In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the “American Negro” in several southern African American prisons. Listening to the ...Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes’ field recordings—including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton—contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element—a sonic rhetoric—for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power of folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes’ archive and other repositories of historicized sound. Throughout Listening to the Lomax Archive, there are a number of audio resources for readers to listen to, including songs, oral histories, and radio program excerpts. Each resource is marked with a ? in the text. Visit https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9871097#resources to access this audio content.
The Kalevala, or runic, songs is a tradition at least a few thousand years old. It was shared by Finns, Estonians and other speakers of smaller Baltic- Finnic languages inhabiting the eastern side of ...the Baltic Sea in North- Eastern Europe. This book offers a combined perspective of a musicologist and a linguist to the structure of the runic songs. Archival recordings of the songs originating mostly from the first half of the 20th century were used as source material for this study. The results reveal a complex interaction between three different processes participating in singing: speech prosody, metre, and musical rhythm.
Devotion to St Anne, the apocryphal mother of the Virgin Mary, reached its height in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Until now, Anne's reception history and political symbolism during ...this period have been primarily discussed through the lens of art history. This is the first study to explore the music that honoured the saint and its connections to some of the most prominent court cultures of western Europe. Michael Alan Anderson examines plainchant and polyphonic music for St Anne, in sources both familiar and previously unstudied, to illuminate not only Anne's wide-ranging intercessional capabilities but also the political force of the music devoted to her. Whether viewed as a fertility aide, wise mother, or dynastic protector, she modelled a number of valuable roles that rulers reflected in the music of their devotional programmes to project their noble lineage and prestige.
El “Cancionero de romances” de Martín Nucio. Ed. crít. de Alejandro Higashi y Mario Garvin. Coord. de Josep Lluís Martos. Universitat d´Alacant, Alacant, 2021; 915 pp. (Cancionero, Romancero e ...Imprenta,3).
The essay is close-reading selected songs by the singer-songwriter and film musician Randy Newman as social constructions of the American dream and the American reality since the 1930s.
In Scots Folk Singers and their Sources, Caroline Macafee offers a detailed analysis of song transmission in two major Scottish folk song collections, the Greig-Duncan Collection, and the Scots folk ...song material of the School of Scottish Studies Archives.
Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike ...songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.
This study examines market concentration's influence on popular music. The data cover popular music from weekly Billboard Hot 100 songs from 1952 to 1989, for which song characteristic data including ...tempo and duration is available from the Million Song Dataset (MSD). Greater market concentration of the top four artists is found to impact song length, with longer #1 songs and shorter songs in the #2 through #10 spots on the Billboard charts. However, tests for alterations in song construction by top artists that might indicate a form of “sell‐out” behavior do not reveal evidence of it.
A sixty-year history of Afro-South Asian musical
collaborations From Beyoncé's South Asian music-inspired
Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and
Alice Coltrane's use of Indian ...song structures and spirituality in
their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott's high-profile
collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the
Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently
engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of
Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces
such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the
political implications of African American musicians' South Asian
influence since the 1960s. Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens
when we consider Black musicians' South Asian sonic explorations as
distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black
musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland,
Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro-South Asian music in the
United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural
site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and
queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates
this cultural history within larger global and domestic
sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South
Asian diasporic communities in the United States. The long
historical arc of Afro-South Asian music in Sounds from the
Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly
political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about
cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized
musicians.
Focusing on the music of the great song composers--Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss--Poetry Into Song offers a systematic introduction to the performance and analysis of Lieder. Part I, ..."The Language of Poetry," provides chapters on the themes and imagery of German Romanticism and the methods of analysis for German Romantic poetry. Part II, "The Language of the Performer," deals with issues of concern to performers: texture, temporality, articulation,and interpretation of notation and unusual rhythm accents and stresses. Part III provides clearly defined analytical procedures for each of four main chapters on harmony and tonality, melody and motive, rhythm and meter, and form. The concluding chapter compares different settings of the same text, and the volume endswith several appendices that offer text translations, over 40 pages of less accessible song scores, a glossary of technical terms, and a substantial bibliography. Directing the book towards students in both voice and theory, and toward all singers, the authors establish a framework for the analysis of song based on a process of performing, listening, and analysing, designed to give the reader a new understanding of the reciprocal interaction between performance and analysis. Emphasizing themasterworks, the volume features numerous poetic texts, as well as a core repertory of songs. Examples throughout the text demonstrate points, while end-of-chapter questions reinforce concepts and provide opportunities for directed analysis. While there are a variety of books on Lieder and on GermanRomantic poetry, none combines performance, musical analysis, textual analysis, and the interrelation between poetry and music in the systematic, thorough way of Poetry Into Song.
