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This article offers a new perspective regarding the politics of Black-Jewish relations in American music through the case study of George Gershwin. Previous research asserted the contribution of Bl...

The upsurge of academic interest in the genre known as progressive rock has taken much for granted. In particular, little account has been taken of how discourses surrounding progressive rock were deployed in popular culture in the past, especially within the music press. To recover the historical place of the music and its critical reception, we present an analysis of three British weekly music papers of the 1960s and 1970s: Melody Maker, New Musical Express and Sounds. We find that there appears to be relatively little consensus in the papers studied regarding the use and meaning of the term ‘progressive’, pointing to either multiple interpretations or an instability of value judgments and critical claims. Its most common use is to signify musical quality – to connect readers with the breadth of new music being produced at that time, and to indicate a move away from the ‘underground’ scene of the late 1960s.

The formation of a Chinese identity through symphonic music is an indispensable part of the overall cultural landscape in China. This article takes the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra – the oldest symphony orchestra in Asia – as a case study to examine the formation of a contemporary identity in China’s cultural field, especially after the ten-year Cultural Revolution. Identity is a complicated and fluid concept for it concerns both individual and collective, and moreover, it is a concept that needs to be negotiated and communicated in spatial and temporal dimensions. This new Chinese identity formed through symphonic music not only involves the tension between local Chinese culture and Western bourgeois culture but also triggers argument with regards to the past, present and future Chinese self. The identity is also formed and confirmed through cultural consumption of symphonic music, a form of cultural capital which later defines social classes. Musical production at Shanghai Symphony Orchestra also...

One could read this book in several ways. I encourage the reader to imagine her/himself listening to the pages – hearing the voices of music lovers as they are regularly cited between its covers. T...

Chinese popular music, inspired by pre-war Shanghai music known as ‘shidai qu’ (时代曲) (songs of the era) and evolving to include Canto pop and Taiwanese Mandarin songs, has always been popular among the Chinese in Malaysia. This music is featured on radio, television, karaoke, and performed by orchestras such as the Dama Chinese Orchestra (大马) to enthusiastic reception. The songs have a broad appeal that transcends time, generation, and place. Of significance is the observation that the music has become a cultural marker and musical heritage for Chinese in Malaysia and in the region. The paper looks at factors behind this development.

Popular music journalism during the American Civil War faced two primary challenges: how to talk about war songs objectively in the midst of war, and how to overcome an elitist attitude tha...

Recent thinking about Intellectual History has moved beyond studying only verbal texts, to encompass other kinds of visual and aural texts that can be vehicles for generative thought. Where might music fit into this expanded conception? If ideas are defined purely as concepts that can be expressed in words, music can be no more than an “epiphenomenon”, a consequence or representation of ideas that lie behind it, but not capable of embodying those ideas in itself. Yet to many musicians, it seems obvious that music can function as a way in which ideas are developed and worked out. What kinds of knowledge might be embodied in music, then, and how do its meanings change over time? In this paper, I examine some of these issues through consideration of one of the key texts of Western art music, J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, exploring how it was conceived in a liturgical context in Bach’s time, how its meaning changed when transposed to the very different milieus of concert performance in nineteenth-c...

Medieval discourse about both the theory and practice of music featured much debate about the views of moderni and antiqui from when Guido of Arezzo devised a new way of recording pitch in the early eleventh century to the complaints of Jacobus in the early fourteenth century about new forms of measured music in the ars nova. There was also a shift from a Boethian notion that practical music was a manifestation of cosmic music, towards a more Aristotelian model, that privileged music as sensory experience. That this could have a profound effect on human emotion was articulated by Johannes de Grocheio writing about music c. 1270 and Guy of Saint-Denis soon after 1300 about plainchant. Jacobus, writing in the 1320s, was troubled by this shift in thinking about music not as reflections of transcendent realities, but as sounds of human invention that served to move the soul. He argued that musical patterns should reflect a transcendent harmony that was both cosmic and celestial.

The present volume brings together six articles which all address issues of censorship in music. While restrictions on free speech in popular music are often ascribed to the semantic content of lyrics or images, the authors in this special issue take their point of departure from the perception that the musical sound in its complexity rather plays a major role in silencing musicians and artists. Drawing on diverse cases of restrictions in various popular music genres, the volume expands knowledge on how censorship affects music life and how it can be theorized.

In the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Church entered into a long-term, complex and productive symbiosis with popular music. Beginning in the 1950s, reform-minded pastors opened their doors to jazz, and, later, almost the entire spectrum of popular music could be found in their churches: from pop hits, beat, rock, blues to singer/songwriters and punk. The interplay between the Church and popular music gave rise to a highly unique communicative space, a counterpart to the rigidly organized public realm. Here, political dissidents took refuge from a repressive system and were free to examine their society critically. This political force infused the alliance of the Church and popular music in East Germany with an explosive quality. To examine the specifics of this alliance, this article traces three major trends: the assimilation of African-American music, the reform of the traditional religious hymn, and the linking of youth ministry with popular music. The analysis of these three t...

This article studies the hipster as the neoliberal offspring of the yuppie. In order to understand the pillars of these cultures, the focus is on their staging of a musicology. I use the term “musicology” here as an umbrella term for the musicological musings of representatives of each of the subcultures studied here. These often encompass approaches to the scholarly analysis of music as regards historical musicology, performance practice, or music theory.of this paper also studies the music industry’s corresponding modes of production by the lived experience of both the hipster and the yuppie subcultures. For a closer reading of these, the parodied rhetoric of music journalism in the novel American Psycho and its film adaptation will serve as a starting point to discuss the relevance of economic and cultural capital in subcultural style or fashion statements.

This paper examines the differences in the approaches that two improvisers, Graham Haynes and Kenny Wessel, take in interpreting Adam Rudolph’s unique improvisational system, and also analyzes two passages of music generated by Rudolph’s approach to what he calls “improvised conducting.” In order for the reader to understand the significance of these analyses, I provide some background on the specifics of Rudolph’s system. I also provide a brief history of conducted improvisation and a framework to understand the different kinds of conducted improvisation commands to give the reader with a basic understanding of the practice. While I place the mechanics of the music at the center of this paper, I also use interviews and ethnographic research to examine Rudolph’s particular development and lineage within a larger creative music history. Examining the solos of Rudolph’s longtime associates, through analysis as well as personal communication with the musicians, I arrive at insights that shed light on...

This paper outlines the prodigious field of public history preservation practice prompted by popular music culture, exploring the relationship of affect, history and the archive. Framing this exploration with a concept of cultural justice, it considers the still uncertain place of popular music as a subject of heritage and preservation, assessing the parameters of what counts as an archive and issues of democratization. It offers a discussion of the archival and affective turns in the humanities as a means of framing the politics of practice focused on popular music culture. The paper offers empirical evidence of the relational qualities of the popular music archive considered in affective terms. Discussion draws first on evidence from the vernacular practices of communities in what Baker and Collins describe as ‘do-it-yourself’ archives and secondly from ‘authorized’ collections in established archival institutions (Baker and Collins, “Sustaining Popular Music’s Material Culture,” 3). The paper e...

This article discusses the relationship between popular music and the newly independent state organization in Cameroon in the first two decades after independence in 1960. Drawing on the theory of the postcolonial state articulated by Achille Mbembe, it analyzes the state’s approach towards popular music and shows the double-edged position in which the musicians found themselves, in terms of their negotiations within the diverse demands of the new nation-state. Thus, the article argues that popular music in Cameroon had a central place at the very heart of the process of nation building.

Although gesture has always been an essential component of music, the study of musical gesture, particularly in its literal interpretation as bodily gesture and movement, has only emerged as a sign...

With a hundred years (1912–2012) of Norwegian master’s and doctoral theses written within the field of music as a backdrop, this article reports from an extensive study of the academisation of popular music in higher music education and research in Norway. Theoretically, the study builds on the sociology of culture and education in the tradition of Bourdieu and some of his successors, and its methodological design is that of a comprehensive survey of the entire corpus of academic theses produced within the Norwegian music field. On this basis, the authors examine what forms of popular music have been included and excluded respectively, how this aesthetic and cultural expansion has found its legitimate scholarly expression, and which structural forces seem to govern the processes of academisation of popular music in the Norwegian context. The results show that popular music to a large extent has been successfully academised, but also that this process has led to some limitations of academic opennes...

The role of music in the formation and shaping of identity cannot be gainsaid since music represents an important cultural sphere where identities are affirmed, challenged, torn apart and reconstructed. Many young people use music and musicians that they admire to distinguish themselves from their peers. Thus, the choice of music among the youth often serves as an important marker of the character and nature of identity under construction. Music is meant to be fun, to brighten life, but the development and expression of musical taste can also be a serious statement about one’s identity. Pop music as a genre has had the greatest appeal and impact to the majority of the youth in Kenya. The influence of the medium and its artists on overall identity development is pervasive, complex, and far-reaching in its cultural significance. Grounded in both a historical analysis and a theoretical framework of identity, we interrogate how contemporary pop music shapes and influences identities among Kenyan youth...

This article shows that over the course of the Warring States period (479–221 BCE) authors began to organize and categorize music in a manner that helped define and reinforce their conceptions of themselves as a distinct cultural or ethnic group: variously referred to as the Huaxia, Zhuxia, and Zhou. By examining how Ruist (Confucian) authors articulated distinctions among various types of music, and by showing how such identifications denigrated nefarious forms not associated with the Zhou court and its culture, I show how authors endeavored in a process of musical canonization while also consolidating a sense of an ethno-cultural self. The fact that these writings distinguished among and evaluated musical types not primarily through a discussion of musical form or theory but via a morally-laden language rooted in the civilizing rhetoric of the day suggests that music was a primary site for formulating, expressing, and promoting cultural identity.

Performing traditional music in Vietnam presents for many a decisive way to establish oneself as part of history, part of the present and a strategist of future cultural function. In this article, I describe how musicians in southern Vietnam deploy the musical ruin, a sound object that has undergone devastating and alienating alteration against which a musician reacts in order to perform innovative music and educate others, in order to limit the development of and better sustain đờn ca tai tử, a genre of traditional music. The invocation of the musical ruin is not specific to the Vietnamese case but emerges as a creative impetus at particular historical moments to maintain one’s voice in increasingly crowded spheres of musical practice.

The relationship between capitalism and cultural production is something that, at one level or another, all ethnomusicologists must take into account. Three recent monographs—Mark Laver’s Jazz Sell...

A comparison of the apps SoundHound and Shazam, using CDs that come with three major music history and appreciation textbooks. The study looked at how many of the audio tracks each app could correctly identify and how quickly they could do it. The goal was to see how many of the pieces were identified and how many of the exact recordings were found.

This article proposes and discusses a queer methodology for oral history research in the LGBTQ community. Music and musical mementos function as the basis of these oral histories, allowing the narrators to guide me through their stories about LGBTQ identity and music. In line with theories of the queer archive and feminist research methods, a collaborative and situated multimedia research approach with a focus on music is suggested. By means of four diverse narrators stories, I discuss how this methodology works in practice.

In parallel with a globally ageing ‘baby-boomer’ population, Western societies have seen an increase in the number of museums devoted to popular music. However, the discourse, design and display of traditional museums is at odds with the culture of popular music and its audience. This article explores how curators of ‘new museums’ of popular music harness aspects of storytelling to increase patron engagement within their exhibits. Drawing on interviews with curators in popular music museums around the world, it seeks to understand the ways memory and narratives are embedded in decisions regarding the design of substantial exhibitions and individual displays through a three-part framework of narrative-led approaches to design. Therein, the authors highlight issues relating to the overt use of narrative in popular music exhibits, including knowledge of amateur expert patrons, the potential for skewed or unbalanced histories, and the institutionalisation of the popular music genre at large.

The article weaves together the historical journey of a set of lament-like musical tropes from the seventh century AD to the 15th, to trace the commonalities in composition and performance. It argues that key to this transmission were women in servitude or slavery, and begins to explore the role of Africans in this long-distance transfer of symbolic goods.

There are two pertinent issues with regard to written histories of art music in Africa. First, the non-existence of written histories, and second, deficiencies in existing literature. A categorisation of literary tropes – contemporary hagiography, the self-promotion of difference, and the self-promotion of prescribed Africanisation – which I argue bars African scholarship on art music from partaking in global discourses, is presented in the first part of the article. These nationalist historiographical practices are read as acts of strategic essentialism. In the second part I present a problematisation in the context of the material archive, using the ethnography of my visit to the collection of modern African music at Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany, as the point of reference. From this I conclude that the promotion of the intellectual ownership of knowledge on Africa by Africa should serve a much greater purpose than the symbolic act of postcolonial restoration of simply transferri...

Through shared music, people claim and bring to life diverse, overlapping, and situational identities. Music has special resonance for indigenous peoples making valiant efforts to keep their langua...

This special issue examines the politics of gender in relation to higher education, creative practices and historical processes in electronic music, computer music and sound art. The starting point is a summary of research findings on the student demographics associated with the burgeoning of music technology (MT) undergraduate degrees in Britain since the mid-1990s. The findings show a clear bifurcation: the demographics of students taking British MT degrees, in comparison to traditional music degrees and the national average, are overwhelmingly male, from less advantaged social backgrounds, and slightly more ethnically diverse. At issue is the emergence of a highly (male) gendered digital music field. The special issue sets these findings into dialogue with papers by practitioners and scholars concerned with gender in relation to educational, creative and historical processes. Questions addressed include: What steps might be taken to redress gender inequalities in education, and in creative, composition...

The purpose of this special edition of Popular Music and Society is to bring together a series of articles from an international group of scholars who consider, in particular and locally specific ways, how popular music has become an object of memory and, in turn, a focus for contemporary renditions of history and cultural heritage. Popular music’s links to and evocation of the past have been evident for many years. Frith has highlighted popular music’s inherently nostalgic properties, a point reinforced by DeNora in her highly instructive work on the propensity of music both to link individuals with their past and to emotionally ground them in the present. In an everyday sense, the untimely deaths of rock and pop icons such as Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain have triggered mass mourning that forcibly demonstrates the extent to which such artists come to signify the complex interplay of generational identification and collective generational memory (Gregory and Gregory; Elliott; Strong). However, it is not just popular music artists themselves but rather the vast array of music-related objects, images, texts, and places that become inscribed with memory (Bennett and Rogers, “In Search,” “In the Scattered”) by music fans and members of specific music scenes. While the study of cultural consumption is well established (see, for example, Miller; Dant; Woodward) in the field of popular music studies, a focus on memory and heritage is less so given the dominant emphasis in scholarship on artists, texts, performance, media, and industry. There are some notable exceptions, such as Waksman’s highly innovative work on the electric guitar and Hayes’s study of vinyl records. Similarly, there is an emerging focus on technological artifacts of popular music history (see, for example, Shuker, Wax). However, the broader field of popular music’s material legacy, and its connections to cultural memory, remains largely unmapped. A similar, if slightly more dynamic, situation obtains in relation to the significance of popular music as contemporary cultural heritage. Certainly, particular regions and cities have for a long time created robust tourist and leisure industries around their popular music histories, a notable example here being Chicago, which is an

A significant amount of previous academic research into popular music museums centres on critiques of the content, design and layout of predominantly authorised institutions. Throughout much of this research, authors consistently criticise the use, or rather, the perceived misuse, of music played within music museums, arguing that the music itself, rather than artefacts, constitutes the most significant part of popular music exhibition. This article seeks to counter this trend by exploring the challenges of incorporating recorded sound into popular music exhibits as understood by curators and exhibit designers. Utilising interviews conducted within 14 authorised and DIY museums devoted to popular music, the researchers demonstrate a distinct contrast between current academic critiques of music use in these museums and the attitudes of the people who create them. The result is a varied discussion surrounding sound in the museal space, including issues of sound bleed, technology and the creation of ...

In this philosophical paper, I propose a theory of music education inspired by ancient Chinese philosophy. In particular, I draw on five classical Chinese philosophical texts: the Analects (lunyu 論語), the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), the Zhuangzi (庄子), the Xunzi (荀子) and the Yue Ji (樂記). Given that music education was an integral part of the social fabric in ancient China, it is potentially illuminating to uncover the theoretical underpinning of this enterprise, and to examine the implications of such a theory for contemporary music education. Based on the texts, I posit an ancient Chinese-inspired theory of music education that comprises four facets: society, teacher-model, effortful training and effortless action. I conclude this paper with implications for contemporary music education.

This article employs observations, interviews, and participatory experiences to explore a Thai Beatles tribute band ethnographically from the perspective of its members, critics, and fans. “The Better” have simulated the formative moments of the Beatles’ mythology in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn clubs through more than a decade of relentless weekly gigs at an Irish pub in Bangkok’s Patpong red light district. The Better’s performances and biographies are filtered through local music history and Thai soundscapes. This article argues that, through their Thai simulation of the Beatles, the Better’s performances in Bangkok’s present simultaneously resonate with audience experiences of the Beatles’ historical legacy.

In this article I discuss the influence of text—in a broad sense—on my music. Careful elaboration of the written text (le travail d’ecriture), made possible by musical notation, can be amplified in the context of computer music, where structural representations may suggest specific transformations of motives or intimate mutations of the sound itself. Certain texts have been influential to my musical options, especially the play Little Boy by Pierre Halet. The computer imposes complex mediations, whereas the voice is the closest sound source to the body: their confrontation brings a theatrical aspect, obvious in my composition Inharmonique. When texts are set to music, intelligibility is an issue. In Oscura, I introduce the spoken text in counterpoint with the song to preserve the poem's intelligibility. Words, poetic fragments, texts affect the mood of the music in L'autre face, Aventure de ligne, La Nouvelle Atlantide, Une aube sans soleil, Invisible, Mokee, The Other Isherwood.

The material objects of popular music have featured significantly in studies of popular music. In particular, there are established literatures on physical playback media (including the re-emergence of vinyl albums) and playback devices, from the Walkman to the iPod. Recently, as popular music scholars have begun to explore the everyday use of music and music technologies by casual listeners, music has increasingly been described as sound and as an ambient presence in our lives. Yet woven through these increasingly digital cultures are concrete manifestations of music listening and fandom. Drawing on the findings of a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project on popular music and cultural memory, this article considers the implications of such manifestations of materiality for the way we understand the significance of popular music, and its linking of the past and the present, in contemporary everyday life. Using fieldwork data collected in cities across Australia, the article considers how va...

Increasing value is being placed on popular music as cultural heritage. This article addresses this interest through the overlooked practice of reissue, which acts to curate and preserve musical heritage, presenting it in a way that emphasizes music’s materiality. I will first look at the rise of popular music as heritage before looking at specific reissue labels—Sing Sing Records and Smithsonian Folkways—that demonstrate the multiplicities of music considered worth salvaging and the motivations for doing so. The reissue process is addressed, including its role in packaging music in ways that signify and inform the listener of its cultural significance. It is argued that reissue labels rescue underground music that is not encompassed by the two major label reissues of rock classics or the music recognized by official heritage bodies, and therefore creates an alternative discourse to mainstream music heritage.

This paper attempts an intervention in contemporary popular music classification. It argues that popular musicians do not only choose the titles to their works, but go further to define the genres of these works. The dynamic at play is such that most popular musicians claim to produce works of different and new genres with each new work they create. By engaging with the works of a selection of Nigerian popular musicians, the paper shows a trend of opportunistic productions within the political music genre by artists not otherwise known for political songs. Through a discussion of the textual and contextual elements of the material, the paper argues that an increased number of popular musicians have started producing protest political music and unity political music, following Nigeria's democratization in 1999, as a way of alerting audiences of their political astuteness and in an attempt to court political relevance.

Whereas it is a commonplace in Western Art Music, particularly since the mid-nineteenth century, to imagine music representing landscape, the notion that landscape is in some respects formed by and/or through music is relatively untheorised. With reference to music by Vaughan Williams and Webern, this essay investigates the ways in which music plays a role in forming landscape, understood from a contemporary geographical perspective as a site where nature and culture encounter and produce one another (rather than as a site privileging one over the other). Drawing on ideas of Lefebvre, Smalley, and Appleton some theorisations of the broader epistemological and ideological tropes organising the landscape–music relationship are proposed. That landscape and music are both mediated in embodied ways positions the active, embodied, creative experience as an articulation of nature-culture through which these tropes are played out.

John Wallis: writings on music, edited by David Cram and Benjamin Wardhaugh, Farnham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2014, xiii + 239 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-68701Slowly but surely the important series, Music Theory in Britain, 1500-1700: Critical Editions published by Ashgate, is expanding with new volumes. So far, most of those which have appeared are concerned with the more esoteric and nerdy aspects of music theory. It is indeed thought provoking how much seventeenth century English music theorists and natural philosophers wrote on music and how few of the writers have been the objects of study among musicologists today. The series is seminal for an entirely new interpretation of the position of music theory in early modern English intellectual circles. Looking at the present volumes of the series published so far, it is obvious that there seems to have been a close and influential discussion between professional musicians and natural philosophers; however, also the music connoisseur played a vital role asking inquisitive questions. From a musicological point view, some of the most complex writings, truly demanding a profound knowledge of early modern mathematics, are those concerned with temperament and tuning for instance. The present critical edition comprising the main musical writings of John Wallis (1616-1703) is one of those volumes that the modern reader may find hard to get through.John Wallis, mathematician and for 54 years Savilian Professor of Geometry in Oxford, was ordained in 1640 becoming a doctor in divinity and elected royal chaplain in 1660. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1661 and published frequently in the Society's journal Philosophical Transactions on a wide range of subjects including hearing, theology, logic, mathematics, grammar and ancient music theory - many of the topics in fact required by the job description as Savilian professor, as the editors of the present volume note. Apparently, it was not until the beginning of the 1660s that Wallis began to show a greater interest in music when the violist, teacher and music theorist John Birchensha presented his musical ideas to the Royal Society. The secretary of the Society, who thought that Birchensha'sideas might be of interest to Wallis, wrote to him about these ideas. Wallis was indeed interested and wrote a treatise on the mathematics of music and musical tuning. The treatise, here edited as Chapter 1, sets the basis for Wallis's later writings on music, in particular the coincidence theory of consonance. Wallis was also fascinated by the syntonic diatonic scale (Ptolemaic scale) which, contrary to the "medieval" Pythagorean scale which was most often mentioned and explained in contemporary music theoretical treatises, included not only pure octaves, fifths and fourths but also thirds and hence sixths. Though the tuning was nearly impossible to use in practice since it advocated two distinct sizes of the whole tone, it nevertheless drew some attention, especially from natural philosophers and musical connoisseurs. Musicians still argued in favour of the Pythagorean tuning though it certainly was not used in practice. There was, as Wallis mentions, a discrepancy between music theory and music practice and he was simply trying to describe in theory what musicians did in practice. As the editors argue (6-7),Walliswasmostlikelyinspiredbyothercontemporary natural philosophers such as Johannes Kepler, Marin Mersenne and Rene Descartes who all seem to have based their ideas regarding the Ptolemaic scale on Gioseffo Zarlino's famous Le Istitutioni harmoniche first printed in 1558.In 1677, Wallis became aware of the discussions concerning the sympathetic vibrations of strings and nodes of vibration. He wrote a letter on the matter to the Royal Society which was subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions as a " New Musical Discovery" (Chapter 2 in the present edition). The article was, with a few revisions, later published in a Latin version in 1693. …

This review article acknowledges the debt that scholars of Australian music history owe to the pioneering research of Therese Radic. It focuses in part on her contribution to establishing the importance of the figure of G.W.L Marshall-Hall. It also addresses historiographical issues concerning Dr Alexander Leeper, the first Warden of Trinity College, and his role in the dismissal of Marshall-Hall from the University of Melbourne. Through extensive use of Trinity College archives, the article suggests that although Leeper played a leading role in the attack on Marshall-Hall, he was neither the sole nor the most vociferous opponent.

General historians have tended to overlook music when seeking to accommodate the arts in their narratives. Looking at the genre of the short history over the last century this article explores the faltering attempts to rectify this omission and argues that the decline of the radical nationalist tradition in Australian historiography may assist music in finding its proper place in the writing of Australian history.

While we commend “Tone Rows and Tropes” by Fripertinger and Lackner as the first completely mathematical treatment of twelve-tone rows, 6/6 mosaics, and their enumeration, we connect the topic to earlier, less formal research in music theory that is partially or not-at-all cited. Rows and related pitch-class entities are returned to their place in twelve-tone music theory and other theories of pitch and time such as pcset-theory and compositional design. We therefore describe the motivations for composing music with rows and how transformations and group actions affect a desire to make sonically coherent and unified music. The end of the review summarizes our concern for musical context by revealing many relations among rows from Luigi Dallapiccola's piano suite Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952).

in the period following the 1968 protests, the question arose of how a transparent music could be conceived, especially one which it would be impossible to misunderstand, and which would therefore be protected against political misuse. this was very often the object of discussion. in a paper delivered at the ‘musik und politik’ symposium held in vienna in 1991, i developed four political aspects of music: function, content, means of production, and the poetic.to explain:function: music composed for ritual and representation, etc, or music composed to increase productivity, or enable an increase of consumption, either in the workplace, the cowshed, or the shopping centre.external content/subject: music with text, plot, or programme.means of production and distribution: free art or dependent work.the methods by which the music is made, its poetry and its style (spahlinger, 1991).as a composer, i am most interested in the final point. i would like to explore this as posing the main set of problems for this p...

This article analyses qualitative data from responses to open questions addressed by 231 music users in a 2009–2010 survey. By coding and quantifying the data provided, the analysis enables the construction of four ‘acoustic axes’ (uplift–relax, inspiration–memory, energy–calm, joy/happiness–sad/sadness) which make direct use of respondent-initiated terminology and enable a means of mapping the activity which occurs for listeners in the affective space created in the listening process. Use of these axes in turn suggests, at a second level of analysis and interpretation, the construction of a musical–spiritual ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor), to grasp how music is used and understood by the music users themselves with respect to their self-understanding and life-commitments. It is concluded that, while music use cannot be referred to as religious, a religion or a form of spirituality in any direct or simplistic sense, there is evidence of the seriousness and intensity with which listeners make use of t...

In this philosophical essay, I propose a theory of creativity for instrumental music education inspired by Confucian creatio in situ (‘situational creativity’). Through an analysis of three major texts from classical Confucianism – the Analects, the Zhongyong (‘Doctrine of the Mean’) and the Daxue (‘The Great Learning’) – I posit a theoretical model of creativity for instrumental music education that comprises the following pairs of facets: situation and sincerity, tradition and training and circumscription and collaboration. I then highlight how several ideas in this model bear striking similarities to those of the American pragmatists, in particular, John Dewey, and conclude by sketching a sample application of this theory. This study grounds creativity in performance in bands and orchestras by appeal to a major Asian philosophical tradition, and also serves as an initial step towards a transcultural theory of creativity for music education relevant to the present globalised world.

Dr Ken Aigen’s new book is a welcome and important addition to the scholarly music therapy (MT) literature. It presents, discusses, and synthesizes topics that are rarely found in books or articles – a fine quality in itself. Aigen’s ambition is to introduce MT theory and its development in the last 50 years to readers from many disciplines. He discusses and reflects on important positions, models, and orientations in contemporary MT theory.In this essay, major themes and ideas in the book are presented, discussed, and at times challenged from a European/Scandinavian perspective.

In this paper, I focus on the music tourist. Concentrating on the geographical movement that takes place within steelpan music-making as players move to Trinidad and Tobago to participate in the national panorama competition, I suggest that although these players (music tourists) do not belong to the location that is visited, they are afforded a sense of belonging through music-making. Following Nicholas Cook's notion of music as performance [(2003). Music as performance. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert, & R. Middleton (Eds.), The cultural study of music: A critical introduction (pp. 204–214). London: Routledge], I explore the notion of dwelling in geographical movement, focusing on the concepts of the stranger and of home in order to draw out the ways in which the steel-orchestra, panorama and the performed arrangements, negotiate and compose identities musically. Discussing in particular the sociological accounts of the stranger offered by Lawrence and Simmel [(1976). Georg Simmel: Sociologist and European. E...

The debate in this paper is enthused by the neurotic recurrence of the Shona linguistic expression “Musoja” (soldier) in Zimdancehall musical discourses. The enthusiastic utilisation of this name by the assemblage of Zimdancehall artists such as Sniper Storm, Jah Prayzer and Guspy Warrior, among others, is profoundly sustained by the militarised lingo, images and discourses that suffuse into their titles, chants, mannerisms, gesticulation and regalia in musical videos and performances. This article critically interrogates the foundation and motivations of the obsessive utilisation of the name “Musoja” (soldier) and other related militaristic expressions in the Zimdancehall music fraternity. It further analyses the outcomes and implications of employing these military images in expressing non-military phenomena as observed in Zimdancehall music to the image of the musicians, the content of music, their musical performances, music brand in general as well as the military service personnel. In addres...

This paper explores a recent, broadly 'electroacoustic', fixed medium composition by Tullis Rennie, which uses his background in ethnographic fieldwork to explore (in this case through auto-ethnography) modes of listening, and the role of technologies in mediating this listening. Muscle Memory: A conversation about jazz, with Graham South (trumpet) (2014) begins to answer questions about how one work can comment on and analyse or critique another through its own agency as music, bringing composition and ethnography together in fruitful collision, and illuminating the human capacity to manipulate and be manipulated by musical activity. The paper uses the piece to test the extent to which four functions, identified by Simon Frith (1987. Towards an aesthetic of popular music. In R. Leppert & S. McClary (Eds.), Music and society (pp. 133-49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) as crucial to the meaningfulness of popular music may, in the context of ubiquitously technologised music, have broader application than he originally intended.

The legend of the difficulty of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto (1936) originates in Jascha Heifetz’s supposed declaration of it as “unplayable.” Since then, the question of what was so formidable about this work has not been adequately addressed. How various technical difficulties of the work have been surmounted by other violinists can be documented by analyzing specific “impossibilities” in the violin part and examining recordings made between 1954 and 2008. The true reasons for Heifetz’s refusal to play this concerto lie in the fundamental incompatibility between the modernist ideology of performance as “objective” interpretation and the romantic virtuoso tradition epitomized by Heifetz. The lack of acceptance for Schoenberg’s work, when considered alongside contemporary violin concertos (Bartok, Stravinsky, etc.), can be seen to stem from the composer’s rejection of idiomatic writing for violin as a consequence of rejecting tonality and the conspicuous absence of a soloist muse.

The most insidious lies are those that are so widely believed they are never questioned. One such fundamental untruth of American music history is the notion that no American composer before Ives w...

Nearly 25 years have passed since an originary wave of scholarly interventions on “world beat” (Feld, “Notes”) and “world music” (Frith). In this time, a rich vein of scholarship has emerged around...