We Shall Not Be Moved: The Trail Blazed by a Song from the U.S. South to Spain and South America details the history of "We Shall Not Be Moved" from its birth as a slave spiritual in the U.S. South ...and its subsequent adoption as a standard hymn by the U.S. labor, civil rights, and farmworker movements, to its singing in the student movement opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain in the 1960s, and finally to its arrival in the South American country of Chile during its experiment with democratic socialism in the early 1970s. The book outlines the role the song has played in each of the movements in which it has been sung and analyzes its dissemination, function, and meaning through a number of different sociological and anthropological lenses.This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.
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.
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.
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.
Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny" became one of America’s most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of ...race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown. In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and “Frankie and Johnny" in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan’s research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.
Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest examines how the Eurovision Song Contest has reflected and become intertwined with the history of postwar Europe from a political perspective.
...Established in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is the world's largest popular music event and one of the most popular television programmes in Europe, currently attracting a global audience of around 200 million people. Eurovision is often mocked as cultural kitsch because of its over-the-top performances and frivolous song lyrics. Yet there is no cultural medium that connects Europeans more than popular music, the development of which has always been tied to cultural, economic, political, social and technological change - making Eurovision the ideal tool to explain the history of Europe in the last sixty years. This book uses Eurovision as a vehicle to address topics ranging from the Cold War, liberal democracy and communism to nationalism, European integration, economic prosperity and human rights. It analyses these subjects through their cultural, political and social relationships with Eurovision entries as expressed through lyrics and music, as well as by examining public debates that have accompanied the selection of the entries and the organisation of the contest itself. Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest also considers how states have used Eurovision to define their identities in a European context, be it to assert their national distinctiveness, highlight political issues or affirm their Europeanism or Euroscepticism in the context of European integration.
Based on original sources, including hitherto unpublished archival documents from international broadcasting organisations, this is a novel historical study of interest to anyone keen to know more about the postwar history of Europe and its cultural history in particular.
This Patti Smith song was the fuse that ignited this Special Issue. We would like to acknowledge that 2021, like the year before it, has been a very difficult time for many. The impacts of COVID-19 ...continue to be globally significant, and countries, cities and communities continue to grapple with its spread. This Special Issue centres on popular music and particularly on music as an expression of power in the face of social problems. While none of the articles included here relate directly to...
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