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2283 results in Ethnomusicology

Page 29 of 115

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman
  • Book:
    The Dawn of Music Semiology
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 1-8

  • Summary

    The aim of this book is to present some of the latest thinking about the nature and purpose of music semiology. It is not only a repository of new scholarship in an exciting area of general musicology but also a tribute to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who in anyone's account of the last half century would be considered the founder of this discipline.

    The word dawn in the title of this book refers to the fact that music semiology— which arrived on the musicological, and particularly the musictheoretical, scene in French, in 1976, through Nattiez's pioneering study Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique—is young, vibrant, and certainly not fully formed. In recent decades other strands of musicological thinking have emerged that can be regarded as spawned by music semiology, explicitly or otherwise. These alone are indications of the labile state of the recent history of ideas as discernible in current musical scholarship. Although the boundaries are anything but clear, as some of the present book indicates, music semiotics, which has aimed to distinguish its methods from those of music semiology, could hardly have emerged as the prodigious research field it now is without the impetus that came from the poststructuralist thinking of the 1980s, largely stimulated by Fondements and Nattiez's other publications from the earliest days of music semiology. Similarly, the development, especially in music theory circles in recent years, of “narrative” approaches to musical explanation has been riding the same wave of hermeneutical explorations of music as the semiologist Jean Molino, Nattiez's principal influence. The development of narrative approaches will be discussed further, as will Molino's concept of the “total symbolic fact.” It is no accident that it was Nattiez himself, according to one authority, who first used the term new musicology in print, applying it to research revealing the antistructuralist urges that had begun to characterize the work of younger historical musicologists. In Nattiez's view, these scholars lacked the aesthetic conviction that would have lent them some enduring hermeneutical value.

  • 7 - Keepsakes and Surrogates: Hijacking Music Technology at Wadeye (Northwest Australia)

  • Edited by Thomas R. Hilder, Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway, University of London, Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book:
    Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 156-175

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on some uses of digital recording technology in the township of Wadeye in Australia's Northern Territory, where I worked on a project focusing on djanba, a genre of public ceremonial song created and performed by Murriny Patha people. In this chapter, I will draw a distinction between “traditional” song forms like djanba—ceremonial genres using Indigenous musical forms and instruments whose origins predate contact with Europeans and that continue to be performed due to their fundamental religious and social role—and “nontraditional” musical forms—recently composed secular songs that use introduced musical instruments (guitar, electric piano) and accompanying musical features such as diatonic scales, two-part harmony, and strophic form.

    The chapter will discuss emerging nontraditional musical forms composed by members of one of the local Indigenous groups in Wadeye. These new compositions, disseminated via various digital platforms, embody strategic assertions of cultural and territorial autonomy and identity, thereby continuing and developing one of the fundamental functions of traditional song performance. In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, Indigenous identity is not monolithic: “the voluntary perpetuation of cultural distinctiveness,” and the “assertion of territorial (and cultural) autonomy” recognized as common elements of Indigeneity worldwide are cultivated not only in relation to the nation state, but also in relation to regional and local intergroup relations. The deployment of digital media discussed here concerns local distribution, the construction of local collectivities and intergroup politics; a form of “strategic traditionalism,” or perhaps, better, a “strategic blend of traditionalism and innovation” intended as an intervention in local rather than global discourses of identity. As discussed by Hilder in the introduction to this volume, nuanced attention to creative practice in case studies such as this is needed for the development of broader insights into contemporary global articulations of Indigeneity, difference, and identity.

    Originally established as Port Keats Roman Catholic mission in 1935, the present-day township of Wadeye lies about 250 kilometers southwest of Darwin. It is home to approximately 2500 people, mainly Aboriginal people descended from about twenty clans from the surrounding areas, whose members were originally attracted to the settlement by the availability of food, work, and schooling.

  • 5 - Schenker's Inhalt, Schenkerian Semiotics: A Preliminary Study

  • from Part Two - Poietic Channels
  • Edited by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman
  • Book:
    The Dawn of Music Semiology
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 81-96

  • Summary

    Schenker's monograph on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, published in 1912, may have been one of his most successful writings and probably was the most influential one in its own time. Its influence on Wilhelm Furtwangler, who read the book in 1913; on Bernard Paumgartner, who reviewed it in Heimgarten in 1914; on Paul von Klenau, who directed the performance of the Symphony for the centenary of its premiere in Vienna in 1924; and on many others is well known. The full title reads: Beethovens neunte Sinfonie. Eine Darstellung des musikalischen Inhaltes unter fortlaufender Berücksichtigung auch des Vortrages und der Literatur; that is: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A Presentation of the Musical Content under Ongoing Consideration of Both the Performance and the Literature. As Nicholas Cook describes it, Schenker's basic purpose in this book “is to refute the whole edifice of Wagnerian interpretation, and to reclaim the work for what [he] calls ‘absolute music.’ … Schenker's attempt to show how everything in the Ninth Symphony, even its finale, can be explained in purely musical terms is therefore an accurately targeted assault on the central stronghold of the Wagnerian aesthetic.” Cook further comments on the contrast between the descriptions of the Ninth, especially of the Finale, by Schenker on one side and by Wagner (and Kretzschmar) on the other. Schenker indeed violently criticizes the “outrageous passion” with which Wagner “defends the idea of a pretended progress on the basis of the overcoming of absolute music, drawn from his own misunderstandings.”

    But Schenker's more precise purpose, as mentioned both in the title and throughout the book, is to describe the “musical content” of the symphony, which does not appear of much concern to Wagner, at least in his program note of 1846. Wagner writes that instrumental music expresses what cannot be formulated in words, and proposes “words,” taken from Goethe's Faust, to express the moods underlying the music:

    It must be granted from the outset that the essence of the higher instrumental music consists specifically in expressing in musical sound what is inexpressible in words. Even so we believe we may approach here, albeit only through suggestion, the solution to an unachievable task by summoning to our aid the words of our great poet Goethe.

Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media
  • Edited by Thomas R. Hilder, Henry Stobart, Shzr Ee Tan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017
  • The essays in this volume offer rich and diverse perspectives on the encounter between Indigenous music and digital technologies. They explore how digital media -- whether on CD, VCD, the Internet, mobile technology, or in the studio -- have transformed and become part of the fabric of Indigenous cultural expression across the globe. Communication technologies have long been tools for nation building and imperial expansion, but these studies reveal how over recent decades digital media have become a creative and political resource for Indigenous peoples, often nurturing cultural revival, assisting activism, and complicating earlier hegemonic power structures. Bringing together the work of scholars and musicians across five continents, the volume addresses timely issues of transnationalism and sovereignty, production and consumption, archives and transmission, subjectivity and ownership, and virtuality and the posthuman. Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media is essential reading for scholars working on topics in ethnomusicology, Indigeneity, and media studies while also offering useful resources for Indigenous musicians and activists. The volume provides new perspectives on Indigenous music, refreshes and extends debates about digital culture, and points to how digital media shape what it means to be Indigenous in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Linda Barwick, Beverley Diamond, Thomas R. Hilder, Fiorella Montero-Diaz, John-Carlos Perea, Henry Stobart, Shzr Ee Tan, Russell Wallace Thomas R. Hilder is postdoctoral fellow in musicology at the University of Bergen. Henry Stobart is reader in music at Royal Holloway, University of London. Shzr Ee Tan is senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London.

  • 6 - In Vienna “Only Waltzes Get Printed”: The Decline and Transformation of the Contredanse Hongroise in the Early Nineteenth Century

  • from Part Three - Marketing the Mundane
  • Edited by Emily H. Green, George Mason University, Virginia, Catherine Mayes, University of Utah
  • Book:
    Consuming Music
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 154-175

  • Summary

    In Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century, the enjoyment of music and dances of various national origins was both common and unsurprising, as subjects from lands throughout the Habsburg Empire flocked to the city to make their living. In Viennese author Joseph Ferdinand Kringsteiner's 1807 farce Der Tanzmeister, a chorus of guests at a private ball provides humorous confirmation of the multitude of dances that could be included in such an event. I reproduce the text of the chorus here, both in its original dialect and in an approximate English translation.

    Der Anfang, so ists Etikett,

    der geschieht mit einem Menuett.

    Dann wirbeln gleich die Pauken drein

    Und's fallen halt die Deutschen ein;

    Dann gehts erst, so ist's der Brauch,

    Uiber d'Landlerischen auch

    Ist das vorbey, so weiß man eh,

    Da kömmt sodann das englische,

    Dann wechseln wir mit türkischen,

    Bald wieder mit Kosakischen;

    Damit man endlich alls probirt,

    Wird Ungarisch auch produzirt;

    Und habn wir g'nug tanzt, dann erst

    gehn wir nach Haus,

    Doch vorher, versteht sich, kömmt noch

    der Kehraus.

    [The opening, according to etiquette,

    takes place with a minuet.

    Then the kettledrums roll in

    And the German dances just break right out;

    Then next come, according to custom,

    The Ländlers too[;]

    When those are over, as one knows,

    Then come the English dances,

    Then we switch to the Turkish dance, Soon again to the Cossack dance;

    Finally[,] so that one tries everything,

    The Hungarian dance is also cranked out;

    And once we've danced enough, only then

    do we go home,

    But before that, of course, comes

    the Kehraus.]

    Most of the dances mentioned in this chorus—the minuet; the German dance and Ländler, whose names were often used interchangeably; the English dance, or longways contredanse; the Cossack dance; and the Kehraus, or last dance of the ball—were common at the turn of the nineteenth century, and references to and descriptions of them appear in numerous contemporary sources. The allusion to a Turkish dance, however, is more unusual; Turkish dances were sometimes imitated in stage works, but Turkish music and the militaristic alla turca style that evoked it for Western European consumers were not typically associated with social dancing

  • 7 - The Power to Please: Gender and Celebrity Self-Commodification in the Early American Republic

  • from Part Three - Marketing the Mundane
  • Edited by Emily H. Green, George Mason University, Virginia, Catherine Mayes, University of Utah
  • Book:
    Consuming Music
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 176-202

  • Summary

    Before the careers of audacious promoters like P. T. Barnum, sensational blackface minstrel performers, and renowned authors such as Washington Irving and Mark Twain brought about an entertainment boom in the nineteenth century, the cultural phenomenon of mass-marketed celebrity had a slow start in America. For much of the eighteenth century, the colonies lacked the infrastructure to foster a cultural environment in which professional performers could flourish. The shuttering of venues during the Revolutionary War hampered what entertainment did exist in cities such as Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The age of American musical celebrity dawned only in the 1780s and 1790s, but its essential features were not native to the new nation. Musical life in the early American republic relied heavily on European performers and repertory, and transatlantic émigré performers nurtured the marketplace for celebrity in America. Borrowing conventions from Britain, transatlantic performers engaged in savvy self-commodification to whet audiences’ appetites not just for the latest music from Europe but for renowned performers as well.

    Yet the United States was not a tabula rasa; performers found themselves engaging in an active, often contentious public sphere in which the comportment of public figures—especially women—fed into larger debates about what society in the new republic would be like. Female performers learned to pick careful paths across the potentially treacherous public stage. Reputations and livelihoods were at stake. Yet even in the midst of fulminating debates over whether and how women should participate in the public sphere, the visible presence of female performers was undeniable proof of women's agency. Occasionally, female actors and playwrights used their position in the public eye to participate actively in political debates. Most notably, Susanna Rowson used her renown as a playwright, an actress, and the author of the bestselling novel Charlotte Temple to advocate for women's education and equality in the 1790s. Yet Rowson was exceptional compared to the many other performers who elected to be more circumspect in the way they crafted their public personas. Indeed, many performing women obfuscated their power on the stage—and thus mitigated possible censure—by hiding behind conventions of demure femininity. Ironically, by sublimating their agency, female performers were able to earn livings for themselves, empowered by their astuteness in making career decisions and deft ability to manipulate their public images.

  • 6 - Music under the Sign of Modernism: From Wagner to Boulez, and Britten

  • from Part Two - Poietic Channels
  • Edited by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman
  • Book:
    The Dawn of Music Semiology
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 97-116

  • Summary

    An Initial Analysis

    Benjamin Britten's Tema “Sacher” (1976) is a one-minute, one-page, fourteen- bar composition for solo cello in C minor. It uses two basic types of material, the first presenting two broadly melodic statements of the motif E♭, A, C, and B, the second an edgier moto perpetuo based on just two notes, E and D (ex. 6.1). These are the six pitch classes derived from the surname of Paul Sacher (Es/E♭, A, C, H/B♮, E, Re/D) and reflect the composition's role as part of a seventieth-birthday tribute to Sacher commissioned by Mstislav Rostropovich.

    Another product of Rostropovich's commission—a total of twelve composers were involved—was Boulez's Messagesquisse for seven cellos. This also uses the “Sacher” hexachord as its source, but instead of Britten's tonal voice leading, which introduces nonhexachord notes to reinforce a relatively diatonic bass line (for example, C to G in bar 1) and a C–D♭–C cadence at the end, Boulez's pitches are generated from a pair of six-by-six matrices that preserve the order of the Sacher interval classes while systematically supplementing the original six pitch classes through rotation (matrix A) and transposition (matrix B)—procedures that assign a certain priority to E♭, but which nevertheless have more to do with post-tonal serial technique than with tonality (exx. 6.2– 6.3; table 6.1).

    Example 6.1. Benjamin Britten, Tema “Sacher” (1976). Reproduced by permission of Faber Music.

    Example 6.2. Pierre Boulez, Messagesquisse, ordered and unordered “Sacher” hexachords.

    Table 6.1. Boulez, Messagesquisse, derived matrices from the ordered version of the “Sacher” hexachord (Matrix A) by rotation (Matrix B) by transposition.

    Example 6.3. Boulez, Messagesquisse, opening of final section, cello 1 only. Pierre Boulez, Messagesquisse | für Violoncello solo und 6 Violoncelli. c Copyright 1977 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE 16678.

    Boulez's eight-and-a-half-minute score falls into five distinct phases:

  • 1. a recitative-like introduction, separating the first, principal cello from the other six:

  • 2. a much faster, contrapuntal moto perpetuo

  • 3. a return to something more recitative-like, but with the first cello providing fragmentary reminiscences of the moto perpetuo against the sustained trilling of the supporting ensemble

  • 4. a cadenza-like episode for the principal cello with alternating relatively animated and reflective statements

  • 5 - Mixing It Up: A Comparative Approach to Sámi Audio Production

  • Edited by Thomas R. Hilder, Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway, University of London, Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book:
    Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 106-126

  • Summary

    In 1989, in a significant article on “Globalization as Philosophical Issue,” cultural theorist Fredric Jameson elaborated some of the tensions between aspects of what he has identified throughout much of his career as “late capitalism.” Noting that the extent to which world markets now require “a global division of labour on an extraordinary scale,” he observes that, on the one hand, cultural difference can be asserted and celebrated to a larger extent than ever before, but, on the other, standardization on an unparalleled scale threatens “forced integration into a world system.” He clearly inclines to the latter (pessimistic) side of the equation, observing that “American mass culture, associated as it is with money and commodities, enjoys a prestige that is perilous for most forms of domestic cultural production.” While, like many ethnomusicologists, I am motivated to emphasize the distinctiveness and agency of local cultures, this article recognizes that it is less useful to take sides on the issue of standardization than to attempt to understand the intertwining factors that impinge on local cultural production. The attention I pay here to comparative recording aesthetics addresses such factors in relation to issues examined in the anthology's introduction. I explore, to some extent, the way contemporary Sami musicians have used the opportunities that modernity has presented in order to resist marginalization by drawing upon local aesthetics, indices of place as well as styles of social interaction, and archival memory. I agree with Wilson and Stewart's statement that “the major executives of the hegemonic media do not always define the terms of ‘excellence’ for Indigenous media makers. Indigenous artists and activists are using new technologies to craft culturally distinct forms of communication and artistic production that speak to local aesthetics and local needs while anticipating larger audiences.” By emphasizing comparative responses to distinct Indigenous processes, however, I hope to nuance the discussion, challenging a simplistic idea of “resistance” by insisting on the complex array of social contingencies, media memory, styles of relationality and cultural values that contribute to the divergent “readings” of Indigenous audio production in the digital era.

  • Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media: An Introduction

  • Edited by Thomas R. Hilder, Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway, University of London, Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book:
    Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 1-27

  • Summary

    This book is about Indigenous musical performance in a digital era. It addresses both the impact of digital technologies on the composition, production, and consumption of music by and for Indigenous people and the ways in which Indigenous people have utilized digital technologies to revive, repatriate, and transmit musical traditions in complex articulations of Indigeneity. Bringing together the work of international scholars and musicians, this volume highlights new perspectives on contemporary Indigenous music making across five continents to reveal both striking connections and contrasts across Indigenous experiences. Indigenous communities have faced histories of genocide, coerced religious conversion, social marginalization, land dispossession, and cultural assimilation. Since World War II, Indigenous activists, academics, and artists have mobilized transnationally to achieve political recognition in diverse governmental and nongovernmental institutions, develop international laws that secure Indigenous rights, and fight for rights to land and cultural heritage. The revival of Indigenous languages, cosmologies, and cultural traditions, including music, has assisted aspirations to Indigenous political and cultural self-determination. Communication technologies have long been tools for nation building and imperial expansion, as well as symbols of the supposed ascendancy of the industrialized “West.” The explosion of digital technologies over the last decades has also very much shaped the everyday lives of Indigenous people but in ways that complicate earlier hegemonic power structures. As Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart write, “Contemporary Indigenous media demonstrate the extent to which the hallmarks of an earlier regime of empire—colonization, forced assimilation, genocide, and diaspora—are being challenged and displaced by new constellations of global power.” Indeed, digital communication technologies have themselves transformed forms of Indigenous activism while also being adopted by Indigenous musicians to assist in cultural revival, repatriation, and transmission—processes which have helped to “decolonize” earlier media spaces and practices. In turn, those technologies have shaped musical traditions, alongside notions of Indigenous subjectivity, collectivity, and sovereignty. But digital media might also cement hegemonies through censorship, surveillance, and propaganda and magnify existing hierarchies within and between Indigenous communities along lines of gender, class, and “race.”

  • 1 - Taiwan's Aboriginal Music on the Internet

  • Edited by Thomas R. Hilder, Henry Stobart, Royal Holloway, University of London, Shzr Ee Tan, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Book:
    Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 April 2018
    Print publication:
    28 February 2017, pp 28-52

  • Summary

    More than a decade since the settling of a controversial lawsuit involving pop group Enigma's use of Amis song in the 1993 hit “Return To Innocence,” aboriginal musicians in Taiwan are grappling with new ideas about mediation, self-representation, cultural ownership, and musical stewardship. Emerging issues in today's diversified networks of music production and consumption extend beyond old debates about copyright; a newer line of inquiry traces the interacting pathways old and new media platforms have carved out in recent years. This article examines how regionally oriented rural routes established through cassette cultures of the 1980s, still prevalent, are being tapped into by more modern (and superficially “urban”) channels of CD distribution. Internet and mobile technology have also remapped old configurations of cultural flow. This is observable not only in the development of parallel online and offline musical communities but also in the widening, global reach of music-interfaced aboriginal transnationalism. At the same time, these routes have also paved the way for emerging cultural disjunctures. In particular, I investigate how the digital divide can be articulated not as a “Han-vs.-aboriginal” or even a “rural-vs.-urban” pattern, but as a generation gap. I study how this gap is itself bridged through mediated musical practices that integrate live and physical dimensions. I look at how feedback between new and existing communities impacts aboriginal musical ecosystems, and study how cultural identities are deliberately or incidentally represented.

    The sections to follow first challenge the idea of “newness” in new media, reexamining old tropes of recontextualization understood through differentiated aboriginal experiences of twenty-first century digitality. Here, unequal access to digital resources, information, and power privilege as well as disadvantage intersecting categories of cultural insiders and outsiders and the technologically savvy. Often, the digital quest for a musical connection requires the querent to know exactly what he or she is looking for, even before multiple hidden pathways to the holy grail can show themselves: thus, even slight alterations of Internet music video search parameters lead to dramatically different results. Next, I study how specific parties—from national institutions to commercial players, from local communities to cyberactivists—hold different digital stakes in the game of information representation and music exchange.

Page 29 of 115