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Whiteness and the Problem of Colourblind Listening: Revisiting Leonard Feather's 1951 Blindfold Test with Roy Eldridge Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2024-03-04 MIKKEL VAD
‘I couldn't tell who was colored and who was white’, admitted the African American trumpet player Roy Eldridge after being submitted to a so-called blindfold test by the white critic Leonard Feather in 1951. Feather was happy that the blindfold test duped a prominent Black musician, because it proved his point about the fundamental colourblindness of music and listening. Through close reading of the
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The Mediation of Genre, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary (Popular) Music Streaming Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2024-02-15 VERONIKA MUCHITSCH, ANN WERNER
Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's
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Valentin Kruchinin and the Queen of Mars: Early Musical Traces of Soviet Sci-Fi Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2024-01-25 HANNAH C. J. McLAUGHLIN
Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for Aelita remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases
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The Musical Text: Theorizing Openness after Structuralism Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-12-13 SAM RIDOUT
This article attends to the conjuncture in the early 1970s of post-Cagean musical practice and poststructuralist theory associated with the journal Musique en jeu and the music department of the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. Reading the theoretical writing of figures including Daniel Charles and Ivanka Stoïanova alongside the music of Costin Miereanu, the article elaborates the account
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The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean: Dance, Consumer Culture, and the Imperial Shape of Modern Entertainment Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-11-06 SERGIO OSPINA ROMERO
After 1917 the word ‘jazz’ disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from the United States, but often associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion. In the Caribbean, this process entailed not only the constitution
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Reiterating Hierarchy and the Failed Promise of the Global Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-11-10 CHELSEA BURNS
The idea of global modernisms rests upon freighted power relationships. Far from decolonizing, this concept reinscribes values of Euro- and US-centric discourses. This article addresses the inherent friction of global musical modernisms through Carlos Chávez's 1940 composition La paloma azul, written for concerts at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Tasked with appealing to a US audience, Chávez created
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Michiko Toyama Disrupts the Historiography of Modernism Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-10-27 BRIGID COHEN
The Paris-trained, Japanese composer Michiko Toyama (1913–2006) was appointed as the earliest foreign-born visiting composer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), the first institutionally supported studio of its kind in the United States. Yet she remains virtually unknown to scholarship, despite a growing literature on women pioneers in electronic music. Drawing on interviews
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Global Musical Modernisms as Decolonial Method Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-10-23 GAVIN S. K. LEE
This article argues that through historiography, global musical modernisms decolonize Western musical modernism, expanding and bursting the latter's spatial (geographic), vertical (high–low genres), and temporal boundaries. The unsettling of these various boundaries shows how coloniality is the context of, and thoroughly imbricated with, global musical modernisms – and yet the latter has channelled
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When Is It Modernism? A Lesson from Indonesian Musik Kontemporer Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-10-10 CHRISTOPHER J. MILLER
When is it modernism? This article poses this question to traditionally based Indonesian musik kontemporer, as an occasion to examine a distinctive instance of musical modernism, but most importantly to illuminate issues with the question itself. Taking it literally, I identify when musik kontemporer was most clearly modernist, recognizing that modernism, and its conception of history, itself has a
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Introduction to the Special Issue on Global Musical Modernisms Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-10-04 GAVIN S. K. LEE, CHRISTOPHER J. MILLER
Global Musical Modernisms – the formulation heralds expansion into new arenas of music research.1 For while certain pairings of the component terms are familiar enough, the concatenation of all three is novel. In music studies, the most notable trend is the flurry of activity around global music history, with study groups in two societies historically focused on Western musics, and one focused on ethnomusicology
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Making Beethoven Black: The New Negro Movement, Black Internationalism, and the Rewriting of Music History Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-10-04 KIRA THURMAN
While the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms
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Challenging Historiographic Assumptions: Opening Up Serialism with Pierre Boulez's Don Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-08-29 JOSEPH SALEM
This article combines historiographic reflections on the open-work concept in serial music with a new philology of Pierre Boulez's Don, the opening piece of Pli selon pli. I begin by presenting challenges in defining the open-work concept. I also deconstruct the dual use of the term ‘serialism’ to define a set of compositional techniques and a musical style. This leads me to a reconsideration of the
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Cannibalizing Bach: Villa-Lobos in Europe, 1936 Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-08-11 EDUARDO SATO
During the 1930s, Heitor Villa-Lobos concentrated his efforts on coordinating Brazilian musical education. As such, he changed his compositional style and did not travel to Europe again until 1936. This article examines Villa-Lobos's trip to Europe in 1936, drawing on Florencia Garramuño's call to ‘incorporate avant-garde voyages as founding moments’ for an autochthonous national character in music
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Iannis Xenakis in Argentina: Reception, Dialogues, and Exchanges Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-05-25 EDUARDO HERRERA
Iannis Xenakis visited Argentina as a professor of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in 1966 where he discussed his interdisciplinary interests – mathematics, architecture, and computer-aided composition. Using archival resources and oral history, this article explores three aspects of Xenakis's trip to Argentina. First, the way the media
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Music Deferred: A Reappraisal of the Legacy of Pierre Schaeffer's Treatise on Musical Objects (1966) Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-05-05 SUSAN C. BAY
This article reinterprets the tension between sound and music in Pierre Schaeffer's 1966 Treatise on Musical Objects. Schaeffer famously insisted that the Treatise did not address music or composition; scholars have therefore engaged with it primarily as a theoretical text on sound and listening. In this article, however, I argue that the denial and deferral of music throughout the Treatise should
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Francoism, Urban Displacement, and Nostalgia in Flamenco Dance from Seville Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-05-03 CARLOS VAN TONGEREN
While it is often assumed that flamenco is strongly oriented towards the past, thus far, few scholars have explored the roles of flamenco in voicing memories of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). During the second half of the dictatorship, a series of natural disasters, combined with new economic and political developments, led to the forced displacement of a number of flamenco artists and their wider
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Forgotten Pasts and Imagined Futures: The First International Webern Festival and the 1962 Seattle World's Fair Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-04-27 DAVID H. MILLER
In an April 1962 article previewing the First International Webern Festival, Hans Moldenhauer promised that Anton Webern's music would one day be known as ‘the music of the space age’. Moldenhauer chose his words carefully. The Webern Festival was set to take place in Seattle at the same time as the World's Fair (an event also known as the ‘Century 21 Exposition’ and ‘America's Space Age World's Fair’)
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Mimetic Mechanicity: The Iron Foundry and Vernacular Internationalism in the 1930s Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-04-27 GILES MASTERS
In the 1930s, the Iron Foundry, a short orchestral piece by the Soviet composer Aleksandr Mosolov, became hugely popular with audiences across Europe, North America, and beyond. Reassembling the fragmented archives of its performance and reception histories, this article sets out to follow the work on the circuitous routes that ensued. Addressing issues including programmaticism, the reception of Soviet
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Mariachi Accompaniment: Cultural Bearers for Communal Conviviality Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-04-19 RUSSELL C. RODRÍGUEZ
Utilizing the ideas of convivencia (convivial interaction) and Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz's framework of ‘accompaniment’, I suggest that the ‘modern-urban’ mariachi, often characterized as an expression of standardization and commodification, has established a capacity for facilitating culture that contributes to the development of convivial communal spaces. In the midst of marginalization
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The Forty Part Motet in New York City after 9/11 Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-03-02 MARÍA EDURNE ZUAZU
In Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (2001, 40Part), ‘a reworking of Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium (c. 1570)’, the forty voice parts of the motet are played back via forty speakers. Visitors walk through and around the encompassing speakers arrayed in eight groups of five. Still in constant demand, 40Part enjoys unparalleled success in the contemporary art scene. This article shows how 40Part became
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Exile and Memory in Post-Franco Spain: Julián Orbón's Libro de cantares (1987) Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-03-01 EVA MOREDA RODRÍGUEZ
In the song cycle Libro de cantares (1987), Spanish-Cuban composer Julián Orbón (1925–91) entered into a dialogue with the work of two other men who, like him, were displaced under the Franco regime: he re-used Asturian folk songs compiled by Eduardo Martínez Torner in 1920; and he followed compositional models deployed by Manuel de Falla in Siete canciones populares españolas (1914). In this article
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Dark Virtuosity: Violin Symbolism in Alberto Iglesias's Score for Pedro Almodóvar's Film The Skin I Live In (2011) Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-02-28 DIEGO ALONSO TOMÁS
Singled out as one of the finest and most original works by the leading film-music composer Alberto Iglesias, the score for Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011) stands out for its inclusion of a (neo-baroque) virtuoso part for solo violin with key symbolic functions in the film. This part is largely derived from the composer's post-minimalist string trio Cautiva (c. 1990). The present article
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The Songs of Fire (1975): Sonic Narratives of Resistance and Collective Memory Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-02-10 ANNA PAPAETI
This article focuses on the documentary The Songs of Fire by Nikos Koundouros (1975). Shot immediately after the fall of the military dictatorship (1967–74) in Greece, it exhumes the elation of three public concerts and demonstrations, capturing the enthusiasm for the return to democracy expressed through singing and chanting. The article focuses on the ways in which popular songs became the vehicles
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Experimenting Musically with Democracy in Late Francoist and Post-Francoist Spain Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-02-10 IGOR CONTRERAS ZUBILLAGA
This article examines how musical practices in 1970s Spain formed ways of imagining democracy and how they participated in the wider social struggle to define freedom and equality for the final years of Franco's dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. I shall analyse two case studies: a large-scale experimental art festival held in the streets of Pamplona in 1972 and a grassroots musical collective
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Rethinking Post-Authoritarian Chile through Its Popular Music Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-02-10 DANIEL PARTY
This article is a study of Chilean popular music produced during the 1990s, the first decade following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. The return of democracy and a period of strong economic growth contributed to a boom in the Chilean music industry. A wealth of music was recorded and the opportunities for listening to live music multiplied. The article's main objectives are to illuminate the
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A Modern-Day Florestan: Fidelio on Robben Island and South Africa's Early Democratic Project Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-02-10 JULIANA M. PISTORIUS
In 2004, Cape Town Opera mounted a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the former apartheid prison on Robben Island. Sponsored by Den Norske Opera, and endorsed by the South African government, the production was presented as a celebration of the country's tenth year of democracy. This article investigates the vision of democracy performed by Fidelio on Robben Island and asks how it interacts with
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‘Stockhausenesque’: South African Musical Vanguardism during the ‘Durban Moment’ Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2023-02-02 WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
This article weaves a story around the scant evidence that survives of the first university-based electroacoustic studio in Africa and the musical experimentalism that developed alongside it at the fledgling music department of what was then the University of Natal. The time is the early 1970s, the setting the eastern seaboard city of Durban, the local political context the ‘Durban moment’ of growing
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Sensing, Sharing, and Listening to Musicking Animals across the Sonic Environments of Social Media Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 KATE GALLOWAY
This article explores the strategies employed by user-creators as they listen to, sense, make, and share digital audiovisual memes of musicking non-human animals on social media. Memes, reels, and other forms of audiovisual social media posts are a form of cultural expression that reveals the varied ways humans relate to, connect with, and represent non-human animals – especially their pets – through
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Virals, Memes, and the Lick's Circulation through Online Jazz Communities Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 HANNAH JUDD
In 2011, Alex Heitlinger, a senior at New England Conservatory, uploaded the video ‘The Lick’ to YouTube. The 1′34″ compilation excerpted a range of performances that each deployed the same seven-note ‘lick’. This article explores the digital dissemination of videos and memes that feature the Lick, suggesting its function as a mimetic device users can deploy to signal their belonging and individuality
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All Songs Considered: The Persuasive Listening of Music Podcasts Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 BYRD MCDANIEL
Music podcasts have proliferated as public discourse about popular music. A significant part of the expanding podcast industry, music podcasts include titles such as All Songs Considered, Switched on Pop, Song Exploder, Sound Opinions, New York Times Popcast, and Lost Notes. These podcasts often feature a combination of conversation and musical selections, which highlight aspects of the music for podcast
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Autoplaying, Unmuting, Attending: (Re)formatting the Twenty-First-Century Digital Sensorium Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 PAULA HARPER
In this article, I analyse the implications of autoplaying video as a driver of ‘audile techniques’ in the 2010s digital ecosystem – in particular, techniques that respond to the realities of the separability of image and sound, even in media that contain both elements. I then examine a number of strategies through which this audio/visual split has been negotiated, monetized, and creatively bridged
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The Infrastructure of Engagement: Musical Aesthetics and the Rise of YouTube in India Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 ANAAR DESAI-STEPHENS
This article analyses the rise of YouTube in India between 2008 and 2018 by focusing on two central themes: first, shifts in digital infrastructure that enabled the widespread consumption of streaming media; and second, the importance of music-media aesthetics in supporting the platform's predominance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and close readings of videos by significant early Indian YouTube
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‘Exchanging Cuba for 1 Million YouTube Views’: Technological Precarity, Offline Virality, and ‘Patria y vida’ Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 MIKE LEVINE
For many Cubans, the internet remains an inaccessible destination. The residents of repartimiento districts – Black Cuban residents from outlying districts across Havana – manage the situation through custom solutions that bridge gaps of technological precarity. Utilizing USB drives to share content with one another, artists and music fans have constructed a complex, alternative internet that allows
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Anitta's ‘Girl from Rio’, Digital Fatigue, and Stereotype Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 K. E. GOLDSCHMITT
In May 2021, Brazilian pop-funk superstar Anitta released ‘Girl from Rio’. The song was based on the melodic foundation of the bossa nova song ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ that became a huge international hit at the end of the 1960s bossa nova craze. ‘Girl from Rio’ features trap beats on top of the familiar melody with a clear lyrical message that critiques international stereotypes of women from Brazil
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Musical Messaging: The Social and Anti-Social Affordances of WhatsApp in the Football Culture of the Latin American Southern Cone Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 LUIS ACHONDO
Argentine, Chilean, and Uruguayan hinchas (soccer or football supporters) cheer for their teams primarily through contrafacta of popular music. Until recently, chants were mainly composed in stadiums and other physical spaces of fan socialization. However, the increasing dominance of the messaging app WhatsApp has altered these sociomusical relations. Drawing on ethnographic work, I argue that the
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The Musical Idea Work Group: Production and Reception of Pre-existing Music in Film Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-09-07 PASCAL RUDOLPH
How do filmmakers work with pre-existing music? To answer this question, I conducted interviews with the musicians, composers, editors, sound designers, and music researchers for Lars von Trier's films. This article combines previously unpublished insider information with an original analytical methodology to clarify the working processes of contemporary filmmakers who utilize pre-existing music. I
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Hearing the Musical Resonances of Catastrophe Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 ABBY ANDERTON, MARTHA SPRIGGE
This collection of articles proposes a theoretical model for understanding and analysing the persistence of music making as a response to urban catastrophe. In the Introduction, the authors present an overview of recent humanistic literature on ruin aesthetics, positioning music as a vital yet overlooked dimension of aesthetic responses to disaster. The forum delves into the moral and ethical complexities
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Singing on Solid Ground: Music Education in Post-Earthquake Haiti Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 LAUREN ELDRIDGE STEWART
The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti continue to reverberate throughout the cultural landscape, particularly within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. In this article, I analyse the sometimes divergent performances of a composition that commemorates that tragedy. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume wrote ‘N'ap Debat’ (‘We're Hangin’ On’) from Los
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Listening to Radioactive Rubble: Vocal Decay, Gender, and Nuclear Ruination in the Marshall Islands Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 JESSICA A. SCHWARTZ
This article explores how Marshallese radiation songs, written during and after the nuclear testing period as nuclear survivors tried to make sense of their sufferings, yield insight into processes of imperial ruination, rupture, and fragmentation by resounding the powerful impress of radioactive decay in Marshallese lives. In assessing the parameters through which radiation becomes sensible, how,
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Damage and Renewal at the Württembergische Staatstheater, Stuttgart Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 EMILY RICHMOND POLLOCK
The dual theatre complex of the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart sustained serious damage during the Second World War. While the larger theatre was eventually able to be repaired, the smaller theatre was destroyed, leading to a multi-phased and controversial process to determine how best to replace it. Many of Stuttgart's citizens publicly pleaded that the smaller theatre should be reconstructed
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The Repercussions of George Rochberg's Rubble Rhetoric Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 AMY LYNN WLODARSKI
During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for
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Destroying the Imagined City Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 ARIANA PHILLIPS-HUTTON
The transformation of rubble into aestheticized ruins turns on the relation of aesthetics, politics, and power alongside questions of memory, imagination, and embodiment. Working outward from this suggestive confluence, I investigate contemporary practices of commemorative composition that resituate elements of the historical archive, and so turn sonic rubble into ruin. Using Mary Kouyoumdjian's 2014
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Rubbled Cities – Sounds and Silence: A Travelogue Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 RUTH HACOHEN
A travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful
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Whiplash, Buddy Rich, and Visual Virtuosity in Drum Kit Performance Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 JONATHAN GODSALL
The 2014 film Whiplash depicts successful jazz drumming as an athletic exhibition of speed and endurance, in a manner that reflects its protagonist's idolization of Buddy Rich (1917–87). The crowd-pleasing virtuosity of Rich and Whiplash has drawn critics’ ire, but this article interrogates the ideas of musical authenticity that underpin their complaints, and offers a more productive analysis of the
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Hearing Global Britishness on the BBC's Commonwealth of Song (1953–1961) Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-06-22 TREVOR R. NELSON
Part of the United Kingdom's national reconstruction following the Second World War was reforming its self-image as a global power in light of imperial decline. This recasting took place across political and cultural spheres and emphasized the Commonwealth, idealized as a friendly collection of current and former colonies linked by British culture. In this article, I demonstrate how music broadcasting
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Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus: National Exoticism or International Modernism? Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-04-27 OWEN BURTON
Einojuhani Rautavaara's international fame rests largely on pieces celebrated for their apparently non-modernist accessibility. Cantus Arcticus – Concerto for Birds and Orchestra (1972) is greeted with suspicion on account of its wide appeal. This article reconsiders this piece in the context of his complicated and original stylistic development and re-evaluates its relation to Finnish nature and culture
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‘Play the Rain Down’: Prince, Paul Morton, and the Idea of Black Ecstasy Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-03-28 BRAXTON SHELLEY
This article grapples with ‘Let It Rain’, the title track of Bishop Paul S. Morton and the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship's 2003 release, which revises Michael Farren's contemporary Christian ballad by braiding it together with Prince's ‘Purple Rain’ and the formal logic of Black gospel tradition. As the Full Gospel version of this song commingles these seemingly discordant components, Morton
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‘Irrational Nuances’: Interpreting Stockhausen's Klavierstück I Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-02-01 GABRIEL JONES
AbstractThe performance practice of European serial music has long been misunderstood. This article uses Stockhausen's Klavierstück I (1952–3) as a lens through which to view the realities of this practice, drawing on close contextual analysis of the affordances of the score and the now significant corpus of recordings. These findings are used to extend M. J. Grant's view of serial aesthetics and to
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(De)constructing Argentine Women: Gender, Nation, and Identity in ‘Alfonsina y el mar’ Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-02-01 CINTIA CRISTIÁ
AbstractThis article examines gender, nation, and identity in the popular song of folk roots ‘Alfonsina y el mar’. Written by Félix Luna and Ariel Ramírez, the song is based on the suicide of feminist poet Alfonsina Storni and achieved worldwide popularity through Mercedes Sosa's 1969 rendition on the album Mujeres argentinas. Using Butler's theory of gender performance, Cusick's proposals for a feminist
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‘Seeing’ Music in Early Twentieth Century Colonial Algeria Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Stephen Wilford
Postcards played an important role throughout the first half of the twentieth century in French-ruled Algeria, offering a fast and affordable means of communication between North Africa and Europe for French citizens working and travelling in the Maghreb. Alongside depictions of beautiful scenery and highly exoticized subjects, a large body of postcards portrayed musicians, musical instruments, and
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Graham Griffiths, ed., Stravinsky in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), ISBN: 978-1-108-42219-2 (hb). Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2022-01-18 Daniel Elphick
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Against ‘John Cage Shock’: Rethinking John Cage and the Post-war Avant-garde in Japan Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2021-10-23 SERENA YANG
After Cage and Tudor visited Japan in 1962, the term ‘Cage Shock’ circulated widely among the Japanese public. My interviews with Japanese composers suggest that the term ‘Cage Shock’ oversimplifies the reception of Cage's debut in Japan. Composer Yūji Takahashi stated that Cage would have met Japanese audiences well prepared for his visit by musical trends present in Japan as early as the late 1940s
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Transcending the Past: Singing and the Lingering Cold War in the Korean Christian Diaspora Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2021-10-21 HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG
Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s)
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Christophe Levaux, We Have Always Been Minimalist: The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style, trans. Rose Vekony (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), ISBN: 978-0-520-29527-8 (pb). - Michael Maizels, In and Out of Phase: An Episodic History of Art and Music in the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), ISBN: 978-0-472-13193-8 (hb). Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Pwyll ap Siôn
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Lorraine Plourde, Tokyo Listening: Sound and Sense in a Contemporary City (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019), ISBN: 978-0-8195-7883-9 (hb), ISBN: 978-0-8195-7884-6 (pb), and ISBN: 978-0-8195-7885-3 (ebook). Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2021-07-21 Jennifer Milioto Matsue
Lorraine Plourde’s Tokyo Listening is a remarkable contribution to the ever-expanding literature in Sound Studies. With a focus on acousmatic sound, affect, and attunement, Plourde argues that the ‘urban sensorium’ allows ‘noises and ambient sounds [to] serve as the foundation upon which listeners experience the city’ (3). In doing so, she rightly presents Tokyo in particular as a sound-saturated sociality
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‘How We Were Never Posthuman’: Technologies of the Embodied Voice in Pamela Z's Voci Twentieth-Century Music Pub Date : 2021-07-13 G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
This article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate