijit. Paris: INEDIT/Maison des Cultures du Monde, 2006. CD-ROM with liner notes in French and English. Dolan muqam music from Xinjiang, China, has gained some renown in recent years because it is one of the few suitelike musical forms that has not had to be revived from the moribund condition of other Uyghur muqam traditions. The performers are generally not educated, modernized, urban professionals, but have come in a steady stream from the same social and religious contexts as earlier performers. They are representative of traditional Central Asian performers because they are generally local community members who have spent their lives performing at large dance celebrations. Their heterophonic style of singing is a remarkable contrast to the mostly mono-melodic forms of other Uyghur music, both muqam and folk. Nonetheless, more questions exist about Dolan lives and musical repertoires than answers. The Dolan are agriculturalists and herders who live primarily in the area around Mäkit and Maralbashi, two communities roughly 200 kilometers east of Kashgar and somewhat distant from each other (Svanberg 1996). There is not much ethnographic research on the Dolan and probably will not be more until Chinese officials change their attitudes toward rural research in Xinjiang. China’s much-touted openness to international researchers has not affected Xinjiang and no foreigners are allowed to do substantial projects outside of major urban areas. A few people have been able to travel and document the music cultures of the Dolan, with the much-lamented ethnomusicologist Zhou Ji (1943–2008) being one of the most successful, but his works have been published only in Chinese and Uyghur. He is heavily referenced by both Sabine Trebinjac (2000) and Rachel Harris (2008), as well as in my own work (Light 2008), but only the first two briefly consider the Dolan muqam repertoire. The recording under review was made as part of Dolan Muqam performances in Paris by six traditional performers from the Dolan community. Brief details about the lives of the performers are given in the liner notes, and they also show up in Harris’s book albeit with differences in the transliteration of their names: [End Page 140] Huseyn Yahya performing on the CD is Husayn Yakhya, and Ahat Tohti on the CD is Häkhät Tokhti (Harris 2008, 116). On this CD, the performers sing what could be described as both religious and love songs, but the liner notes describe them only as love songs. Nonetheless, the translations preserve much of the allegorical love imagery that reflects the devotion to God that appears in Sufi poetry and dervish singing from many parts of Central Asia. Although the heterophonic singing makes the original song texts difficult to decipher, the religious content in some cases is also clear from the repetition of the refrain “Ah Allah.” Some Dolan performers also know pieces from the tradition known as the Twelve Muqams (Harris 2008, 120–3), the large sequence of suites that has been the subject of standardization and canonization for more than 50 years and has recently succeeded in being declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005. Except for some similar instruments, vocal style, and verse, the Dolan muqam suites are musically quite distinct from the Twelve Muqams. We cannot even say for sure that the term muqam was traditional for this repertoire among the Dolan. The liner notes on the present recording say, “traditionalists consider the term muqam too scholarly, and prefer to use the word bayawan (literally, desert).” This would appear to mean roughly, “scholars and politicians have come and wish to incorporate this tradition into the expanding muqam framework as a further demonstration of the richness of Uyghur tradition,” an interpretation readily supported by observing recent changes in muqam performances over the past 20 years (Harris 2008). As Trebinjac (2000, 260–6...

A Selective Discography of Scandinavian Heavy Metal Music

Since its emergence in the United States and United Kingdom in the late 1960s, heavy metal music has spread to all corners of the globe. From Brazil (Sepultura) to Bali (Eternal Madness) to Bahrain (Dhul-Qarnayn), this hard-edged musical style has firmly established itself in practically every country in the world. One region that adopted heavy metal particularly early on was Scandinavia. Not only have these countries and regions contributed numerous metal artists, but also several genres and sub-genres. This discography highlights some of the more famous (and infamous) bands to have come from the frozen north. BACKGROUND Heavy metal as a genre had its origins in the hard rock bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They distinguished themselves from mainstream rock and roll through the extensive use of amplified feedback and distortion coupled with power chords (normally comprised of open fifths), and aggressive bass and percussion lines. While bands such as Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer, and the MC5 have been regarded by some as originators of the genre, three bands are widely considered to be the godfathers of heavy metal: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath set the mood through its use of an unusually raw tone, dark and sometimes mystical lyrics, and even darker album-art imagery. The opening track on the band's self-titled debut album begins with the soft sound of falling rain and tolling bells before bursting forth with an eerie tritone passage from Tony Iommi's down-tuned guitar. Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, both exerted a tremendous sonic influence on the nascent metal scene with a soaring, almost operatic vocal style combined with dauntingly technical instrumental parts. In the song Highway Star, Deep Purple guitarist Richie Blackmore and organist Jon Lord produced solos reminiscent of passages from baroque concertos. After Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin, the first wave of specifically identifiable heavy metal bands began to emerge during the early 1970s. England's Judas Priest and Germany's Scorpions introduced the twin attack. Whereas more traditional rock bands featured both a rhythm (tasked primarily with playing chords and simple accompaniment lines, and often played by the lead singer), and a lead (responsible for improvised solos and more complex accompaniment), the twin guitar approach allowed guitarists to alternate lead and rhythm roles back and forth during a song. Australia's AC/DC gained notoriety for a particularly aggressive combination of high-voltage riffs, driving percussion, and a screaming vocal style on the part of lead singer Bon Scott and, following the latter's death, Brian Johnson. Alice Cooper and KISS became known for their outlandish use of makeup, costumes, and elaborate stage productions that would later exert a tremendous influence on particular heavy metal subgenres. During the mid- to late-1970s, punk rock arose as a reaction to the slickly-produced and often self-indulgent music being put out by both the mainstream rock and heavy metal communities. Groups like the Misfits, the Ramones, and the Stooges coupled the raw sounds of early Black Sabbath with faster tempos, simpler song structures, and lower production values. At about the same time, the English group Motorhead and its enigmatic front man, Lemmy Kilmister, began incorporating punk influences into its high-energy rock music. Motorhead's influence would later pave the way for the extreme metal genres of black and death metal. The late 1970s also saw the rise of the American band Van Halen, featuring Eddie Van Halen's phenomenal work which took metal to whole new heights of virtuosity, as well as helping the genre break into the commercial mainstream. As the 1980s arrived, a new generation of heavy metal bands appeared on the scene. Often dubbed the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), groups like Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Venom revitalized the aging metal brand and brought it back into the commercial spotlight. …

Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997 (review)

Reviewed by: Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997 Ed Cray Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934–1997. Ed. Ronald D. Cohen. (New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. x + 365, introductions, 15 illustrations, bibliography, "About the Contributors," sources and permissions, index.) As a collector and an unflagging advocate of American folk music in the years before and after World War II, Alan Lomax, the son of John A. Lomax, had no peer. A great percentage of the field recordings deposited in what was then the Archive of American Folk Music sprang from the battery-powered Duotone recording machine the Lomaxes stowed in the trunk of their car. It was the Lomaxes, particularly Alan, who introduced us to Iron Head Baker, Mose Platt, anonymous prison wood cutters and tracklayers who appeared on his recordings, Vera Hall, Muddy Waters, and hundreds of other great artists. It was Alan who refused to hide these treasures away in an archive and ceaselessly promoted the singers and their songs on the radio and through commercial recordings, concerts, and hootenannies. And to Alan goes no small measure of credit for the folk revival that has sustained academic interest in folklore. For all those reasons, Lomax's various writings anthologized here by the astute Ronald Cohen are historically important. If there is anything of great value missing from these selected readings, it might be some of the liner notes Lomax wrote for his Southern Journey anthology of field recordings, now available on compact disc from the Rounder Records label. At the same time, it is not always wise to reread one's early writing, as every writer learns sooner or later. At times, Alan Lomax is patronizing, describing various African American individuals as "blue black" (p. 10), "kinky head[ed]" (p. 10), or a "cotton headed old fellow with a mouthful of snuff" (p. 13). The unconscious racism of a lad raised in Texas early in the twentieth century leaks through in the use of the term "buck Negro" (p. 19) or when he refers to an adult African American as "the boy" (p. 21). Other passages reveal a raw naivety: "I had heard several versions of the song ['Stagolee']," Lomax writes, "but I wanted the correct one" (p. 50). His galloping romanticism sometimes expresses itself in sheer overwriting. In one passage, for example, he states that the American singer's "songs have been strongly rooted in his life and have functioned there as enzymes to assist in the digestion of hardship, solitude, violence, hunger and the honest comradeship of democracy" (p. 63). Over time, Lomax outgrew such comments, particularly after coming in contact with the American Left in the prewar years. Nonetheless, he continued to find it difficult to curb his habit of grand generalizations. For example, he wrote that the "Southern Italian [capitals in the original] . . . comes to the bed of his inexperienced madonna flushed with wine and the repressed passion of a long engagement, a feeling that is closely akin to anger. Little wonder that so many Southern Italian marriages are sexually infelicitous" (p. 162–3). This cultural observation, one adds, spilled from the typewriter of a forty-four-year-old man who had spent no more than a year in that country. That habit of thought involving grand generalizations infused the two most controversial [End Page 362] articles of Lomax's career: "Folk Song Style" (American Anthropologist 61(6): 927–54, 1959) and "Song Structure and Social Structure" (Ethnology 1(4):425–51, 1962). In these articles, Lomax becomes the first to link the vocal cords with the sex organs, insisting again with broad generalization that courtship patterns conditioned vocal style around the world. Stated simply, the more repressed a culture, the more constrained the singer's vocal production—never mind the exceptions. He had become the Alan Lomax, authority on folk music around the world. Even then he was still promoting folk music. If the revival had moved past him, if he had outlived his Rooseveltian times, he has still left his mark. Ed Cray University of Southern California Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

"Esprimere la voce humana": Connections between Vocal and Instrumental Music by Italian Composers of the Early Seventeenth Century

Several points of intersection exist between vocal and instrumental music by Italian composers of the early seventeenth century. First, like books of vocal monody with an overt pedagogical purpose, volumes of instrumental music may have been designed to instruct the performer in the conventions of the modern style. Specifically, many books published in the 1610s and '20s offer their users a window on the changeable, fluid idiom of the stile moderno, in which contrast of musical material and a posture of invention assumes primary importance. Second, as in recitative and other vocal styles, much of the vocal and instrumental music of the early seventeenth century is dominated by a metrical flexibility that similarly contributes to an air of immediacy, and that seems designed to highlight the emotional qualities of the music—to convey and move the affetti. And third, whereas the theatrical nature of vocal music of the period—especially music destined for the stage—may appear obvious, some instrumental music of the period may be equally theatrical, containing instructions for interaction with an audience, staging, imitation, and role-play. These points of intersection in particular suggest a relationship between the instrumental stile moderno and the vocal stile rappresentativo, prevalent in operas, ensemble madrigals, and solo songs in the early 1600s. Although no single, exclusive definition of the stile rappresentativo exists, it is nevertheless possible to trace a constellation of features associated with that term through a variety of works. Despite the divergence of the specific musical language of the vocal and instrumental repertoires, some of the vocal features are analogous to elements of instrumental music discussed in the article.

A Study of Melodic Patterns in Vocal Styles Accompanied by the Shamisen

A Study of Melodic Patterns in Vocal Styles Accompanied by the Shamisen

A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.

‘Rude am I in Meh Speech': Vocality and Victorian Shakespeare

This article refutes some of the assumptions, most often associated with Peter Hall and John Barton, that colour accounts of the vocality of verse actors before the emergence of contemporary stylisations. It focuses on the earliest recordings of late Victorians actors – in particular, Edwin Booth, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving – performing Shakespearean roles. By examining the social, political and cultural evaluations of the actor's voice from the period 1870-1901, it emerges that the actors who dominated the English-speaking stage of the period spoke with a voice unaffected by Received Pronunciation, which was becoming increasingly dominant through the education system. By timing the rate of speech of existing recordings it becomes clear that the application of pejorative terms – such as 'declamation' – to the actors' vocal styles is inaccurate because their voices progress through the text at a rate in the median of twentieth-century dramatic speech. Most importantly, their training – rooted in the repertory system and the late nineteenth-century forms of elocution – required the use of a different resonance centre than that used by contemporary performers, which lends to their voice a timbre more suited to the space of a large auditorium. The article asks for a reconsideration of those voices as more recognisably 'natural' to the actor and to the nineteenth-century audience than they are to their contemporary counterparts.

The Erotics of an Oil Drum: Queercore, Gay Macho, and the Defiant Sexuality of Extra Fancy's Sinnerman

IN 1996 ATLANTIC RECORDS RELEASED AND almost instantly abandoned an album that asserted uniquely aggressive, macho gay male identity. The songs of Extra Fancy's Sinnerman deal with sadomasochism, violent retribution against gay-bashers, and life with HIV in punk-inflected style that musically reflects the intense aggression of their texts. Extra Fancy first released Sinnerman on the independent label Diablo Musica, but Atlantic immediately picked it up, hoping to use it as catalyst for their new gay marketing division. Eight weeks later the band, along with the division, was dropped, rais[ing] eyebrows among the alternative rock community. (1) Despite Extra Fancy's explicitly homosexual-themed lyrics, only the lead singer of the band was openly gay. Brian Grillo's intimidating muscular body, aggressive stage presence, butch clothing style, and shaved head presented radical gay male image that foregrounded an enraged machismo. His gritty vocal style demonstrated indebtedness to the hardcore-grunge-alternative masculinity of Henry Rollins, Kurt Cobain, and Eddie Vedder as he strutted imposingly on stage, shirtless, banging on fifty-gallon oil drum. Nine years later Extra Fancy was virtually canonized in David Ciminelli and Ken Knox's celebration of the queercore movement, Homocore: The Loud and Raucous Rise of Queer Rock, even as the authors observe that Grillo never had desire to be anything other than performer who rocked--regardless of his sexual orientation. Indeed, in their interview with him he clearly distances himself from the book's subject. Nevertheless, for Ciminelli and Knox, the members of Extra Fancy were once messiahs of the queercore movement. (2) This dissonance invites close consideration of Extra Fancy's constructions of queer identity. The term queercore or homocore can be used to describe number of subcultural and musical practices, but its most common usage--a usage I have found prominent during my localized ethnographic work with Homocore Minneapolis--refers to the channeling of the underground, do-it-yourself ethics associated with punk music and style and their offshoots in order to challenge both heteronormativity and more mainstream images of LGBT life and culture. Despite Grillo's reluctance to associate himself with the queer punk movement, Sinnerman's lyrics explicitly and often graphically address male homosexuality, while its music demonstrates particular variant of the hardcore legacy of queercore style. Still, the privileged place Ciminelli and Knox claim for the band within musical subculture that is in large part defined by fluidity of gender and sexual identity presents significant issues of representation and authority. As Susan McClary notes, the various cultural and artistic discourses at work in society do not simply represent preexisting notions of community and identity but are where the ongoing work of social formation occurs. (3) Extra Fancy challenged some of the most culturally prevalent perceptions about sexual identity and musical gendering during the time in which they were active. This article in part constitutes an attempt--largely driven by Judith Halberstam's call for archiving queer subcultural production, which is frequently and necessarily fleeting--to recover this underappreciated cultural moment, one whose transgressive potential warrants examination. (4) Halberstam describes her conception of queer archive as not simply collection of documentary artifacts but a discursive field and structure of thinking and a theory of cultural relevance, construction of collective memory, and complex record of queer activity. (5) While I wish to place Extra Fancy within the queer archive, I also recognize that this essay necessarily constitutes an initial foray into the explication of the discourses and social structures surrounding the band. Therefore, I primarily approach Extra Fancy from two contextual angles. …