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This essay shows how Jimi Hendrix's experiments with fuzz anticipated notyet-audible sonic worlds and evinced Blackness in sound. Focusing on the American guitarist's debut album, Are You Experienced (1967), I describe fuzz as an entryway into the politico-theatrical scene of Black sociality. My analysis pivots on two axes: edgework and excess. I argue that Hendrix's pursuit of new sonic territory, as well as the mathematical-electrical engineering that brought such sounds into being, can be read as an aesthetic practice of edgework, but also that the resulting music—which early reviewers described as "hellish," "freaky," "unimaginable," and "manic"—acts as a sign of fuzz's unruly excess. Across my analysis, I am in conversation with Matthew Morrison's theory of "Blacksound," which shows how US popular music attempts to essentialize and delimit Black performativity. If Hendrix's fuzz tone is audible as an enactment of fugitivity born from a tradition of radical Black aesthetics, I argue, then its unruly and anarchistic ethos refutes racial essentialism, insisting on agency, beauty, and life in the face of social death. Through this intervention, I develop a theory of "rehearsal" as a future-oriented Black performance sensibility that creates the conditions in which living otherwise becomes imaginable and achievable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Romanian music has many histories. From composer George Enescu to Dictator Nicolae Ceauțescu, the Romanian music reflected multiple faces of becoming and corresponding, streaming from a varied cultural diversity and gravitating towards the central European canons. The process of creating the Romanian music shaped a dynamic and fluid image of the place and people it represents, balancing its pendulum between the western aspiration and the eastern inspiration. Moreover, it has not just one history, but many ones because the Romanian music is not a monolithic tradition, but a fusion of various customs and influences that fluctuated their presence more or less obvious along this time of becoming. Seen in a long run framed between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, folk music reveals as the constant component of each ideological narrative that emerged from both nationalism and socialism. This span of time is vital to understand the complex and mercurial nature of the popular or the folk that has a relation to music and song not because it describes a historical reality, but because it has been used historically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines user-curated, public playlists on Spotify tagged with homonegative terminology. We consider these playlists discursive texts that reflect and co-construct discourses about the relations between music, music streaming, gender, and sexual identity. Applying theories from masculinity and queer studies and conducting a critical textual analysis of 21 playlists, this article unpacks how these playlists relate to homophobia, heteromasculinity, and queer reappropriation. The analysis shows that the discursive connections between certain musics and homonegativity are not as straightforward as they might seem at first sight. The tagging practices suggest a network of ambiguities that cannot be interpreted as unilaterally and integrally homophobic, while overly optimistic claims also cannot account for this meticulous discursive identity work. A variety of logics underlies these playlists, including queer reappropriation, heteromasculine homonegativity, and more ambiguous negotiations. The findings support earlier queer and masculinity studies' claims that homophobic practices are as much a matter of gender as sexuality. Rather than instances of active hatred toward certain sexual identities, the playlists and their discursive tags are attempts to negotiate identities amidst music's multidimensional gendered connotations. Circulating in the digital space that is Spotify, the playlists articulate a complex variety of heteromasculine and/or queer identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Previous research has revealed that stigma is not restricted to people with mental health problems but extends to the professionals involved in their care and treatment. Unlike other artistic manifestations, the study of the depictions of psychiatry in popular music is still a less-explored topic. This article addresses the subcultural portrayals of the psychiatrist and psychiatric treatments within Spanish popular music. The predominance of negative depictions of mental health professionals as social control agents was a striking finding, given the topicality that characterises punk music. It is suggested that the allegorical role assigned to the psychiatrist in such a specific narrative framework, marked by ideological factors, could potentially explain these findings. In contrast to other cultural manifestations that show a tendency towards more balanced views of psychiatric treatment and practice, the negative representations in Spanish punk songs seem to have evolved little over decades, reflecting outdated views of the psychiatric approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calls for a recalibration of how cultural geography engages with music, lyrics, motion, and emotion. Within existing geographical work on music, research on the music itself remains scarce, with reflection on lyrics rarer still. This paper addresses this via a close reading of the work of the Glaswegian group, The Blue Nile. It examines how the trio – and especially their principal songwriter, Paul Buchanan – used lyrics as a means for articulating distinctive conceptions of movement and stillness. The significance of song-words themselves is considered, but so too is their mode of delivery, and their relationship to the enveloping musical settings they are embedded in. The importance of time, space and place in The Blue Nile's work is analysed and the methods by which they are evoked is investigated. The paper moves discussion on from well-covered terrain regarding music as a conduit for expressing youth focussed tropes, such as rebellion and speed, focusing instead on music's facility for voicing ideas of slowness and immobility, particularly in urban settings. In doing so, it demonstrates popular music's value for articulating sensations that are now being encountered with ever greater frequency, including those of stasis, drift, and disconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the band Los Pacaminos and their role in the transatlantic exchange of music and culture between the UK and the US. Formed in 1992 by Paul Young, the band incorporates Tex-Mex influences into their music, drawing inspiration from US Latinx and Latin American aesthetics. The article delves into the band's background and the diverse musical histories of its members, highlighting the global reach of Tex-Mex conjunto music and the processes of media/migration, hybridization, and appropriation that contribute to its dissemination. The author emphasizes the cultural hybridity of conjunto music, exemplified by bands like the Texas Tornados, and argues against simplistic notions of cultural appropriation and exoticism. [Extracted from the article]

Catchiness and groove are common phenomena when listening to popular music. Catchiness may be a potential factor for experiencing groove but quantitative evidence for such a relationship is missing. To examine whether and how catchiness influences a key component of groove–the pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM)–we conducted a listening experiment with 450 participants and 240 short popular music clips of drum patterns, bass lines or keys/guitar parts. We found four main results: (1) catchiness as measured in a recognition task was only weakly associated with participants' perceived catchiness of music. We showed that perceived catchiness is multi-dimensional, subjective, and strongly associated with pleasure. (2) We found a sizeable positive relationship between PLUMM and perceived catchiness. (3) However, the relationship is complex, as further analysis showed that pleasure suppresses perceived catchiness' effect on the urge to move. (4) We compared common factors that promote perceived catchiness and PLUMM and found that listener-related variables contributed similarly, while the effects of musical content diverged. Overall, our data suggests music perceived as catchy is likely to foster groove experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion contemplates theoretical incantation as a convergence of auto-theory and music. The relevance of this mode of expression to the history and future of psychoanalytic writing is reviewed and extended. A comparison to the form that psychotherapy-informed auto-theory has emerged in pop and hip-hop music in recent years is presented. These various considerations are reconciled with the psychoanalytic project of negotiating freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well‐known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self‐selected rewarding songs in a proof‐of‐concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of popular culture as a teaching tool is often overlooked in teaching introductory-level political science courses. In recent years, advocacy for the inclusion of popular culture in the classroom has increased due to studies that highlight the benefits of such application in combination with other teaching methods. This paper argues that the incorporation of popular music and cartoons as a combined auxiliary teaching tool is an efficient way to increase students' understanding of theoretical concepts at multiple levels and to encourage them to think unconventionally. Relating political science paradigms and theories to popular culture makes them accessible to a broad spectrum of students and ensures that students become more engaged in the classroom. Students may also be more likely to apply theoretical concepts to real-life events. In this paper, we share our observations of using popular songs and cartoons as supplementary teaching materials and methods to explain theories of international relations and comparative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a group of Japanese‐born experimental musicians who make their lives in Tokyo and New York as a case study, this article examines how new musical genres are created, shared, and mediated through layers of circulations, identities, and locations. The author argues that these musicians' lives and music have a kind of "noisy" quality, complicating genre boundaries and identity binaries in their wake. Through ethnographic "thick descriptions" and the words of the musicians themselves, the author shows the web of musical genres, languages, geopolitical identities, and gender relations that combine to make up the texture of musical performances. This article is also thinking through and with a sea change in the study of Japanese music. In recent years, building on the work of scholars of Japanese cultural studies, ethnomusicologists have critiqued how monocultural and mono‐ethnic mythologies have influenced the study and production of Japanese music. Ethnomusicology and area studies are Cold War enterprises, designed to create research that would help maintain that world order, educate Americans as global leaders, and change hearts and minds in foreign lands, leading to a cultural conservatism that often led scholars to focus on "traditional" Japanese music. Recently, however, research on Japanese music has increasingly focused on popular and experimental musics and examines how Japanese contemporary identity is created and maintained through music. Thus this article gives readers a view of how US‐based Japanese music scholarship is moving away from such Cold War paradigms and contributes to this shift in studies of Japanese music and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the author's personal experiences and reflections on their love for tonal music and their shame for also enjoying Japanese popular music. They discuss the societal expectations that influenced their feelings of shame and the performative aspect of expressing their enthusiasm for European classical music. The author also examines the concept of tonality and its connection to racism, as well as the limitations of the tonal narrative. They argue for a broader understanding of music beyond the tonal and atonal categories, suggesting that tonal harmony still exists in modern popular music and should not be dismissed as inferior. The author proposes being specific and clear in discussing different types of music, avoiding the privileging of one style over others. [Extracted from the article]

This study chooses a transnational perspective to understand the practice of American culture in Indonesia. As this study discussed identity formed in social media and involved popular music singers, the theories applied in this study are the theories of identity, youth culture, new media, and popular music from the popular culture approach. In examining this study, the content analysis method was applied. After reviewing primary and secondary sources and find suppported theories for the data, it is find that the cegil identity is channeled through Taylor Swift and NIKI’s musicality due to the interconnection of youth culture and new media in treating popular music. The star and stardom of Swift and NIKI influence people's perspectives on their songs. The cegil community likes their lyricism in descriptive, imaginative, and poetic songs. Global access and media allow Spotify and X as the mediums to communicate and participate for cegil to express their feelings. They were also the place where the cegil term was coined. The last factor is a youth culture that treats music as the soundtrack of life and hence sees songs as a medium to express themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social media app TikTok was launched in the US in 2017 with a very specific purpose: sharing 15-s clips of singing and dancing to popular songs. Seven years and several billion downloads later, it is now the go-to app for Gen Z Internet users and much better known for its ultra-personalized algorithm, AI-driven filters, and network of thriving subcultures. Among them, a growing community of magical and spiritual practitioners, frequently collectivized as Witchtok, who use the app not only share their craft and create community but consider the technology itself a powerful partner with which to conduct readings, channel deities, connect to a collective conscious, and transcend the communicative boundaries between the human and spirit realms—a practice that can be understood as algorithmic divination. In analyzing contemporary witchcraft on TikTok and contextualizing it within the larger history of technospirituality, this paper aims to explore algorithmic divination as an increasingly popular and powerful practice of technomancy open to practitioners of diverse creed and belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the ongoing, record‐setting migration in the Global South, this paper explores the values, principles and ethical tensions of Venezuelan migrants in the informal economy of Colombia. We found that migrants frequently prefer to stay within the informal economy as a way of preserving their identities, values and principles, rather than adopting those of their new country. This choice sets up ethical tensions for the migrants and their host countries. Our analysis challenges the current policy goals of transitioning migrants from informal to formal economies as a mark of success and inclusion. Instead, we attempt to recognize the migrant voice and their agency capacity through our research using focus groups and applied thematic analysis (ATA) of popular music and narratives. Our findings broaden the understanding of why migrants choose to stay in the informal economy and challenge policy goals that focus on inclusion and integration of migrants into formal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Peace of Münster (1648) ended the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) in the Low Countries. After decades of conflict, peace came to the Dutch, who for three generations had only experienced wartime. Since the lives of commoners and soldiers alike had become dependent upon and conditioned to the war, the successful peace negotiation heralded a new and uncertain future. Music played an important role in facilitating understanding of the cultural changes brought about by the peace treaty. Drawing on a representative sample of broadsheets and songs from 1609 to 1648, this article sheds light on how the Dutch dealt with their realities during the Eighty Years’ War, the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–21), and the immediate aftermath of war. Broadsheets announced the peace and worked through divisions among the Dutch; plays staged drinking songs that alluded to controversies; Dutch chambers of rhetoric debated the peace in their publications; and geuzenliederen (beggars’ songs sung to popular tunes) memorialized soldiers’ daily lives during and after the war. Christian songs further thematized the “true” meaning of the newly negotiated peace and provided instructions on how to act peacefully. Popular songs offer a different take on the Peace of Münster than do the official peace celebrations, which have been the focus of previous scholarship. The songs discussed here functioned as an emotional outlet for commoners and soldiers. They thematized the different opinions pertaining to the peace negotiations, encouraged merry-making, and explained or helped process the reality of the battleground and the subsequent postwar experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two books that contribute to the study of ballads in early modern England and Europe. Patricia Fumerton's book focuses on the intermediality of early modern ballads and explores their multifaceted nature. Una McIlvenna's book examines execution ballads across five languages and 400 years, highlighting the emotional effects of these songs on both the singer and the listener. Both books emphasize the importance of understanding ballads as a form of performance and explore the connections between music, words, and emotions. The article acknowledges that not all readers may agree with the authors' findings, but praises their depth of knowledge and theoretical approaches. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the discourse of current popular music by analyzing the list of the most-listened Turkish songs on Spotify in 2022. Two competing theories about popular culture serve as the theoretical basis for this article: one from the Frankfurt School, which views mass culture as a means of manipulation, and the other from the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies, which views popular culture as a field of submission and resistance. The study applies content analysis to the lyrics of fifty songs on the most-listened list. The themes investigated in the content analysis are social-political criticism, alienation (through sub-themes of criminal tendency, egocentrism, and distance from social relations), social change and vision of the future, consumption culture, use of slang, masculine point of view and tradition (through sub-themes of religious belief and nostalgia). The findings obtained from the content analysis show that love and emotional relationships are the main themes in today's popular Turkish music. This situation evokes an affinity with arabesque, the older popular culture form of Türkiye. The discourse of today's popular music seems semantically simpler than arabesque. Unlike arabesque, there are almost no elements of social-political criticism in today's popular Turkish music. The subject of the lyrics is embedded in the commodities offered by consumer culture. Hence, it is proposed that the prevailing individualistic tendency in today's popular music can be called "egocentric individualism." Finally, the implications of consumption for sociopolitical resistance are questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formed in 1969 and active through the early 2000s, Pesniary were arguably the most popular band in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Their music is distinctively Belarusian, but still fits neatly within a broader Soviet narrative. This article explores the extent to which Pesniary represent an independent Belarusian identity or Soviet kitsch. It considers both the group's reception at home in the Soviet Union and abroad. Pesniary's ability to repackage both Soviet cultural policy directives and Western popular music motifs as authentic folk material was key to their success in the 1970s Soviet music scene and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, the past two decades have been crucial for the growing popularity of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). This is largely due to the burgeoning presence and significance of EDM festivals as a performative site of a contemporary Indian youth culture. A salient feature capturing the zeitgeist of twenty-first century, urban, modern Indian youth is EDM's gradual permeation into the cultural fabric of India through crucial collaborations with cultural industries like Bollywood. It is a truism that the legacy of Goa Trance remains a dominant point of reference in the global imagination of the Indian EDM scene. This article, however, argues that the contemporary mode of Indian Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) has largely developed independently of this legacy. The main proponent of contemporary EDMC in urban India has been the multiple greenfield EDM festivals held annually all over the country. This article draws on fieldwork data collected between 2016-2018 at Indian EDM festival sites. Using this empirical data, the article examines the 'performance' of Indian EDMC and considers whether it is viable to speak in terms of an Indian way of raving, as a variation of other 'local' ways of performing EDMC that may exist elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate how music educators engage their students with Hip-Hop, we adopted a "research remix" approach, combining elements of case study and constructivist grounded theory. This approach allowed us to privilege Hip-Hop culture and to construct new understandings about Hip-Hop teaching and learning. Six elementary and middle school music teachers implemented Hip-Hop-focused instruction in their classrooms while also attending professional development workshops. Data included videos of classroom instruction, participant interviews, and videos of the workshops with co-facilitation from Hip-Hop artists and the researchers. Educators encountered tensions and challenges related to a perceived Hip-Hop "realness" and a lack of musical and pedagogical skills. To address these challenges, participants remixed their approaches by blending elements of Hip-Hop music and culture with their established teaching strategies. Teachers' dispositions and feedback from students and colleagues engendered critical reflections about their positionalities in relation to Hip-Hop. We constructed a visual model of a DJ as a metaphor to describe participants' approaches to remixing their teaching with Hip-Hop within their contexts. Implications include a need for increased emphasis on Hip-Hop in U.S. music teacher education programs and institutional pathways for Hip-Hop musicians to become music educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity. We find that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to comprehend over time: not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease (for instance, captured by vocabulary richness or readability of lyrics), but we also observe that the structural complexity (for instance, the repetitiveness of lyrics) has decreased. In addition, we confirm previous analyses showing that the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative and that lyrics have become more personal over the last five decades. Finally, a comparison of lyrics view counts and listening counts shows that when it comes to the listeners' interest in lyrics, for instance, rock fans mostly enjoy lyrics from older songs; country fans are more interested in new songs' lyrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Popular Music and Society on gender and popular music knowledge considers feminized ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have occupied the margins of media representations and popular music studies. By way of introduction, we consider classic and recent work on gender and popular music, the traditional confines of popular music knowledge-making, and how centering the knowledge of women and girls broadens our understanding of popular music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary Greek Cypriot popular music scape, we witness various and varying instances that feature cultural heritage elements: the frontman of a hard rock band performing in a vraka, the traditional male trousers; a trap song making references to lefkaritiko, a traditional lace; a metal band opening their album with an acapella tsiattisto, a traditional oral poetic style. This paper discusses these and other instances by placing them in the wider historical and political framework of the Republic of Cyprus. Distinguishing between tradition and heritage, as well as place and space, it suggests that the creative turn to the cultural past of Cyprus can be interpreted as a redefinition of the modernisation and decolonisation process of the Republic of Cyprus, which is accomplished through an inward look that emphasises the geographical and cultural particularities of the island. This inward look, it is argued, speaks back to the historical process of decolonisation that was defined by external references (attachment to the motherland(s), desire for Westernisation, and opposition to the 'Other'). The decolonisation process, itself the cause and effect of conflict and sentiments of ethno-nationalism, defined the identity of postcolonial Greek Cypriot subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines musical participatory practices on TikTok as mediations of ordinary feelings and knowledges. It conducts a multimodal analysis of user-generated videos that recirculated the song “Complex” by Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod, which became widely successful on the app in 2022. Through its features and sociotechnical affordances, TikTok fosters feminine-coded articulations of intimate affects and negotiations of ordinary feelings and knowledges that have been marginalized in popular music cultures. Its intersecting algorithmic logics and human practices also create new rules about what affective sensibilities are foregrounded and how they are circulated through multimodal and memetic participatory practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an alternate methodology for quantifying the parameter of prominence introduced by Duguay (2022) to describe the relative level of the voice in the mix. I begin with a discussion of RMS amplitude, focused on the difference between average and true RMS values. I then propose that overall RMS amplitude ratios be logarithmically transformed to more closely represent the perception of relative level differences, with the relative level of the vocal better assessed through comparison to the mix minus the vocal rather than the full mix. I also discuss methods to compensate for the uneven sensitivity of the human ear to different frequencies at different sound pressure levels, ultimately recommending that prominence be quantified in terms of K-weighted loudness units. I conclude with a reconsideration of vocal prominence in the four Rihanna and Eminem collaborations that Duguay analyzes in her original article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the importance of music-making within both instrumental and vocal ensembles in South Tyrol based on the results of two different research projects: 'Cultura musicale e funzione sociale della musica in Alto Adige' ('Music culture and the social function of music in South Tyrol'), by Paolo Somigli and Ilaria Riccioni, and 'Going to the Source', carried out by Antonella Coppi. Through a reflection on the two research projects, this article aims to provide an image of the role of music in the South Tyrolean community; although the two research projects were carried out between 2011 and 2019 overall, they are still relevant, as they represent ground-breaking research in this region. The two research projects complement each other in a reciprocal contextualization of issues about the role of non-formal musical ensembles in developing the social and cultural fabric in South Tyrol. The different perspectives and objects of the two studies offer a broader view of music-making, not only from a musicological but also from a sociological and pedagogical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of art, particularly music, in depicting and understanding the migration experience. It focuses on the Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte and their songs that address various aspects of the migrant journey. The band's lyrics capture the emotional and human complexities of migration, shedding light on the challenges faced by migrants and their families. Los Tigres del Norte's music serves as a powerful tool for migrants to express their experiences and for audiences to empathize with their stories. The article highlights the significance of migration art in complementing and surpassing migration scholarship. [Extracted from the article]

The article emphasizes the need to integrate music-making into music theory classes to enhance student engagement and relevance. It discusses challenges faced by a student teacher in a music theory class and proposes a constructivist pedagogy centered around active music-making, drawing on contemporary popular music and historical traditions.

Modern band programs have spread throughout the United States to create learner-centered and culturally affirming school music experiences for children. The four key concepts of modern band, (1) approximation and scaffolding, (2) decision-making, (3) iconic notation, and (4) culturally sustaining (music education), are congruent with many elementary general music philosophies and pedagogies. This article examines intersections of modern band and general music practices and demonstrates how typical classroom instruments (e.g., unpitched percussion, ukuleles, xylophones, and metallophones) can be used to implement key modern band concepts in an elementary school general music setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between Richard Wagner and the "English Musical Renaissance" in Britain during the late 19th century. It discusses the influence of Wagner's music on British composers and the reception of his works in the British press. The article also highlights the establishment of the London Wagner Society and the role of figures like Edward Dannreuther and Charles Hallé in promoting Wagner's music. It acknowledges the mixed opinions of composers and critics towards Wagner's music and explores its impact on English ecclesiastical music. The article concludes by mentioning the performances of Wagner's works in London and the gradual popularity and influence of his music on British composers. [Extracted from the article]

The given text is an analysis and presentation of source materials for Toru Takemitsu's Concerto de chambre par 13 exécutants. The concerto, composed in 1955, is considered a masterpiece by some but remains relatively unknown in wind literature. The essay provides an introduction to Takemitsu and the concerto, including a description of the manuscript score, its structure and organization, potential interpretive questions, and a new performing edition. The text also explores Takemitsu's background and the cultural atmosphere in post-World War II Japan. [Extracted from the article]

This study examines the learning processes that take place when upper secondary students apply and generate theories while drawing on their preferred music and writing songs of their own. One music theory teacher and two researchers collaborated to design an emergent sequence of lessons focusing on students' interests, questions and creative work. Interpretive and musical analysis of students' progress suggests that learning to theorise through modes and sounds from popular music was experienced as motivating, involved similar difficulties as traditional major/minor-based approaches, and resulted in original songs that the students enjoyed and were proud to perform for their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional Malay song about a yellow ship, lancang kuning, recorded in 1979 for a research project on oral traditions in North Sumatra, is still popular today and can be found in multiple versions on the Internet. This article tries to find possible reasons for this lasting popularity by looking into the meaning and background of this song as performed by singers and storytellers in North Sumatra. Through a discussion of various versions of the song-text and its interpretation, the article shows how the theme functions in different contexts in Sumatra and beyond. Exploring its symbolic value in songs, traditional poetry, stories and ritual performances featuring a lancang kuning helps to explain its continuing relevance in various social contexts of the Malay world in past and present times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prince's alter-ego Camille is an elusive character, not least because they never officially existed. Camille was an album created and test-pressed by Prince between September and November of 1986, which he planned to release without his name attached; all production, writing, and vocals were to be credited to the mysterious and fictional Camille. Though Prince abandoned the Camille album in November 1986, he continued to engage with the character for years afterward, composing more Camille songs, writing Camille into the original draft of Graffiti Bridge, and including Camille in the Lovesexy Tour booklet (1988-1989). Camille as a character is inherently liminal: they had no assigned gender, being referred to as he or she in different mediums; no corporeal body, as they existed only as a pitch-altered voice; and did not exist as an established character, because the Camille album was never officially released. In this paper, I argue that Prince's Camille exists as a trans* caricature, meaning the character inhabits multiple stereotypes attributed to trans people, specifically trans women and transfemmes. To do this, I delve into the construction of the character and compare their depiction to an historic trans* caricature, the character Alexina from Oscar Panizza's short story, "A Scandal at the Convent" (1893), based on real-life White intersex person Herculine Barbin. I compare these characters to show how they were both constructed as trans* caricatures similarly but with crucial differences due to Prince's and Camille's Blackness. I argue then that in Camille we can situate an echo of Prince, an unmastered version who is predatory, animalistic, and inhabits transphobic stereotypes, and who, crucially, was then subsumed into Prince's own canon. By understanding this construction of Camille, we can more fully understand the taboo ways in which Prince queered the boundaries of his performance, and of Black masculinity, throughout his career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of "affective authenticity" to explore the experiences and reception of US-based African migrant musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on interviews, archival sources and musical analysis, we trace the migration stories of South African singer Letta Mbulu and the ways in which she negotiated conflicting demands for "authenticity" in her musical performances on the American stage. Affective authenticity represents a heterogenous, explorative sound, reflecting pan-African politics and aesthetics that created the very conditions for African and African American musical collaborations. This aesthetic was countered with expectations for "scientific authenticity:" an ethno-linguistically circumscribed performance that catered to colonial ears and conceptualized African musics as insular, ancient and unchanging - an aesthetic held and policed primarily by (white) music critics. Through analysis of the Yoruba hymn Ise Oluwa (1927) and its "translations" in Mbulu's performance on the soundtrack for the television show Roots (1977), we show the careful balance of voices, texts, instruments, and rhythms African migrant musicians perform in order to adhere to conflicting demands for authenticity, and the rebuke they experience when they transgress them. We also place conceptualizations of affective and scientific authenticity applied to popular music in broader discourses occurring during the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the decolonization of Africa, and the entrenchment of the apartheid regime in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twelve-year-old Annette Swinson burst onto New York's Black music scene in 1953. A darling of the local Black press, Swinson worked as a solo singer throughout her adolescence before replacing Arlene Smith as lead singer of the Chantels. During her career, Swinson's girlhood evoked connotations of malleability and naïvete' that were attractive to music industry men searching for salable sounds. Swinson exploited these assumptions using her extraordinary ability to transform her vocal timbre, but this strategy also complicated the record of her career. This article examines journalistic coverage of Swinson's career alongside her recorded performances to consider the possibilities afforded by her vocal shapeshifting. Beginning with Swinson's early period as a child singer, this article argues that Swinson's legibility as a child highlights the impact of legal minority as a status that denies Black girls' capacity for rational consent, prevents them from representing their own work, and leaves them vulnerable to abuse. This article also analyzes Swinson's recorded voice to demonstrate that girls like Swinson used unstable vocal identity as a choreographic technique to work around their legal disempowerment and gain access to professional opportunities. Ultimately, this article suggests that listening to vocal timbre in this way presents a method by which scholars might recognize Black girls' agency within archival silences and obfuscations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how compositional and performative strategies impact the potency of environmental song lyrics on Gorillaz's album Plastic Beach. The quality of songfulness is implicated as a primary obstacle to lyrical force. The literary function of fictionality is put forth along with the Bakhtinian concept of literary polyphony as key strategies by which lyrics are reinforced. Plastic Beach employs a large cast of contributors, engaging several voices in a fictionalized reflection on plastic pollution. These features support the potential of lyrics to exert political force, while residing in tension with distracting effects of catchy pop grooves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research taking into account the everyday nature of tourism destinations and its impact upon authenticity and attendees' resulting extraordinary experiences is limited. Drawing upon a 3-year ethnography (including fieldnotes, photos/videos, artifact material) and interviews with festival attendees, we explore the interrelationships between authenticity and extraordinary experiences in the context of Primavera Sound music festival. Our emergent thematic categories—the festival's indie music character, its urban and quotidian configuration, and the instrumental orientation of the festival experience—suggest the festival is firmly positioned within the structures of the indie music industry, while also being located within the confines of day-to-day urban life. Attendees seek to achieve a sense of spatial authenticity by engaging with the features of tourism destinations. We contribute to discussions about authenticity and extraordinary experiences by unpacking the everyday nature of tourism destinations, demonstrating that not all music festivals need to be "extraordinary" muddy camping events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article enquires into the discursive and affective texture of the intersections of popular culture and left/feminist politics in the current Anglo-American context. It does this primarily via a contextual reading of the recent work of Welsh/Greek pop singer Marina Diamandis (who performs under the mononym 'Marina'), especially her 2021 single entitled 'Purge the Poison'. Building on Sarah Banet-Weiser's work on popular feminism, I suggest that recent years have seen the emergence within popular and commercial culture of a 'popular left politics' which includes – but is not limited to – popular feminism. I argue that Marina's work – as well as its reception from fans and critics – can help us identify several constitutive features of what I call the cultural grammar of popular left politics. These include, first, a conception of knowledge as linked to the revelation of truth grounded in identity and experience; second, a projection of purity and perfectionism of self and, third, a projection of complicity onto others. I further suggest – drawing in particular on Akane Kanai's recent work – that these features of the cultural grammar of popular left politics are testament to the centrality of neoliberalism in shaping the discursive, affective and subjective character of even ostensibly anti-neoliberal forms of politics and culture. Furthermore, in contrast to the familiar argument that neoliberalism blunts or co-opts oppositional discourses, I suggest that, in the current conjuncture, explicitly and overtly anti-neoliberal discourses are sometimes afforded a certain cachet and visibility, so long as the cultural grammar they adopt aligns with the competitive and individualistic logics of neoliberal hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singer-songwriter Jack Johnson is known for his laid back, inoffensive and seemingly uncontroversial music; however (perhaps paradoxically), he is also known for his environmental activism and accountability measures, measures that may seem at odds with his relaxed personality and musical output. In the 2016 short documentary film The Smog of the Sea, Johnson partakes as a citizen scientist in an expedition to the Sargasso Sea. Here he comes to the realization that the ocean is no longer this pristine wilderness; instead, the effects of human action (in the form of plastic) can be seen everywhere. In this short film, we see the coming together of Johnson's laid-back aesthetic with a keen and urgent message to effect positive environmental change, amounting to what some commentators have referred to as a kind of 'quiet activism.' In this paper we critically explore the role and value of quiet activism in contradistinction to other modes typically associated with ecomedia, especially the trope of the apocalypse. We argue that the hope associated with such quiet activism may be an effective approach to environmental politics in the epoch of the anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904" by Hannah L. Scott explores the cultural exchange between France and England during the late 19th century. The author examines how French culture was influenced by British music and literature, particularly through popular songs and performances. The book delves into topics such as the portrayal of English stereotypes in French entertainment, the reactions to Salvation Army bands in France, and the fascination with Celtic folk music. Through extensive research and analysis, Scott provides insights into the complex dynamics of French identity and self-examination through song. [Extracted from the article]