Once again, the reviews are in! Another installment has arrived of RILM’s Instant Classics series, which chronicles and collects the books indexed in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature that have received the most reviews in academic literature. This most recent list collects publications covering a wide range of musical topics that were released between 2020 and 2021, listed in order from least to most reviewed.
As always, this list should be viewed as a living document that will become outdated as reviews continue to be written. Despite the inherent limitations, collecting these texts in this way generates a valuable archive of the topics, methodologies, and perspectives that earned the attention of music scholars during a brief period in time. As we zoom out, patterns may emerge that provide insight into the topical trends that have contributed to music discourse in the early decades of the 21st century.
We may also pause over which voices are being heard in music research, the interests of the publishers who are amplifying them, and the types of audiences being targeted. Although this list may inevitably serve as means of promotion, it is not meant to be viewed uncritically. We can appreciate these texts’ contributions to musical knowledge while simultaneously being aware of the powers held and challenges faced by the publishing firms and university presses that sell them.
And finally, do keep in mind that RILM can only disseminate the writings on music to which it has access. You are invited to help make RILM Abstracts be as complete as it can be by visiting our website and submitting your review! We thank you in advance and wish you a happy summer of reading!
– Written, compiled, and edited by Michael Lupo, Assistant Editor/Marketing & Media, RILM
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#8. Osborne, Richard and Dave Laing, eds. Music by numbers: The use and abuse of statistics in the music industry (Bristol: Intellect, 2021). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-99384]
Abstract: Examines statistics within the music industry. Its aim is to expose the historical and contemporary use and abuse of these numbers, both nationally and internationally. It addresses their impact on consumers’ choices, upon the careers of musicians and upon the policies that governments and legislators make.
#7. Slominski, Tes. Trad nation: Gender, sexuality, and race in Irish traditional music. Music/culture (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-54789]
Abstract: Just how “Irish” is traditional Irish music? This book combines ethnography, oral history, and archival research to challenge the longstanding practice of using ethnic nationalism as a framework for understanding vernacular music traditions. The author argues that ethnic nationalism hinders this music’s development today in an increasingly multiethnic Ireland and in the transnational Irish traditional music scene. She discusses early 21st-century women whose musical lives were shaped by Ireland’s struggles to become a nation; follows the career of Julia Clifford, a fiddler who lived much of her life in England, and explores the experiences of women, LGBTQ+ musicians, and musicians of color in the early 21st century.
#6. Lockwood, Lewis. Beethoven’s lives: The biographical tradition (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-11238]
Abstract: When Beethoven died in March 1827, the world of music felt an intense loss. The composer’s funeral procession was one of the largest Vienna had ever witnessed, and the poet Franz Grillparzer’s eulogy brought the tensions between the composer’s life and music into sharp focus: the deaf and aloof genius, the alienated and eccentric artist, unable to form a lasting relationship with a woman but reaching out to mankind. These apparent contradictions were to attract many Beethoven biographers yet to come. The story of Beethoven biography is traced, from the earliest attempts made directly after the composer’s death to the present day. It casts a wide net, tracing the story of Beethoven biography from Anton Schindler as biographer and falsifier, through the authoritative Alexander Wheelock Thayer and down to the present. The list includes Gustav Nottebohm, the first scholar to study Beethoven’s sketchbooks. With his work, biography could begin to reflect on the inner life of the artist as expressed in his music, and in this sense, sketchbooks could be seen as artistic diaries. Even Richard Wagner thought of writing a Beethoven biography, and the late 19th and early 20th century saw the emergence of French and English traditions of Beethoven biography. In the tumultuous 20th century, with world wars and fractured politics, the writing of Beethoven biography was sometimes caught up in the storm. By bringing the story down to our time, it identifies traditions of Beethoven biography that today’s scholars and writers need to be aware of. Each biography reflects not only on the individual writer’s knowledge and interests, but also his inner sense of purpose as each writer works within the intellectual framework of his time.
#5. Brennan, Matt. Kick it: A social history of the drum kit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-11043]
Abstract: The drum kit has provided the pulse of popular music from before the dawn of jazz up to the present day pop charts. This provocative social history of the instrument looks closely at key innovators in the development of the drum kit: inventors and manufacturers like the Ludwig and Zildjian dynasties, jazz icons like Gene Krupa and Max Roach, rock stars from Ringo Starr to Keith Moon, and popular artists who haven’t always got their dues as drummers, such as Karen Carpenter and J Dilla. Tackling the history of race relations, global migration, and the changing tension between high and low culture, the author makes the case for the drum kit’s role as one of the most transformative musical inventions of the modern era. He shows how the drum kit and drummers helped change modern music—and society as a whole—from the bottom up.
#4. Austern, Linda Phyllis. Both from the ears & mind: Thinking about music in early modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-8218]
Abstract: Offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. The author brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music’s conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, the author illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change.
#3. Frühauf, Tina. Transcending dystopia: Music, mobility, and the Jewish community in Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-1]
Abstract: Discusses the role music played in its various connections to and contexts of Jewish communal life and cultural activity in Germany from 1945 to 1989. This history of the Jewish communities’ musical practices during the postwar and Cold War eras tells the story of how the traumatic experience of the Holocaust led to transitions and transformations, and the significance of music in these processes. As such, it relies on music to draw together three areas of inquiry: the Jewish community, the postwar Germanys and their politics after the Holocaust (occupied Germany, the Federal Republic, the Democratic Republic, and divided Berlin), and the concept of cultural mobility. Indeed, the musical practices of the Jewish communities in the postwar Germanys cannot be divorced from politics, as can be observed in their relations to Israel and U.S. On the grounds of these conceptual concerns, selective communities serve as case studies to provide a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and in social life. Within these pillars, a wide spectrum of topics is covered, from music during commemorations, on the radio and in Jewish newspapers, to synagogue concerts and community events; from the absence and presence of cantor and organ to the resurgence of choral music. What binds these topics tightly together is the specific theoretical inquiry of mobility.
#2. Robinson, Dylan. Hungry listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies. Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-4582]
Abstract: Listening is considered from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. In a critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies”, how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality are evaluated. This involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear” that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values are examined. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, examples of “doing sovereignty” in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibitions, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence are offered. It is shown how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, a reorientation is demanded toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
#1. Ross, Alex. Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-4721]
Abstract: For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and U.S. culture. Such colossal creations as Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over 21st-century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. A German translation is cited as RILM 2020-61241.
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The library of the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) in Paris is home to an extensive collection of writings on music from the Arab world, a region stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Indian Ocean. This series of blog posts highlights selections of this collection, along with abstracts written by RILM staff members contained in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, the comprehensive bibliography of writings about music. Since the onset of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, the Institut du Monde Arabe has hosted exhibitions and concerts featuring musicians and artists who are at the heart of the cultural production in the region.
Illustration by artist Amado Alfadni featuring the young female protestor Alaa Salah, nicknamed the “Kandaka” of the Sudanese revolution of 2018-2019 for her role in mobilizing protesters through revolutionary chants. Kandaka refers to the name of ancient Nubian queens and the design is a remake of the old perfume label “Bint El Sudan” (the daughter of Sudan). Illustration used with permission.
“It takes a revolution/To find a solution” - From the song “Revolution” by the Palestinian hip-hop band DAM.
Revolutions and popular movements are characterized by a distinct soundscape defined by chants, songs, and the rhythmic movements of collective bodies. The act of protesting in the Arab world is often encapsulated in the idiom kasir ğidār al-ṣamt (to break the barrier of silence); in contrast, the authorities’ act of oppression is referred to as an act of silencing.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the peoples of the Arab world have composed, disseminated, and rendered songs and chants against all forms of domestic, foreign, secular, and religious oppression. Musicians, vocalists, urban poets, and rappers all moved people to act in spaces, public and virtual. In music literature, these songs and chants are referred to by different names: al-aġānī al-ṯawrīyaẗ (revolutionary songs), aġānī al-iḥtiğāğ (protest songs), al-aġānī al-multazimaẗ (socially committed songs), and al- aġānī al-waṭanīyaẗ (patriotic songs). With the rise of communist and leftist movements in the Arab world during the 1960s and 1970s, aesthetic judgment was defined by the level of social and political consciousness of music and songs.
The history of independence and protest movements in the Arab world is interlinked with a crackdown on civil liberties and freedom of expression, and is marked by the movement of peoples across regional borders and beyond. Writers on music have commented on the phenomena of protest songs in their home countries as well as the circulation of songs across borders and cross-cultural influences among Arab diasporas in exile, acknowledging the continuous connections between communities at home and elsewhere.
Given the cosmopolitan contexts in which musicians and poets work and perform, the musical and poetic production of non-Arabic-speaking peoples of the region is noteworthy: The Algerian Kabyle vocalist Lounès Matoub (1956–98) singing in Kabyle, youths living abroad rap in European languages, and Moroccan urban poets known as Jil Lklam (Generation of Words) mix the languages and dialects of Amazigh and Arabic, fusing them with expressions in French, English, and Spanish.
The music that carries protest and political themes is as diverse as the dialects and languages present in the Arab world. The patriotic and nationalist songs of the first half of the 20th century draw from the rich repertoire of al-qaṣīdaẗ al-ʽamūdīyaẗ (vertical poetry), fusing with local melodies and European-style orchestration and arrangement. Other songs rely on local dialects and musical sensibilities to appeal to the broader masses. Among the anti-colonial and independence songs, the Tunisian “Tūnis al-yūm brāt mi al-tankīdaẗ” stands out, sung here by legendary Tunisian vocalist Saliha (1914–58).
Tunisian musician Ṣalīḥaẗ performs “Tūnis al-yūm birāt mi al-tankīdaẗ”
The songs of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that offer social and political commentary rely on local folk styles and instruments, as can be observed in the revolutionary songs of the Sabreen group (Palestine) and the revolutionary anthems of the Firqaẗ al-Ṭarīq (Iraq). The songs of Nass el Ghiwane (Morocco) feature elements of rwais, and the rebel songs of Groupe El-Ouali (Mauritania) use the subversive lyrics of Sheikh Imam (1918–95) from Egypt. In the last decades, rock, reggae, rap, hip hop, and other popular genres have served as a source of inspiration for bands such as Mashrou’ Leila (Lebanon), DAM (Palestine), and Cairokee (Egypt), with its aspirational lyrics and rock instrumentation that respond to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. “Ya El Medane” is one song that expressed the aspirations of the youth during the Egyptian revolution.
Cairokee’s “Ya El Medane”
Protest songs in the Arab world are forms of expression that break boundaries, defy expectations, and challenge reality. They hail from the Atlas Mountains to Tangier and Algiers, and find a receptive audience in the banlieues of Paris; chants are heard in Tahrir Square and move protesters in Sana’a, Beirut, and Tunis.
The writings featured in this annotated bibliography present and carefully analyze songs accompanying key political and social events. These include nationalist protest movements that unfolded in the Arab world in the last century, from anti-colonial movements and national movements in the first half of the century to chants that accompanied the revolutions of 2011 and beyond.
– Written and compiled by Farah Zahra, Assistant Editor, RILM
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Select Bibliography
Caubet, Dominique and Amine Hamma. Jil Lklam: Poètes urbains (Casablanca: Éditions du Sirocco; Mohammedia: Senso Unico Éditions, 2016). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-56443; IMA catalogue reference]
The Moroccan music scene that emerged in the mid-1990s has become a crucial part of the overall cultural scene of the country. Rappers, slammers, reggae musicians, creators of metal music and non-music genres such graffiti and break dance have all initiated an urban movement that mixes genres and contributes to a multicultural Morocco. The evolution of discourse emerging from the underground scene to the public sphere is explored, with attention to the lyrics of songs expressing a young generation that is concerned with taboo subjects, cool music, and tough texts. Eloquent, humorous, sensitive, angry, and poetic, this creative and rebellious generation expresses, in multilingual tongues—vernacular, Amazigh, mixed with French, English, and Spanish—its love for its homeland along with its desire for dignity, freedom, and a future. A new generation of artists is revealing, in addition to its eloquence and its extraordinary talent for writing and composition, an unquenching determination to be heard. The generation adapted the American counterculture’s ethos of do-it-yourself and solidarity while using new technology and social media to share its music. Including interviews with experts on the new music scene, a selection of song texts shared in their original language and translated to French, and rich iconography, the book represents a platform for the new generations of artists to be heard and seen, a generation that is the true echo of the youth.
Dridi, Daïkha and Omar Zelig. “La petite musique du voyage au bout de la nuit: Quand la musique se revolte, entre ‘bizness’ et poesie”, La pensée de midi 4 (mai 2001) 65–71. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2001-49702; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: A description and an interpretation of the music scenes in 2001, after ten years of political violence that Algeria witnessed. The aftermath of violence and political stances in music genres and scenes, old and new, is discussed. Local genres such as raï, Kabyle militant, and chaabi triste sorrowful chaabi capture a general spirit of hopelessness, but also of hope. Case studies and performances such as the hip-hop group Intik and the group Ragga-Gnawi are explored, and the performance and the following banning of Baaziz’s “Algérie mon amour” is interpreted against the backdrop of political upheavals in Algeria. Algerian hip hop is a rhythmic, musical, and lyrical rupture from everything that preceded it.
El Mazned, Brahim. “Les rwayss, ou la musique amazighe comme résistance”, Le monde arabe existe-t-il (encore)?, ed. by Chirine El Messiri. Araborama 1 (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe; Seuil, 2020) 190–193. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-71413; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Approaches Amazigh (Berber) music as an expression of cultural, social, and political resistance. Rwayss is a genre that originates in the Sous region, the center of Amazigh culture, and incorporates singing, dance, and a religious ceremony. The setting where rwayss is traditionally performed is described, and new scenes of rwayss in urban spaces in Morocco and in Europe, especially in France and Belgium, are analyzed. Resistance to musical assimilation and the importance of continuity in rwayss and its connection to the past are considered the main expression of resistance that the tradition holds.
El Zein, Rayya. “Resisting ‘resistance’: On political feeling in Arabic rap concerts”, Arab subcultures: Transformations in theory and practice, ed. by Layal Ftouni and Tarik Sabry. Library of modern Middle East studies (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016) 83–112. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-56445; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Explores the ways in which young Arab rap artists navigate the contradictions in the urban and public spheres in everyday life. The discourse of resistance permeating scholarship on rap and hip hop in the Arab world is critiqued and perceived as an expression of neoliberal power. Within the context of the rap scenes in Beirut and Ramallah, political feeling is expressed through objection, confrontation, repetition—a set of processes that hinges on collective action and solidarity rather than individual agency. Interactions, as such, should not be labeled as political but should be approached as subversive in their own terms. Conclusions are based on ethnographic studies conducted in Beirut and Ramallah, where interviews and conversations were conducted and exchanges between artists and audiences were observed.
Houssais, Coline. “En chansons: Florilège musical révolutionnaire”, Il était une fois…: Les révolutions arabes, ed. by Chirine El Messiri. Araborama (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe; Seuil, 2021) 239–248. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-101344; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Provides a selection of songs that marked the history of revolutionary and nationalist songs. Most of them were initially poems later set to music. All the case studies feature a short background on the poet, the performer, and the historical context. Brief background information is then followed by the lyrics in Arabic and a French translation. Among the case studies featured are Min djibalina (From our mountains) by Mohamed Laid Al Khalifa from Algeria, Irdatou al-hayat (The will to live) by Abou el Kacem Chebbi from Tunisia, “Ana Afriqi ana Soudani” by Alsir Gadour from Sudan, Ounadikoum (I call upon you) by the poet Tewfik Ziad from Palestine, and other cases from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria.
Institut du Monde Arabe. Hip Hop: Du Bronx aux rues Arabes [Exposition, Paris, Institut Du Monde Arabe, 28 Avril–26 Juillet 2015], ed. by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz (Gent: Snoeck; Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2015). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-89747; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Issued as part of the exhibition Hip Hop, du Bronx aux Rues Arabes organized by the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2015. The book is divided into three sections: the birth of a movement, a new aesthetic, and rap and society. The editors approach hip hop not simply as a genre but as an aesthetic, a lifestyle in perpetual evolution and a continuous transformation. In the preface, the director of the Institut du Monde Arabe remarks on the recourse of young Arab generations to hip hop as a way to express frustration with current realities and to vocalize their aspirations. Articles by multiple authors covering various topics and aspects of hip hop history and its adaptation by contemporary Arab artists are included.
Massad, Joseph. “Liberating songs: Palestine put to music”, Palestine, Israel, and the politics of popular culture, ed. by Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2005) 175–201. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2005-31981; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Analyzes the role of patriotic, nationalist, and revolutionary songs in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, approaching songs as a register for the changing dynamics of the Palestinian struggle and the various populations and demographics involved in it at different stages of the country’s history. Themes of the songs include the fight for liberation, the dream for Arab unity and solidarity, and the struggle for refugees’ rights. Songs are categorized in three historical phases. The first phase is marked by the growing support for pan-Arabism, the rise of Palestinian guerrillas, and the underground scene in the late 1960s and 1970s. The second phase comprises songs produced by non-Palestinians following the great defeat of 1967. The third phase covers songs that accompanied the first intifada (1987–93). Overall, resistance songs were subject to many transformations throughout the second half of the second century and beyond. Musicians and artists moved away from state-sponsored productions to underground scenes in Palestine and among its displaced population. Nowadays, Palestinian resistance and patriotic songs have reached a wide reception and have become a founding aspect of Arab and Palestinian popular culture.
Mérimée, Pierre and Jacques Denis. Intifada rap. Trans. by Tara Dominguez and Sarah Bouasse(Paris: LO/A Edition, 2014). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2014-95113; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Presents photographs featuring Palestinian rappers, spoken word artists, and musicians, as well as photos of the broader urban spaces in which the alternative and broader Palestinian music scene flourishes. The photographer followed musicians in their everyday lives and captured aspects of their activity. The photographs are occasionally accompanied by brief written commentary and by quotes or lyrics by Palestinian poets and artists and Israeli activists. Hip hop artists featured include Saz (Sameh Zakout), Boikutt (Jad Abbas), Shaana Streett, Mahmoud Jrere of DAM, and members of MWR, WE7, and G-Town. Other non-hip-hop artists featured are Amal Murkus and Said Mourad (founder of Sabreen Band).
République Arabe Sahraouie Democratique. Groupe El- Ouali chants et danses sahraouis: Une culture de résistance (Nouakchott: Ministère de L’information de la République Arabe Sahraouie Démocratique, 1983). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1983-26413; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Surveys the works, repertoire, and style of the Mauritanian music and dance company Groupe El-Ouali, and situates them within the broader landscape of cultural resistance in Mauritania in the 1970s and the liberation movement led by the Front Polisario. Groupe El-Ouali was formed by amateur musicians and militants and performed live concerts and disseminated their music on cassettes. The book covers dance styles such as the war dance Dance de ausred, which was performed during the resistance movement led by the Front Polisario against the Spanish occupation of the Sahara, and La touiza, a women’s dance. The book also includes lyrics of selected songs by Groupe El-Ouali translated into French. The songs express themes of revolution and independence, as well as relationships to the land, national identity, and the values of the nationalist movement.
Shalaby, Nadia A. “A multimodal analysis of selected Cairokee songs of the Egyptian revolution and their representation of women”, Women, culture, and the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution, ed. by Dalia Said Mostafa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2017) 59–81. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-90149; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Analyzes the music videos Ṣawt al-ḥurrīyaẗ (Voice of freedom), Yā al-mīdān (O Tahrir Square), and Iṯbat makānak (Stand your ground) by the Egyptian band Cairokee. The three music videos were released during the year following the breakout of the Egyptian revolution on 25 January 2011, and each reflects the popular mood accompanying the phases of the revolution. The creation and reception of meaning through these music videos is a product of lyrics, music, and other semiotic resources such as visual cues, photographs, camera angles, framing, range of shots, and gaze. The visual design of each music video is discussed to show how multimodal discourse is formed through the employment of various visual, verbal, and musical modes. Finally, the presence and the agency of women in the three music videos are analyzed following the same analytical model.
Skilbeck, Rod. “Mixing pop and politics: The pole of raï in Algerian political discourse”, The Arab-African and Islamic worlds: Interdisciplinary studies, ed. by Kevin R. Lacey and Ralph M. Coury (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000) 289–302. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2000-83623; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Documents the rise of popularity of raï and of kabyle musics among young Algerians at home and among the country’s diasporas, covering the origins and early development of raï in the early 20th century and documenting its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Raï is a hybrid genre that merges Arabic and Bedouin poetry and incorporates local and Western instrumentation. Raï song texts can be categorized in terms of clean raï, which narrates stories of love, and dirty rai, which deals with forbidden sexual desires, alcoholism, and alienation. At the start of the Algerian civil war in 1991 raï became one of its battlefields, and while raï itself was not political, it became political insofar as it represents marginalized social classes through expressions of themes that are deemed taboo or unethical by society or political authorities. During the civil war raï artists were banned, and some were murdered by religious guerrilla groups. One important case study presented is the raï song El harba way? (To flee but where to?) by Cheb Khaled, which became the anthem of protesters during the political crisis of 1988.
Al-Sayyid, ʽUmar. Kalām al-ġīwān (Rabat: Ittiḥād Kuttāb al-Maġrib, 2002). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2002-50214; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: A comprehensive collection of song lyrics by the Moroccan group Nās al-Ġīwān, compiled by one of its members. The preface includes key information about the group and presents a critical take on various commentators’ views on the phenomenon of Nās al-Ġīwān, their musical career, and their popularity in Morocco. Formed in the 1960s, the group accompanied and contributed to the cultural, artistic, and political movement that was unfolding in Morocco. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by a growing popular protest movement that Nās al-Ġīwāne marked with their lyrical and musical contribution. However, one should not reduce the group’s artistic production to a political message. Nās al-Ġīwān merged musical and lyrical elements belonging to four cultures—African, Arab, Amazigh, and Saharan—providing a case study of how to properly reclaim musical and cultural heritage and identity. The concept of a Nās al-Ġīwān dictionary of terms is introduced.
Šalābī, Fawzīyaẗ. Qirāʼāt munāwiʼaẗ (Tripoli: al-Dār al-ʽArabīyaẗ li-al-Kitāb, 1984). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1984-28079; IMA catalogue reference]
Abstract: Approaches political songs from the 1960s through the 1980s as expressions of contemporary Arab consciousness. The difference between the Arab intellectual elites fueling the conscious cultural movement and the Arab masses who follow with little critical take is explored. Political songs that do not give lip service to intellectual elites, but rather engage and express the real suffering of the people, are highlighted, distinguishing between progressive songs (al-aġānī al-taqaddumīyaẗ) of politically and socially engaged people and political songs (al-aġānī al-siyāsīyaẗ) of authoritarian states and the Arab right. Case studies from Morocco (Nās al-Ġīwān), Tunisia (Aṣḥāb al-Kalimaẗ), Iraq (Firqaẗ al-Ṭarīq), and Egypt (al-Šayẖ Imām) are included.
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With a professional career spanning over four decades, Allan was a researcher, teacher, performer, academic officer, and mentor. Directly after receiving a Ph.D. in musicology from New York University in 1971 with the dissertation Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Giulia XIII.27 and the dissemination of the Franco-Netherlandish chanson in Italy, ca. 1460-ca. 1530, he began teaching at Brooklyn College, a post he continued to hold after joining the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center in fall of 1974. He would go on to serve as the Executive Officer for The Graduate Center’s Ph.D.-D.M.A. programs in music for much of his time there. Additionally, in 1998 he founded the Center for the Study of Free-Reed Instruments within the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, which he led until 2014. In 1998, The Graduate Center bestowed on him the title Distinguished Professor of Music. From 1999, he also was editor of The free-reed journal: A publication by the Center for the Study of Free-Reed Instruments.
These accomplishments and responsibilities hardly encapsulate Allan’s range of talents as a scholar and teacher. He was just as generous with his ideas on music, which have been published in many prestigious sources, as he was with his guidance. At The Graduate Center, his Introduction to Music course taught budding musicologists in the music program to gather, organize, and edit research; stay current with trends in the discipline; prepare a critical edition; become familiar with the canon of founding musicologists; and evaluate and analyze historic texts. The course challenged and inspired, and many of his students will still have his patented emails in comic sans etched in their memories.
His knowledge seemed boundless: from Italian Renaissance music, to Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, to the music of Ralph Vaughn Williams, to Requiem Masses in the last 1000 years or so, to the concertina (which he plays), to Robert Moses. And this merely scratches the surface. The bibliography below is a selection of some of Allan’s contributions to music research. However inchoate, it is hoped to inspire further research, archive just a small snippet of his production, and reveal aspects of trends in the discipline.
Allan remains an active scholar and orienting guide (dare we say an “atlas”?) in musicology, who has not yet finished sharing his valuable perspectives. Throughout all the changes in musicology over the years, he was always diligently aware of research trends, as well as the field’s limitations and possibilities. This was partially a result of his close relationship with RILM and its staff. Allan was consistently a strong advocate for RILM throughout his tenure at the Music Department of The Graduate Center, unceasingly arguing for RILM’s significance for global music research within the university administration. Whenever Allan would come to teach classes at The Graduate Center, he would stop by the shelf of publications that had just arrived at the RILM office to learn what was new in musicological research. These moments were opportunities for beneficial conversations about a variety of topics, and we always knew that Allan’s opinions were important. He could be relied upon to train his eagle editorial and musicological eye on RILM’s database when he was using it for his own scholarship, letting us know if he saw areas for improvement, correction, or enhancement.
In more official capacities, Allan served as RILM’s Area Editor for publications on Renaissance music during the 1980s and early 1990s and was a member of both the RILM Commission Mixte (1997-2000) and the Board of Directors (2000-16).
Thank you, and happy birthday, Allan. Here’s to many more.
– Introduction by Michael Lupo, Assistant Editor/Marketing & Media, RILM and Zdravko Blažeković, Executive Editor, RILM. Compiled by Lupo
__________________________________
Atlas, Allan W. “La provenienza del manoscritto Berlin 78.C.28: Firenze o Napoli?”, Rivista italiana di musicologia: Organo della Società Italiana di Musicologia 13/1 (1978) 10–29. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 1978-320]
Abstract: Considers the question of the provenance of the chansonnier Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, MS 78.C.28. Takes issue with Reidemeister’s claim that, on the grounds that it contains the arms of two Florentine families and a miniature which can be associated with a Florentine workshop, the manuscript originated in Florence (see RILM 1975-607). Argues instead that it was compiled at Naples—this on the grounds of its “internal” relationship with other Neapolitan sources—and was only later removed to Florence. Evidence for such a transfer and break in the compilation of the source is supported by certain of its physical features.
_____. “Mimì’s death: Mourning in Puccini and Leoncavallo”, The journal of musicology: A quarterly review of music history, criticism, analysis, and performance practice 14/1 (winter 1996) 52–79. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1996-190]
Abstract: Seeks to answer the following question: Why do people cry at the end of Puccini’s La bohème but not at the end of Leoncavallo’s? Puccini spends the entire opera leading up to the moment where tears can be shed, while Leoncavallo miscalculates—musically and dramatically (he fashioned his own libretto)—at virtually every turn. The issues of voice/person/agent, psychic/aesthetic distance, and pacing/timing just before the final curtain are also discussed.
_____. “Multivalence, ambiguity and non-ambiguity: Puccini and the polemicists”, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 118/1 (1993) 74–93, [1] [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 1993-10663]
Abstract: Takes issue with recent articles that polemically link the idea of multivalency in opera with ambiguity and disjunction, privilege the latter over unity and coherence, and write off large-scale tonal relationships as meaningful vehicles of overall coherence. A more open-minded approach is called for; polemics simply substitute one brand of dogmatic orthodoxy for another. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and La fanciulla del West are analyzed to show that a multivalent approach will uncover instances of both ambiguity and nonambiguity and that the two ideas can coexist. There is in fact a continuum of approaches, each of which has its own contribution to make.
_____. Music at the Aragonese court of Naples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1985-1259]
Abstract: When Alfonso V of Aragon defeated René I of Anjou in 1442 and thereby established the kingdom of Naples as part of that of Aragon, he revived Neapolitan cultural life and made his court one of the leading centers of humanism. A survey of the historical-cultural background precedes discussions of the royal chapel and its musicians, the chapel composers and other musical worthies, secular music, sources, and repertoire. Musicians mentioned include Pietro Oriola, Joan Cornago, Johannes Vincenet, Johannes Tinctoris, Bernard Ycart, Franchino Gaffori, Serafino Dall’Aquila, Fiorenzo De’ Fasoli, Josquin Des Prez, and Alexander Agricola. An edition of musical works representative of the repertoire concludes the volume.
_____., ed. Music in the Classic period: Essays in honor of Barry S. Brook (New York: Pendragon Press, 1985). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1985-664]
_____. “On the reception of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies in New York, 1920/1–2014/15”, The Royal Musical Association research chronicle 47/1 (2016) 24–86. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-37340]
Abstract: Considers the reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies (and a few non-symphonic works) in New York City (and, occasionally, its suburban environs), from the American premiere of on December 30th, 1920 to a performance of symphony no. 6 on December 10th, 2014. The reception rolls out across five distinct periods: (1) 1920/1–1922/3: the New York premieres of A London symphony, A sea symphony, and A pastoral symphony (in that order), all to greetings that were lukewarm at best; (2) 1923/4–1934/5: Vaughan Williams’s reputation grew meteorically, and A London symphony became something of a staple; during this period Olin Downes of The New York times became Vaughan Williams’s most ardent champion among New York’s music critics; (3) 1935/6–1944/5: symphonies 4 and 5 made their New York debuts, and a rift opened between the pro-Vaughan Williams and the negative criticism of the New York herald tribune, one that would follow Vaughan Williams to the grave and beyond; (4) 1945/6–1958/9: premieres of symphonies 6, 8 and 9, as Vaughan Williams’s reputation in New York reached its honors- and awards-filled zenith; and (5) the long period from 1959/60 to the present day, which can be described as 20 years of decline (1960s–1970s), another 20 in which his reputation reached rock bottom (1980s–1990s) and, since the beginning of the new millennium, something of a reassessment, one that is seemingly unencumbered by the ideologically driven criticism of the past. Finally, Appendix I provides a chronological inventory of all New York Philharmonic programs (along with those of the New York Symphony prior to the two orchestras’ merger in 1928) that include any music (not just the symphonies) by Vaughan Williams. Appendix II then reorganizes the information of the chronological list according to work, conductor, venue, and premieres.
_____. “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The house of life: Four levels of cyclic coherence”, Acta musicologica 85/2 (2013) 199–225. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-12048]
Abstract: Explores aspects such as motive, recitative, tonality, and proportion, which develop the coherence of the song cycle by Vaughan Williams setting the poetry of Rossetti.
_____. Renaissance music: Music in Western Europe (1400-1600). Norton introduction to music history (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1998-4334]
Abstract: Renaissance music, a textbook for today’s classroom, focuses first and foremost on the music, then on the social, political, and economic forces that combined to produce it. Readers are immediately drawn into the subject through Professor Atlas’s vivid, energetic writing. Atlas addresses the student directly, in language that is clear and understandable even when it treats complex topics such as isorhythm and hexachords. Renaissance Music is sensibly organized, avoiding the great composer approach. Most chapters are devoted to musical genres; others center on specific geographical areas or on categories such as patronage, music theory, and music printing. Like all the books in Norton’s introduction to music history series, this text includes bibliographies and incorporates the latest scholarship in the field. A Spanish translation is cited as RILM 2002-20881; a French translation is cited as RILM 2011-18309.
_____. The Wheatstone English concertina in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1996-3066]
Abstract: A comprehensive survey of the career of the so-called English concertina from its invention by the English physicist Charles Wheatstone, Jr. in the late 1820s to its use in the early 20th c. by Ives and Grainger. Attention is given to its changing social status (from upper-crust to working-class), art-music repertoire (concertos, sonatas, and character pieces by George Alexander Macfarren, Bernhard Molique, Julius Benedict, John Barnett), virtuoso performers and their works (Giulio Regondi and Richard M. Blagrove), and critical reception. Two chapters explain the concertina’s technical capabilities and certain problems of concertina-specific performance practice. An appendix contains five works for concertina by Joseph Warren, George Alexander Macfarren, Giulio Regondi, Richard M. Blagrove, and John Charles Ward.
_____., ed. Victorian music for the English concertina. Recent researches in the music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Middleton: A-R Editions, 2009). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2009-47579]
Abstract: Developed by the physicist Charles Wheatstone around 1830, the English concertina was extremely popular in art-music circles of Victorian England until late in the 19th century. This edition includes 15 works that present a cross section of the instrument’s concert and salon repertories, and includes music by the “mainstream” composers George Alexander Macfarren, Julius Benedict, and Bernhard Molique, as well as original compositions by such concertina virtuosos as Giulio Regondi and Richard Blagrove. There are also pieces by two little-known women composers and arrangers, Hannah Rampton Binfield and Rosina King (the instrument was particularly popular with women), and an arrangement by George Case of a well-known hymn tune, which shows how the baritone concertina was used in small parish churches. Finally, there are two works for concertina ensembles, a duo for treble and baritone concertina by Blagrove and a transcription by Regondi for concertina quartet of the final movement of Mozart’s Prague symphony.
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista. Salve Regina, ed. by Allan W. Atlas. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: Complete works/Opere complete 15 (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press; Milano: Ricordi, 1994). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1994-15656]
Grand Canyon Native American Heritage Day: NPS photo by Erin Whittaker
November marks National Native American Heritage Month in the United States, honoring the first Americans’ contributions to the establishment and growth of the country. Exhibits and collections, song and dance recordings, visual art and imagery, poetry and storytelling, and teaching materials dedicated to National Native American Heritage are available through the portal https://nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov/.
This bibliography reflects the diverse musical expressions and musical life of Native Americans over nearly three centuries, ranging from engagement with Christianity to cope with Colonial-era displacement, to Navajo heavy metal and Indigenous sound studies in the present. It comprises a wide range of document types, including monographs, collections, journal articles, and sound recordings.
Native Americans are both active and represented in traditional, popular, and classical music; music education; radio; and record production. The ways in which Native American music has been colonized and appropriated may be contrasted with the way in which it has been used by its practitioners as a means of cultural and spiritual agency and survival. Finally, although this bibliography centers on indigeneity in the United States, many of its ideas, traditions, and struggles find parallels in the experiences of Indigenous communities worldwide, and it is hoped that the research below may resonate with the musical-cultural experiences of those groups as well.
Cahill, Cathleen D. “Urban Indians, Native networks, and the creation of modern regional identity in the American Southwest”, American Indian culture and research journal XLII/3 (2018) 71–92. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-95806]
Abstract: The careers and political activism of Native opera singers in the Southwest of the 1920s are explored. A number of talented Native artists recognized that engaging their audiences directly in live performances provided opportunities for public education in addition to their economic benefits. Partnering with regional boosters, they built careers performing in multiple pageants and events sponsored by municipalities across the Southwest. Live performance with its direct access to audiences also facilitated their political agendas of publicizing Indigenous histories. Their careers highlight the mobility of Indigenous people, demonstrating how they helped create modern urban spaces across the American Southwest.
Diamond, Beverley. “Affect, ontology, and indigenous protocol: Encounters in Canada”, Ethnomusicology matters: Influencing social and political realities, ed. by Ursula Hemetek, Hande Sağlam, and Marko Kölbl (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2019) 117–134. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-12878]
Abstract: Ethnomusicologists have, thus far, written extensively about Indigenous ontologies but less about the ways divergent ontologies shape intercultural diplomacy. This article attempts to think through several such spaces of intercultural encounter. It considers how Indigenous protocol plays a role in promoting respectful relations. But it also reflects on situations where a failure to consider the affect of protocol-related performances may be disrespectful and counter-productive. There is a need, then, for intercultural dialogue about the clashes of perspectives, and the affect of performances that surround difficult moments of meetings, when one way of being in the world (i.e., ontology, simply defined) meets another and seems utterly incomprehensible. Sometimes such incommensurability is rooted in language: that song or story are “law” for many Indigenous groups in North America (and elsewhere), for instance, is often a confusing notion for Euroamericans. This formulation is already stimulating action-oriented discussions about access to archives, and appropriations of Indigenous song. At other times, forms of relationality are at stake. For instance, many Indigenous expressive cultures assume kinship with non-humans, spirits, and other life-forms in a broad ecological system that differs fundamentally from, e.g., those who see the earth’s resources as economic investments, or those promoting “creative city” initiatives that see the arts as a vehicle for prosperity while disregarding human relations with other life forms. The affect of performances that assert presence and sovereignty on the one hand or guesthood on another is an important consideration when divergent viewpoints are at issue. In some cases, a focus on “affect” may help to reduce misunderstanding, while in other cases it may encourage respect for the performers who assert their values, understandings, and sovereign rights.
Fox, Aaron A. “Repatriation as reanimation through reciprocity”, The Cambridge history of world music, ed. by Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 522–554. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-17019]
Abstract: Describes the process by which the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music came to be housed at Columbia University, a process that began in 1962. The Boulton Collection’s history includes disputes between the collector and various institutions, and among and within those institutions as well, about the extent and nature of its contents. The collection is an assemblage of sound recordings made or acquired by the mid–20th-century music collector Laura Boulton (1899–1980) in a series of expeditions to dozens of countries over nearly 40 years. This essay examines her work as a particularly vivid example of the ironies inherent in ethnomusicology’s broader racist and colonialist legacy, a legacy embedded in the structure of the broader archive-building mindset upon which the discipline was constructed. Doing so allows us to think critically about that legacy and about how to address it and heal its lingering and still caustic effects on our discipline and its relations with its publics and constituents. Recovering, through repatriation, the cultural and scholarly value of archives like Boulton’s suggests ways to move ethnomusicology forward as an ethical as well as scholarly enterprise, by confronting the moral obligations the discipline has incurred, but not always honored, in the past.
Garrett-Davis, Josh. “American Indian Soundchiefs: Cutting records in Indigenous sonic networks”, Resonance: The journal of sound and culture I/4 (winter 2020) 394–411. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-54119]
Album released by American Indian Soundchiefs
Abstract: American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls Indigenous sonic networks, fields of obligation and responsibility.
Goodman, Glenda. “Joseph Johnson’s lost gamuts: Native hymnody, materials of exchange, and the colonialist archive”, Journal of the Society for American Music XIII/4 (November 2019) 482–507. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-11405]
Abstract: In the winter of 1772–73, Joseph Johnson (Mohegan/Brothertown) copied musical notation into eight books for Christian Native Americans in Farmington, Connecticut, a town established by English settler colonists on the land known as Tunxis Sepus. Johnson did so because, as he wrote in his diary, “The indians are all desireous of haveing Gamuts”. Johnson’s gamuts have not survived, but their erstwhile existence reveals hymnody’s important role within the Native community in Farmington as well as cross-culturally with the English settler colonists. In order to reconstruct the missing music books and assess their sociocultural significance, a surrogate bibliography is proposed, gathering a constellation of sources among which Johnson’s books would have circulated and gained meaning for Native American Christians and English colonists (including other printed and manuscript music, wampum, and legal documents pertaining to land transfer). By bringing together this multi-modal network of materials, redress is sought for the material and epistemological effects of a colonialist archive. On one level, this case study focuses on a short period of time in order to document the impact on sacred music of conversion, literacy, shifting intercultural relations, and a drive to preserve sovereignty. On another, a methodological intervention is presented for dealing with lost materials and colonialist archives without recourse to discourses of recovery or discovery, the latter of which is considered through the framework of archival orientalism.
_____. “Sounds heard, meaning deferred: Music transcription as imperial technology”, Eighteenth-century studies LII/1 (fall 2018) 39–45. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-95884]
Image from A voyage around the world; but more particularly to the north-west coast of America (1789)
Abstract: How notations of the traditional musics of Indigenous peoples by colonists in the 18th century came to be regarded as evidence in the mapping of global trade are examined, focusing on the example of a transcription by William Beresford, published in A voyage round the world; but more particularly to the north-west coast of America (London: Geo. Goulding, 1789). The book, an account of the fur trading voyage of the ship Queen Charlotte in 1786–88 consists almost entirely of material written by Beresford, the ship’s supercargo. Beresford’s transcription of an Indigenous (likely Tlingit) song from Norfolk Sound (now Sitka Sound, Alaska) included a description of the customary pre-trade ceremonies as a guide for future traders. The transcription itself reflects multiple performances, by different groups, as Beresford re-encountered this ceremonial song along the coast; it should be viewed as an invention as much as a documentation.
Gray, Robin. “Repatriation and decolonization: Thoughts on ownership, access, and control”, The Oxford handbook of musical repatriation, ed. by Frank D. Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret D. Woods. Oxford handbooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) 723–737. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-11972]
Abstract: Focuses on the efforts of Ts’msyen from Lax Kw’alaams to repatriate songs and associated knowledge products from the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music. It provides an overview of the sociopolitical context that created the conditions for the songs to be taken from the community, including an analysis of the contributing role of Western property frameworks in the dispossession of Ts’msyen knowledge, heritage, and rights. Based on a community-based participatory action research project with, by, and for Ts’msyen, this chapter offers decolonial considerations on the topics of ownership, access, and control from the vantage of Ts’msyen laws, ethics, and protocols.
Hauptman, Laurence M. “The musical odyssey of Cleo Hewitt, Cattaraugus Seneca, 1889–1987”, New York history C/2 (winter 1999) 246–268. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-32487]
Abstract: Caroline Glennora Cleopatra (Cleo) Hewitt (1889–1987), a Hodinöhsö:ni’ elder, was for four decades a music teacher at the Thomas Indian School and other schools for Native Americans in western New York State, as well as a piano teacher. Hewitt was also a violinist, but was blocked from a performing career due to her race. While Hewitt faced formidable obstacles as a Native American and a woman, her life story both confirms and contradicts the assimilationist narrative of Native boarding schools.
Levine, Victoria Lindsay and Dylan Robinson, eds. Music and modernity among First Peoples of North America. Music/culture (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2019). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-2103]
Abstract: A collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from Canada and the U.S., exploring the intersections between music, modernity, and indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music. The essays coalesce around four main themes: innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange. Closely related topics include cosmopolitanism, hybridity, alliance studies, code-switching, and ontologies of sound.
Moling, Martin. “’Anarchy on the Rez’: The blues, popular culture, and survival in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation blues“, American Indian culture and research journal XL/3 (2016) 1–22. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-56019]
Abstract: The ingenious ways in which Sherman Alexie appropriates the blues as a vessel for Native Americans to creatively express their predicament and a subversive instrument in their struggle to resist colonial cooption are explored. In Reservation blues (1995), Alexie’s writing itself creates a Native American version of the blues that appropriates such blues staples as the AAB stanza, improvisation, and syncopation. The multiple references in the novel to mainstream popular culture are in contrast to the role of the blues, which arguably serves as the music of choice for Alexie’s principal project: the survival of Native America.
Moylan, Katie and Sheila Nanaeto. “‘Indigenous for days’: Indigenous internationalism in Native American music radio”, The global South, XV/2 (spring 2022) 176–192. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-7727].
Abstract: Community building in Indigenous music radio is identified and explored, drawing on music programming examples and practitioner insights from two Indigenous radio stations: KPRI FM (Rez Radio) and KSUT FM. Multifaceted music programming across the two stations embodies the concept of grounded normativity (Coulthard and Betasamosake Simpson) and expands capacities for tribal community building on-air, in turn reinforcing a cultural Indigenous internationalism. In particular, Rez dub reggae and Songs of the Southwest at KPRI and the Tribal radio morning show at KSUT enable and encourage Indigenous community building through place-based practices of music radio production which in turn embody possibilities for Indigenous resurgence (Corntassel).
Perea, John-Carlos. Intertribal Native American music in the United States: Experiencing music, expressing culture. Global music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-52557]
Abstract: Over time many Native American tribes have developed a shared musical culture that is prominently audible on local, national, and international stages. Northern and Southern Plains pow wow practices represent a singular performance encompassing disparate stories and sounds. Traditional sounds, such as pow-wow and Native American flute songs, have developed in tandem with increasingly recognizable forms like Native jazz and rock.
Peters, Gretchen. “Unlocking the songs: Marcie Rendon’s indigenous critique of Frances Densmore’s Native music collecting”, American Indian culture and research journal XXXIX/4 (2015) 79–92. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-89340]
Abstract: Criticisms of the work of Frances Densmore in Marcie Rendon’s play SongCatcher are identified and contextualized within Densmore’s own writings. The integration of physical and spiritual realities, as well as contemporary and historic settings, denies the common assertion that Densmore preserved large repertoires. Numerous musical performances remain intact within their broader context and call into question the value of the isolated and distorted recordings and transcriptions by Densmore. While Densmore’s analytical working method marginalized the Native individual experience and perspective, SongCatcher examines Densmore’s work through its impact on Native individuals and communities in the past and present.
Poirier, Lisa. “Makes me feel glad that I’m not dead: Jim Pepper and music of the Native American Church”, Journal of religion and popular culture XXX/2 (summer 2018) 120–130. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-95883]
Witchi tai to (1974)
Abstract: Jim Pepper’s 1971 jazz hit Witchi tai to is a contact zone in which cultures (Native and non-Native) collide. In the song, Native powwow culture and Native identities are reclaimed and reinterpreted within a jazz idiom. While Native supratribal identities are celebrated within this popular culture artefact, the song retains an opacity that resists absorption and cooptation by non-Natives. Witchi tai to is a song of Native religious reorientation within a context of modernity, and its legacy reverberates in at least two genres of contemporary Native popular music: Native American Church songs and Native American electronic dance music.
Prest, Anita and J. Scott Goble. “Language, music, and revitalizing indigeneity: Effecting cultural restoration and ecological balance via music education”, Philosophy of music education review XXIX/1 (spring 2021) 24–46. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-98113]
Abstract: Challenges are explored in conveying the culturally constructed meanings of local Indigenous musics and the worldviews they manifest to students in K–12 school music classes, when foundational aspects of the English language, historical and current discourse, and English language habits function to thwart the transmission of those meanings. In settler colonial societies in North America, speakers of the dominant English language have historically misrepresented, discredited, and obscured cultural meanings that inhere in local Indigenous musics. Three ways in which the use of English has distorted the cultural meanings of those musics are examined. How historical discourses in English have intentionally undervalued or discredited the values intrinsic to those musics are explained, also describing how some current music education discourse in English might work against the embedding of Indigenous meanings in school music education settings. Additional factors distinguishing Indigenous languages from European languages (especially English) are considered to show how a people’s language habits influence their perception of and thus their relationship with their natural environment. The role of music education in revitalizing local Indigenous languages and musics and advancing the cultural values of their originating communities is considered.
Przybylski, Liz. “Indigenizing the mainstream: Music festivals and indigenous popular music authors”, IASPM@Journal XI/2 (2021) 5–21. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-13635]
Abstract: First Nations, Métis, and Inuit music and dance practices have enacted Indigenous survivance since colonization began. Contemporary Indigenous performers within and beyond present-day Canadian borders continue this performative intervention through popular music, building sonic sovereignty. Rooted in dialogue with Indigenous music industry professionals and musicians, this article draws on ethnographic work with Indigenous music festivals, especially the sākihiwēfestival in Winnipeg, Canada where musicians from many Nations share stages. In response to music industry barriers, Indigenous media professionals created performance spaces for First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and international Indigenous musicians. With the imposition of performance restrictions due to COVID, musicians faced new limitations. On the heels of ongoing political changes, Indigenous music professionals navigated multilayered challenges for the 2020 festival season. As uncertainty continues around music festivals in the future, how decolonial possibilities are shifting around cultural and political change through music festival performance is addressed.
Reed, Trevor. “Sonic sovereignty: Performing Hopi authority in Öngtupqa”, Journal of the Society for American Music XIII/4 (November 2019) 508–530. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-11407]
Abstract: Explores the ways in which territorial authority or sovereignty emerges from within a particular mode of indigenous creativity—the creation and performance of Hopi taatawi (traditional songs)—despite the appropriation of Hopi traditional lands by the American settler-state. Hopi territories within Öngtupqa (Grand Canyon) are just a sample of the many places where indigenous authority, as expressed through sound-based performances, continues to resonate despite the imposition of settler-colonial structures that have either silenced Indigenous performances of authority or severed these places from Indigenous territories. Hopi musical composition and performance are deeply intertwined with Hopi political philosophy and governance, resulting in a form of sovereignty that is inherently sonic rather than strictly literary or textual in nature. Recognizing that this interconnection between territorial authority and sound production is common across many indigenous communities, listening to contemporary indigenous creativity should be considered both as an aesthetic form, and more importantly, as a source of sonic sovereignty.
Robinson, Dylan. Hungry listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies. Indigenous Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-4582]
Abstract: Listening is considered from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. In a critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies”, how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality are evaluated. This involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear” that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine. With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values are examined. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, examples of “doing sovereignty” in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibitions, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence are offered. It is shown how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, a reorientation is demanded toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space.
Samuels, David W. Putting a song on top of it: Expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2004). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2004-16236]
Apacheria – San Carlos, From Nantes Rim: Triplets Peak, Yellowjacket area and Mount Turnbull, San Carlos Apache Reservation (2008)
Abstract: As in many Native American communities, people on the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona have for centuries been exposed to contradictory pressures. One set of expectations is about conversion and modernization—spiritual, linguistic, cultural, technological. Another is about steadfast perseverance in the face of this cultural onslaught. Within this contradictory context lies the question of what validates a sense of Apache identity. For many people on the San Carlos reservation, both the traditional calls of the Mountain Spirits and the hard edge of a country, rock, or reggae song can evoke the feeling of being Apache. Using insights gained from both linguistic and musical practices in the community—as well as from his own experience playing in an Apache country band—the author explores the complex expressive lives of these people to offer new ways of thinking about cultural identity. He analyzes how people on the reservation make productive use of popular culture forms to create and transform contemporary expressions of Apache cultural identity. Some popular songs—such as those by Bob Marley—are reminiscent of history and bring about an alignment of past and present for the Apache listener. Thinking about Geronimo, for instance, might mean one thing, but “putting a song on top of it” results in a richer meaning. He also proposes that the concept of the pun, as both a cultural practice and a means of analysis, helps us understand the ways in which San Carlos Apaches are able to make cultural symbols point in multiple directions at once. Through these punning, layered expressions, people on the reservation express identities that resonate with the complicated social and political history of the Apache community. This richly detailed study challenges essentialist notions of Native American tribal and ethnic identity by revealing the turbulent complexity of everyday life on the reservation. It is a multifaceted exploration of the complexities of sound, of language, and of the process of constructing and articulating identity in the 21st century.
Soltani Stone, Ashkan. Rez metal. DVD (Leomark Studios, 2022). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2022-7725]
Abstract: The remarkable journey of Kyle Felter and the Navajo heavy metal band I Dont Konform is traced, from the band’s early days to the recording of their debut album Sagebrush rejects with Flemming Rasmussen, the Grammy-award winning producer of Metallica, while telling the story of the thriving heavy metal scene on the Navajo reservations. A companion monograph is abstracted as RILM 2020-69069.
Soltani Stone, Ashkan and Natale A. Zappia. Rez metal: Inside the Navajo Nation heavy metal scene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-69069]
Abstract: Bridging communities from disparate corners of Indian Country and across generations, heavy metal has touched a collective nerve on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona in particular. Many cultural leaders—including former Navajo president Russell Begaye—have begun to recognize heavy metal’s ability to inspire Navajo communities facing chronic challenges such as poverty, depression, and addiction. Heavy metal music speaks to the frustrations, fears, trials, and hopes of living in Indian Country. A seminal moment in Indigenous heavy metal occurred when Kyle Felter, lead singer of the Navajo heavy metal band I Dont Konform, sent a demo tape to Flemming Rasmussen, the Grammy Award–winning producer of several Metallica albums. A few months later, Rasmussen, captivated by the music, flew from Denmark to Window Rock, Arizona, to meet the band. Through a series of vivid images and interviews focused on the venues, bands, and fans of the Navajo Nation metal scene, a window is provided into this fascinating world. A companion documentary film is abstracted as RILM 2022-7725.
Veerbeek, Vincent. “A dissonant education: Marching bands and Indigenous musical traditions at Sherman Institute, 1901–1940”, American Indian culture and research journal XLIV/4 (2020) 41–58. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-69045]
Abstract: At the end of the 19th century, the U.S. government established a system of off-reservation boarding schools in an effort to assimilate Indigenous youth into the American nation-state. Music emerged as one of the most enduring strategies that these schools employed to reshape the cultural sensibilities of young Native Americans. A lively music culture could be found, for instance, at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, which was home to a marching band and dozens of other music groups throughout its history. Although school officials created these institutions for the purposes of assimilation and cultural genocide, this music program often had a more ambiguous place in the lives of students. To understand the role of music within Sherman Institute during the early 20th century, the school’s marching band and the place of Indigenous cultural expression are examined. While the school had students march to the beat of civilization, young Native Americans found various strategies to combat assimilation using the same instruments. At the same time, they also used the cultures of their communities to navigate life in an environment that the government created to destroy those very cultures.
Wheeler, Rachel and Sarah Eyerly. “Singing Box 331: Re-sounding eighteenth-century Mohican hymns from the Moravian Archives”, William and Mary quarterly LXXVI/4 (October 2019) 649–696. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-32488]
Abstract: A single Mohican-language hymn verse, Jesu paschgon kia, from the Moravian Mission collection at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is the focus of a collaboration between a historian, a musicologist, members of Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, a scholar in linguistics, recording professionals, and students, as well as with the professional Mohican musician Bill Miller and the composer Brent Michael Davids. Applying what might be called a nanohistorical approach to the verse’s four lines of text, the history of the creation of Mohican-language hymns is traced at a number of different communities affiliated with the Moravian Church in New York and Pennsylvania in the mid-18th century. Building upon this historical research, Jesu paschgon kia is rendered as a living, multidimensional sounded text by creating three recordings, each of which highlights very different aspects of the collaborative work. These musical renderings of the verse stand as aural shorthand for the diverse meanings and interpretations of historical sources generated by varied relationships with and perspectives on those sources, speaking to recent calls for methodological innovation in the fields of history, musicology, and Native American and Indigenous studies.
Wigginton, Caroline. “Hymncraft: Joseph Johnson, Thomas Commuck, and the composition of song and community from the Native North American Northeast to Brothertown”, NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association VIII/1 (spring 2021) 19–55. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-10146]
Abstract: Hymncraft is the composition of a material text with songs of praise and veneration for the sacred relationships between communities, place, and beings, human and nonhuman. For Mohegan Joseph Johnson in the 1770s and Brothertown Narragansett Thomas Commuck in the 1840s, hymncraft was an instrument for choreographing new visions of community in order to counter colonization’s destructive fragmentation of their peoples and homelands in the North American Northeast. Their intergenerational tale begins with Johnson’s creation of now-lost manuscript music instruction books he called gamuts and continues with Commuck’s publication of his tunebook Indian melodies 70 years later. Their hymncraft extends and adapts their region’s multicentury custom whereby craft combines with sacred song to forge, arrange, and maintain relations among peoples. Rebinding communities first through scribal publication and then through print, they produced objects with diplomatic valences that enfold ancient and new technologies to serve their people’s pasts, presents, and futures.
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California State University, Fullerton Photos: Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month Celebration 2019
As the largest minority in the United States, the Latino/a/x population has spawned a diverse array of cultural and musical expressions, many of which have impacted American popular culture. From the Latino/a/x groups historically affected by border expansions, to today’s immigrants, these communities express their experiences, political struggles, and lives in oral traditions, music, dance, and sound.
This bibliography reflects the diversity of musical and dance expressions of these communities. Beyond the dominant sonic imaginaries towards mariachi music, or the ideas of correspondence between geographic region and musical style, the selected texts reflect a complex reading of how cultural practices challenge ideas on race, gender, sexuality, experiences of dislocation, belonging, and identity. This bibliography references practices on the Mexican-American border region, the Appalachian region, Puerto Rico, and New York, and spans multiple genres, from son jarocho and salsa, to Latin jazz and reggaetón.
Written and compiled by Beatriz Goubert, Editor and Product Development Coordinator, RILM
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Alvarado, Lorena and Frances R. Aparicio. “Dissonant love: Music in Latina/o diaspora weddings”, Music in the American diasporic wedding, ed. by Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019) 70–86. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-5492]
Abstract: Deploying Deborah Vargas’s critical concept of dissonance as a disruption of the heteronormative and cultural nationalist limits, this essay examines the heterogeneous musical repertoires featured in U.S. Latina/o weddings that trouble or “disrupt” the dominant sonic imaginaries—the Mexican mariachi—that conflate national identity with musical traditions. Tracing the musical repertoires in U.S. Latino weddings, the essay juxtaposes a survey conducted by the authors with 11 couples and four Latino grooms and their own readings of weddings in films (including the Latino film Mi familia [My family]), novels, and poetry. In order to weave a broad picture of music in Latino weddings, the essay weaves textual and ethnographic approaches as an intervention that can only begin to suggest new ways of thinking about the social meanings of musical repertoires in these weddings. Tensions between tradition and modernity, between national and global sounds, generation-informed musical taste and predilections, and gendered norms, surfaced in the film and literary texts studied as well as in the surveys completed by young Latina/o couples.
Chávez, Xóchitl Consuelo. “La creación de Oaxacalifornia mediante tradiciones culturales entre jóvenes oaxaqueños de Los Ángeles, California”, Desacatos Revista de Ciencias Sociales 62 (enero–abril 2020) 172–181. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-69173]
Guelaguetza Festival 2019
Abstract: The Guelaguetza and the philharmonic bands are community practices of the Oaxacan migrant communities in the United States—from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles—and in the places of origin in Oaxaca, Mexico. These cultural productions cross the border between Mexico and the United States and survive in the region called Oaxacalifornia. As part of the traditions and forms of cultural expression, music and dance help to recover a community identity, despite economic instability and political conflict, and overcome the difficult processes of transnational migration. Oaxacalifornia is a microcosm, a migration route of human bodies, ideas, languages, and identities. Young people create a bicultural identity that claims and constitutes their indigenous cultural citizenship in Oaxaca and California.
Colón Montijo, César. “Carimbo: Raza, farmacolonialidad y conjuro en la espectropolítica salsera de Ismael ‘Maelo’ Rivera”, Del archivo a la playlist: Historias, nostalgias, tecnologías, ed. by Darío Tejeda (http://iaspmal.com/index.php/2021/07/07/del-archivo-a-la-playlist-actas/, 2021) 286–292. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-5920]
Abstract: The song Carimbo, by Afro-Puerto Rican singer Ismael “Maelo” Rivera, tells the story of Carimbo, an enslaved man who talks to the sonero about the infamous mark that slavery left on his voice. Carimbo’s spectral voice can be thought in relation to the precarious contemporaneity of the 1970s in which Maelo recorded it. Maelo’s Carimbo is not only the subject of the times of slavery, he is also that contemporary subject who struggles with the infamous mark of pharmacolonial violence. The incantation that Carimbo and Maelo vocalize as a survival tactic allows us to rethink the concatenation of their voices as an entry point to theorize a spectropolitics of listening. The incantation tells us much about the politics of life and death in contemporary Puerto Rico.
Enriquez, Sophia M. “‘Penned against the wall’: Migration narratives, cultural resonances, and Latinx experiences in Appalachian music”, Journal of popular music studies 32/2 (June 2020) 63–76. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-14803]
Che Apalache performing at The Crying Wolf in Nashville, 12 September 2019
Abstract: Although the Appalachian region has long been associated with white racial identity, Latinx people remain the region’s largest and fastest-growing minority. What perspectives and experiences are revealed when such narratives of whiteness are challenged by the visibility of Latinx migrants? What does music tell us about ongoing discourses of migration and border-crossings? This essay analyzes Latinx immigration narratives in Appalachian music and offers the possibility of a Latinx-Appalachian musical and cultural resonances. I take up the music of artists who claim hybrid Latinx-Appalachian cultural and musical identities. Namely, this essay focuses on Che Apalache—a four-piece band based in Buenos Aires that plays Latingrass—and the Lua Project—a five-piece band based in Charlottesville, Virginia, that plays Mexilachian music. Using field recordings and ethnographic interviews with both groups, this essay analyzes references to U.S.-Mexico border politics, acts of border crossing, and Latin American-Appalachian geographic similarities. I engage U.S.-based Latinx studies and Appalachian studies to establish relationships of Appalachian and Latinx cultures and incorporate analyses of both Spanish and English lyrics. Ultimately, this essay suggests that listening for Latinx migration narratives in Appalachian music challenges assumptions of belonging in the shifting U.S. cultural landscape.
Fernández L’Hoeste, Héctor and Pablo Vila, eds. Sound, image, and national imaginary in the construction of Latin/o American identities. Music, culture, and identity in Latin America (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-64488]
Abstract: Addresses a gap in the many narratives discussing the cultural histories of Latin American nations, particularly in terms of the birth, configuration, and perpetuation of national identities. It argues that these processes were not as gradual or constrained as traditionally conceived. The actual circumstances dictating the adoption of particular technologies for the representation of national ideas shifted and varied according to many factors including local circumstances, political singularities, economic disparities, and highly individualized cultural transitions. This book proposes a model of chronology that is valid not only for nations that underwent strong processes of nationalism during the early or mid-20th century, but also for those that experienced highly idiosyncratic cultural, economic, and political development into the early 21st century.
Hernández-León, Rubén. “How did son jarocho become a music for the immigrant rights movement?”, Ethnic and racial studies 42/2 (2019) 975–993. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-25678]
Abstract: Chicana/o activists and artists in Greater Los Angeles have turned son jarocho, a traditional music genre from southeastern Mexico, into an organizing resource and a means to express the plight of immigrants. Building on a movement that started in Mexico to reestablish the communal celebration of the fandango as the center of the son jarocho tradition, these Chicana/o activists have reinterpreted fandangos as the enactment of community. They have also repurposed son jarocho and its lyrical content to articulate demands for the rights of undocumented immigrants and other social justice causes. These endeavors take place in community and cultural centers founded and led by a mix of immigrant generations: veterans of the Chicana/o civil rights movement of the 1970s, first generation immigrants and their adult children and grandchildren. These actors embrace fandangos as a metaphor and blueprint for community participation as they write new lyrics to demand justice for immigrants.
Loza, Steven, ed. Barrio harmonics: Essays on Chicano/Latino music (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center press, 2019). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-14233]
Abstract: Explores Chicano, Mexican, and Cuban musical forms and styles and their transformation in the United States. Employing musical, historical, and sociocultural analyses, Loza addresses issues such as marginality, identity, intercultural conflict and aesthetics, reinterpretation, postnationalism, and mestizaje—the mixing of race and culture—in the production and reception of Chicano/Latino music.
Miller, Sue. “Pacheco and charanga: Imitation, innovation, and cultural appropriation in the típico tradition of New York City”, Latin American music review/Revista de música latinoamericana 41/1 (spring–summer 2020) 1–26. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-2944]
Abstract: Explores the performance practice and aesthetics of Cuban dance music in the U.S. in relation to the concept of sabor. This multifaceted term encompasses a range of meanings and includes, among other elements, a dance imperative, melodic call-and-response-style inspiraciones, and a clave feel. A case study of Dominican-born Johnny Pacheco, a charanga flute player and the cocreator of the term salsa, allows for exploration of a specific New York-based sabor as well as consideration of issues such as imitation, innovation, and cultural appropriation in the context of charanga típica performance in mid-20th-century New York. Pacheco’s musical contributions, critiqued by Juan Flores as “traditionalist” and by John Storm Roberts as “revivalist”, have often been overshadowed by his considerable entrepreneurial activities. Rather than examine his work as a record producer and entrepreneur, Pacheco’s earlier recordings made as a charanga flute improviser are examined to demonstrate that, pace Roberts and Flores, his improvisational style illustrates a particular New York performance aesthetic rooted in clave aesthetics and the rich musical culture of the Bronx—an aesthetic that is related to, but distinct from, that of earlier Cuban role models.
Power-Sotomayor, Jade. “Moving borders and dancing in place: Son jarocho’s speaking bodies at the Fandango Fronterizo”, TDR: The drama review 64/4 (winter 2020) 84–107 [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-12392]
Fandango Fronterizo Community logo
Abstract: The annual Fandango Fronterizo is a binational performance gathering where the U.S.-Mexico border meets the ocean. Fandanguerxs, gathering on both sides of the border wall in Tijuana and San Diego, enact a performative, political gesture that interrupts the discursive racialized and gendered logic of the two nation-states, refusing to be eternally desterrados by the violence of the border.
Ramos-Kittrell, Jesús A., ed. Decentering the nation: Music, mexicanidad, and globalization. Music, culture, and identity in Latin America (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-8323]
Abstract: Decentering the nation: Music, mexicanidad, and globalization considers how neoliberal capitalism has upset the symbolic economy of “Mexican” cultural discourse, and how this phenomenon touches on a broader crisis of representation affecting the nation-state in globalization. This book argues that, while mexicanidad emerged in the early 20th century as a cultural trope about national origins, culture, and history, it was, nonetheless, a trope steeped in otherization and used by nation-states (Mexico and the United States) to legitimize narratives of cultural and socioeconomic development stemming out of nationalist political projects that are now under strain. Using music as a phenomenological platform of inquiry, contributors to this book focus on a critique of mexicanidad in terms of the cultural processes through which people contest ideas about race, gender, and sexuality; reframe ideas of memory, history, and belonging; and negotiate the experiences of dislocation that affect them. The volume urges readers to find points of resonance in its chapters, and thus, interrogate the asymmetrical ways in which power traverses their own historical experience. In light of the crisis in representation that currently affects the nation-state as a political unit in globalization, such resonance is critical to make culture an arena of social collusion, where alliances can restore the fiber of civil society and contest the pressures that have made disenfranchisement one of the most alarming features characterizing the complex relationships between the state and the neoliberal corporate system that seeks to regulate it. Scholars of history, international relations, cultural anthropology, Latin American studies, queer and gender studies, music, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.
Rivera-Rideau, Petra R. and Jericko Torres-Leschnik. “The colors and flavors of my Puerto Rico: Mapping Despacito‘s crossovers”, Journal of popular music studies 31/1 (March 2019) 87–108. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-3436]
Street art in La Perla, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico
Abstract: Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s song Despacito shattered records to become one of the most successful Spanish-language songs in U.S. pop music history. Declared 2017’s Song of the Summer, the remix version featuring Justin Bieber prompted discussions about the racial dynamics of crossover for Latin music and Latina/o artists. However, little attention was paid to the ways that the song’s success in the Latin music market demonstrated similar racial dynamics within Latin music, especially in the song’s engagement with reggaetón, a genre originally associated with Black and working-class communities. This paper examines the racial politics that surround the success of Despacito in both the Latin mainstream and the U.S. mainstream. We argue that Despacito reinforces stereotypes of blackness in the Latin mainstream in ways that facilitate reggaetón’s crossover. In turn, Fonsi himself becomes attributed with similar stereotypes, especially around hypersexuality, that represent him as a tropical Latina/o racialized other in the United States. Through close readings of media coverage of Despacito alongside the song’s music video, we argue that it is critical to look at its success in both the Latin mainstream and the U.S. mainstream in order to examine the complex and contradictory process of crossing over.
Ruiz Vega, Omar. “Representando al caserío: Narcocultura y el diario vivir en los videos musicales de reggaetón”, Latin American music review/Revista de música latinoamericana 39/2 (fall–winter 2018) 229–265. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-44684]
Abstract: Reggaetón music videos frequently portray representations of narco culture and Puerto Rican marginalized communities. Existing literature explains these representations as an expressive vehicle that reflects the life and problems in the barrios and housing projects. However, the analysis of 14 reggaetón music videos provides a critical perspective of the narco-related messages. Reggaetón’s narco references help strengthening the stereotypes prevailing in Puerto Rican society toward marginalized communities, promoting a problematic identity through narco-aesthetics messages.
Sánchez Rivera, Rachell. “Reggaetón, trap y masculinidades: Dinámicas sociales al ritmo del perreo combativo en Puerto Rico”, Taller de letras número especial (2020) 42–55. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-64456]
Abstract: Examines the Puertorican reggaetón imagination based on the perreo combativo, a combative reggaetón dance that was part of the 2019 social protest against Governor Ricky Rosselló. The analysis of the intersections between gender, race, class, and identity overcome the unitary view of Puertorican identity embedded in machismo.
Schreil, Cristina. “Eunice Aparicio: Slow and steady”, Acoustic guitar 28/4:298 (October 2017) 48–49. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-55454]
The Women Taking on the Macho World of Mariachi: Posted by Great Big Story, 2016
Abstract: Flor de Toloache’s guitarist, Eunice Aparicio, shares her mariachi playing tips. Formed in 2008, the Latin Grammy winning Flor de Toloache are New York City’s first all-female mariachi group. Today its members hail from diverse locales such as Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Australia, Italy, Germany, and the U.S.
Washburne, Christopher. Latin jazz: The other jazz. Currents in Latin American and Iberian music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2020-10628]
Abstract: Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, this book corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre’s international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
Williamson, Emily J. “Reclaiming the tarima and remaking spaces: Examining women’s leadership in the son jarocho community of New York City”, Transatlantic malagueñas and zapateados in music, song and dance: Spaniards, natives, Africans, Roma, ed. by K. Meira Goldberg, Walter Aaron Clark, and Antoni Pizà (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) 406–413. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-6519]
Abstract: If the tarima is the corazón of the fandango, is the zapateado its heartbeat? Then, is the bailadora the life that flows through this heart? The tarima and zapateado are often described in romantic and powerful metaphors. However, few scholars have examined women’s relationship to the performance and practice of son jarocho. In this paper, I build upon Martha González’s theory of “rhythmic intention,” and argue that women in the recently formed Mexican fandango revival or “jaranero” community across the five boroughs of New York City are not only moving and executing sounds of zapateado on the tarima with rhythmic purpose, but also outside of the fandango. The jaraneras of New York City are creating distinctly feminine spaces for music as well as leadership. Their leadership is present in their organizational work that maintains and cultivates the son jarocho community and in their musical practices—at fandangos, in professional stage performances, and in music workshops. This paper presentation will provide ethnographic examples that demonstrate the ways in which women are making and articulating space for jaraneras by sounding their fandango-centered practice on and off of the tarima.
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“Rejoice in what you learn, and spray it.” – Tim Minchin
The multifarious methods used to communicate, transmit, and preserve musical knowledge reflect the diversity of this knowledge and the assumptions that lie behind what constitutes it. Students around the world learn about music in a wide range of settings—on stage, in the classroom, one-on-one with a specialist, and through personal reflection and rehearsing, to name only some examples. Music pedagogy, whether practiced within or outside of formalized institutions of learning, is a vibrant and important field of study. Those who teach pass on traditions, provide opportunities for economic advancement, exercise neurological pathways, and even instill ethical values on communities large and small. With music teachers and students in mind, and in recognition of the value of book reviews, this installment of our Instant Classics series highlights RILM’s eight most reviewed music pedagogy texts from 2016 to 2019. Although merely a snapshot of a moment in a dynamic publication environment, it is one worth taking.
And as always, an important reminder: We need your help! RILM always welcomes your reviews or reviews of your publications. Notice an omission? Help us fill in our gaps by submitting your review.
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#8. Campbell, Patricia Shehan. Music, education, and diversity: Bridging cultures and communities. Multicultural education series (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-685]
Abstract: Music is a powerful means for educating citizens in a multicultural society and meeting many challenges shared by teachers across all subjects and grade levels. By celebrating heritage and promoting intercultural understandings, music can break down barriers among various ethnic, racial, cultural, and language groups within elementary and secondary schools. This book provides important insights for educators in music, the arts, and other subjects on the role that music can play in the curriculum as a powerful bridge to cultural understanding. The author documents key ideas and practices that have influenced current music education, particularly through efforts of ethnomusicologists in collaboration with educators, and examines some of the promises and pitfalls in shaping multicultural education through music. The text highlights World Music Pedagogy as a gateway to studying other cultures as well as the importance of including local music and musicians in the classroom. It chronicles the historical movements and contemporary issues that relate to music education, ethnomusicology, and cultural diversity; offers recommendations for the integration of music into specific classes, as well as throughout school culture; examines performance, composition, and listening analysis of art (folk/traditional and popular) as avenues for understanding local and global communities; and documents music’s potential to advance dimensions of multicultural education, such as the knowledge-construction process, prejudice reduction, and an equity pedagogy.
#7. Abrahams, Frank and Paul D. Head, eds. The Oxford handbook of choral pedagogy. Oxford handbooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-925]
Abstract: Explores varied perspectives on teaching, learning, and performing choral music. Authors are academic scholars and researchers as well as active choral conductors. Topics include music programming and the selection of repertoire; the exploration of singer and conductor identity; choral traditions in North America, Western Europe, South America, and Africa; and the challenges conductors meet as they work with varied populations of singers. Chapters consider children’s choirs, world music choirs, adult community choirs, gospel choirs, jazz choirs, professional choruses, collegiate glee clubs, and choirs that meet the needs of marginalized singers. Those who contributed chapters discuss a variety of theoretical frameworks including critical pedagogy, constructivism, singer and conductor agency and identity, and the influences of popular media on the choral art. The text is not a how-to book. While it may be appropriate in various academic courses, the intention is not to explain how to conduct or to organize a choral program. While there is specific information about vocal development and vocal health, it is not a text on voice science. Instead, the editors and contributing authors intend that the collection serve as a resource to inform, provoke, and evoke discourse and dialogue concerning the complexity of pedagogy in the domain of the choral art.
#6. Ódena Caballol, Óscar. Musical creativity revisited: Educational foundations, practices and research. SEMPRE studies in the psychology of music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-4287]
Abstract: How is creativity understood and facilitated across music education settings? What is the power of creativity in enhancing individual and group learning? How is musical creativity used as a tool for cross-community integration? How can we research the interactions of those engaged in musical activities aimed at creative development? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book, which includes insights from theory, practice-based research, and methodological analyses. Its chapters celebrate the diversity of the many different ways in which young and adult learners develop musical creativity. Following on from the volume cited as RILM 2012-8068, the author offers novel examples from practice and precise suggestions on how to research it. Chapters are organized into three sections: Foundations, Practices, and Research. They include examples from in-depth studies focused on a secondary school in England, higher music education in Spain, and out-of-school settings in Northern Ireland.
#5. Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. Globalizing music education: A framework. Counterpoints: Music and education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-2953]
Abstract: How do globalization and internationalization impact music education around the world? By acknowledging different cultural values and priorities, the author’s vision challenges the current state of international music education and higher education, which has been dominated by English-language scholarship. Her framework uses an interdisciplinary approach and emphasizes the need for developing a pluralistic mode of thinking, while underlining shared foundations and goals. She explores issues of educational transfer, differences in academic discourses worldwide, and the concept of the global mindset to help facilitate much-needed transformations in global music education. This thinking and research, she argues, provides a means for better understanding global transfers of knowledge and ways to avoid culturally and linguistically hegemonic standards.
#4. Downing, Sonja Lynn. Gamelan girls: Gender, childhood, and politics in Balinese music ensembles. New perspectives on gender in music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-10637]
Abstract: In recent years, girls’ and mixed-gender ensembles have challenged the tradition of male-dominated gamelan performance. The change heralds a fundamental shift in how Balinese think about gender roles and the gender behavior taught in children’s music education. It also makes visible a national reorganization of the arts taking place within debates over issues like women’s rights and cultural preservation. The author draws on over a decade of immersive ethnographic work to analyze the ways Balinese musical practices have influenced the processes behind these dramatic changes. Girls and young women assert their agency within the gamelan learning process to challenge entrenched notions of performance and gender. One dramatic result is the creation of new combinations of femininity, musicality, and Balinese identity that resist messages about gendered behavior from the Indonesian nation-state and beyond. Such experimentation expands the accepted gender aesthetics of gamelan performance but also sparks new understanding of the role children can and do play in ongoing debates about identity and power.
#3. Wallbaum, Christopher, ed. Comparing international music lessons on video. Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig: Schriften 14 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-58022]
Abstract: Video-recorded music lessons (on multi-angle DVDs) were used to inspire and improve understanding among experts from different cultures and discourses of music education. To make the process manageable and focused, we developed the Analytical Short Film (2–3 minutes) to address particular areas of interest and starting points for debate. We asked selected music teachers from seven nation-states to allow a typical and (in their opinion) good lesson to be recorded. We also asked the students and their parents for permission. At a symposium, held at Leipzig’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy in September 2014, national experts and researchers presented views on their lessons through Analytical Short Films. Discussion followed which included implicit and explicit comparisons. Each presenter also used a lesson from one of the other countries to stimulate discussion about assumptions in and challenges to their own views. We documented all comparisons made and compared these to derive cross-cultural categories. These categories should be relevant for understanding what makes a music lesson “good”. The different perspectives and discussions offered by the authors in this book—together with ten DVDs, interviews with the teachers and students, and associated research—provide rich and diverse material for researchers, teachers, and teacher educators. A related article is abstracted as RILM 2015-83222.
#2. Cook, Nicholas. Music as creative practice. Studies in musical performance as creative practice 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-2373]
Abstract: Until recently, ideas of creativity in music revolved around composers in garrets and the lone genius. But the last decade has witnessed a sea change: musical creativity is now overwhelmingly thought of in terms of collaboration and real-time performance. This book synthesizes both perspectives. It begins by developing the idea that creativity arises out of social interaction—of which making music together is perhaps the clearest possible illustration—and then shows how the same thinking can be applied to the ostensibly solitary practices of composition. The book also emphasizes the contextual dimensions of musical creativity, ranging from the prodigy phenomenon, long-term collaborative relationships within and beyond the family, and creative learning, to the copyright system that is supposed to incentivize creativity. This book encompasses the classical tradition, jazz, and popular music, and music emerges as an arena in which changing concepts of creativity—from the old myths about genius to present-day sociocultural theory—can be traced with particular clarity. The perspective of creativity tells us much about music, but the reverse is also true, and this book offers an approach to musical creativity that is attuned to the practices of both music and everyday life.
#1. Allsup, Randall Everett. Remixing the classroom: Toward an open philosophy of music education.Counterpoints: Music and education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-3531]
Abstract: Provides alternatives for the traditional master-apprentice teaching model that has characterized music education. By providing examples across the arts and humanities, the author promotes a vision of education that is open, changing, and adventurous at heart. He contends that the imperative of growth at the core of all teaching and learning relationships is made richer, though less certain, when it is fused with a student’s self-initiated quest. In this way, the formal study of music turns from an education in teacher-directed craft and moves into much larger and more complicated fields of exploration. The author advocates for an open, quest-driven teaching model that has repercussions for music education and the humanities more generally.
Comments Off on Instant Classics: RILM’s Top 8 most reviewed music pedagogy texts, 2016-19
Reviews serve many valuable functions in music scholarship, from sparking critical discourse, to revealing topics of interest at a particular historical moment, to providing summaries and assessments for further inquiries, to shining a light on superlative (or, in some cases, substandard) research. Reviews collect and constitute interpretive communities, which arguably play a role in constructing the very meaning of a text.
In recognition of the importance of reviews, RILM inaugurates its Instant Classics series—a collection of the ten most-reviewed monographs indexed in the extensive international holdings of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. The current list of books spans the two-year period from 2017 to 2019 and is ordered from least to most reviewed. Since it takes some time for texts to be assessed and reviews to be released, going back a few years provides a fuller and more accurate picture of a book in review.
This list is inherently limited, dynamic, and subject to continuous revision as more reviews potentially accrue for these and other texts. What we offer here is merely an inchoate snapshot, one that reflects the biases and areas of interest in music research at a specific time and place in history. With that in mind, it is also more than simply another “Top Ten” list, as it may hold a degree of historiographic value.
And finally, an important reminder: We need your help! RILM always welcomes your reviews or reviews of your publications. Notice an omission? Help us fill in our gaps by submitting your review.
– Compiled and edited by Michael Lupo, Assistant Editor and Marketing Coordinator, RILM
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#10. Wheeler, Barbara L., Donna W. Polen, and Carol L. Shultis. Clinical training guide for the student music therapist (2nd ed., rev.; Dallas: Barcelona, 2017). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-43779]
Abstract: Covers planning, assessment, goals and objectives, improvisation, composing, listening, individual and group work, documentation, and self-assessment.
#9. Borge, Jason R. Tropical riffs: Latin America and the politics of jazz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-1970]
Abstract: This book traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-20th century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals—who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own—the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian anti-jazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina, jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Dámaso Pérez Prado challenged the United States’s monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, this book elucidates how the art form was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.
#8. Chua, Daniel K.L. Beethoven & freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-28046]
Abstract: Over the last two centuries, Beethoven’s music has been synonymous with the idea of freedom, in particular a freedom embodied in the heroic figure of Prometheus. This image arises from a relatively small circle of heroic works from the composer’s middle period, most notably the Eroica symphony. However, the freedom associated with the Promethean hero has also come under considerable critique by philosophers, theologians, and political theorists; its promise of autonomy easily inverts into various forms of authoritarianism, and the sovereign will it champions is not merely a liberating force but a discriminatory one. Beethoven’s freedom, then, appears to be increasingly problematic; yet his music is still employed today to mark political events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the attacks of 9/11. Even more problematic, perhaps, is the fact that this freedom has shaped the reception of Beethoven’s music to such an extent that we forget that there is another kind of music in his oeuvre that is not heroic, a music that opens the possibility of a freedom yet to be articulated or defined. By exploring the musical philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno through a wide range of the composer’s music, this book arrives at a markedly different vision of freedom. The author suggests that a more human and fragile concept of freedom can be found in the music that has less to do with the autonomy of the will and its stoical corollary than with questions of human relation, donation, and a yielding to radical alterity. This work makes a major and controversial statement by challenging the current image of Beethoven, and by suggesting an alterior freedom that can speak ethically to the 21st century.
#7. Talle, Andrew. Beyond Bach: Music and everyday life in the eighteenth century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-24136]
Abstract: Reverence for J.S. Bach’s music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, the book takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach’s Germany. The author focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. Ranging through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, he brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals—amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners—inhabited a lost world, and this book teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, the author’s nuanced recreation of keyboard playing’s social milieu illuminates the era’s reception of Bach’s immortal works. An excerpt is abstracted as RILM 2018-7846.
#6. Watt, Paul. Ernest Newman: A critical biography. Music in Britain, 1600–2000 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-24973]
Abstract: Ernest Newman (1868–1959) left an indelible mark on British musical criticism in a career spanning more than 70 years. His magisterial (a reprint of which is cited as RILM 1976-2951), published in four volumes between 1933 and 1946, is regarded as his crowning achievement, but Newman wrote many other influential books and essays on a variety of subjects ranging from early music to Schoenberg. In this book, the geneses of Newman’s major publications are examined in the context of prevailing intellectual trends in history, criticism, and biography. Newman’s career as a writer is traced across a wide range of subjects including English and French literature; evolutionary theory and biographical method; and French, German, and Russian music. Underpinning many of these works is Newman’s preoccupation with rationalism and historical method. By examining particular sets of writings such as composer-biographies and essays from leading newspapers such as the and the Manchester guardian and the Sunday times, this book illustrates the ways in which Newman’s work was grounded in late–19th-century intellectual paradigms that made him a unique and at times controversial figure.
#5. García, David F. Listening for Africa: Freedom, modernity, and the logic of Black music’s African origins (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-38670]
Abstract: Explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of Black music and dance’s African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. The author examines the work of figures ranging from Melville J. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora to Duke Ellington, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and others who believed that linking Black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernity’s promises of freedom in the face of fascism and racism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the nuclear threat at the start of the Cold War. In analyzing their work, the author traces how such attempts to link Black music and dance to Africa unintentionally reinforced the binary relationships between the West and Africa, white and black, the modern and the primitive, science and magic, and rural and urban. Counter to the movement’s goals, it was modernity’s determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth, that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.
#4. Tunbridge, Laura. Singing in the age of anxiety: Lieder performances in New York and London between the World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-4190]
Abstract: In New York and London during World War I, the performance of lieder was roundly prohibited, representing as they did the music and language of the enemy. But as German musicians returned to the transatlantic circuit in the 1920s, so too did the lieder of Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss. Lieder were encountered in a variety of venues and media—at luxury hotels and on ocean liners, in vaudeville productions and at Carnegie Hall, and on gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and films. The renewed vitality of this refugee musical form between the World Wars is examined here, offering a fresh perspective on a period that was pervaded by anxieties of displacement. Through richly varied case studies, it traces how lieder were circulated, presented, and consumed in metropolitan contexts, shedding new light on how music facilitated unlikely crossings of nationalist and internationalist ideologies during the interwar period.
#3. Eidsheim, Nina Sun. The race of sound: Listening, timbre, and vocality in African American music. Refiguring American music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-7187]
Abstract: Traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. The author illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. The author examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as the vocal synthesis technology Vocaloid to show how listeners carry a series of assumptions about the nature of the voice and to whom it belongs. Outlining how the voice is linked to ideas of racial essentialism and authenticity, the author untangles the relationship between race, gender, vocal technique, and timbre while addressing an under-theorized space of racial and ethnic performance. In so doing, she advances our knowledge of the cultural-historical formation of the timbral politics of difference and the ways that comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience, all the while advocating for a form of listening that would allow us to hear singers in a self-reflexive, denaturalized way.
#2. Kreuzer, Gundula. Curtain, gong, steam: Wagnerian technologies of nineteenth-century opera (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-5417]
Abstract: Argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of 19th-century opera. The author shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses changed through the 20th century, sometimes still resonating in stagings, performance art, and popular culture today. Focusing on devices (which she dubs “Wagnerian technologies”) intended to amalgamate opera’s various media while veiling their mechanics, the author offers a practical counternarrative to Wagner’s idealist theories of total illusionism. At the same time, the book’s multifaceted exploration of the three titular technologies repositions Wagner as catalyst more than inventor in the history of operatic production. With its broad chronological and geographical scope, this book deepens our understanding of the material and mechanical conditions of historical operatic practice as well as of individual works, both well known and obscure.
#1. Iverson, Jennifer. Electronic inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War musical avant-garde. New cultural history of music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-1204]
Abstract: For a decimated post-War West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio station in Cologne was a beacon of hope. This book traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio’s composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music—echoing both cultural anxiety and promise—is a quintessential Cold War innovation.
The term “Asian American” refers to people of Asian descent who have settled in North America beginning in the mid-18th century. Encompassed within the term is a wide range of ethnic groups and immigrant experiences stretching from Japan, Korea, and China, to India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The earliest Asian immigrants were Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and South Asians who came for economic reasons and worked on building the railroads or in agriculture. Subsequent waves of migration since the 1960s have included refugees escaping from political conflict in countries such as Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Laws passed in the United States such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, which barred further immigration from Asia, and Executive Order 9066, which facilitated the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II, highlight instances where Asian immigrants encountered racism and segregation. Many have overcome such challenges by maintaining connections with their homelands, especially through music, dance, and the dramatic arts.
The diversity of social classes and ethnic heritages of Asians in North America are represented in a wide range of performance traditions. Using the term Asian American music, for instance, has been highly contested and can refer to any music made by Asian Americans or simply music made about the Asian American experience (Wong 2004). Some artists have voiced concerns about the phrase “Asian American music” suggesting it could be essentializing or implies a unified aesthetic. Dance scholars have made the case for establishing Asian American dance as a critical field of inquiry bringing topics of Asian American studies into dialogue with dance studies. By interrogating issues of racial belonging and identity, citizenship, and model minority stereotypes in the context of dance, the field offers a framework for Asian American embodiment.
The scope of Asian American music and performance also has a historical component given the different waves of migration. Early Chinese immigrants of the 18th century brought to North America their love of Cantonese opera and narrative song traditions often heard in the Chinatowns that emerged in cities across the continent. From 1890 to 1924, Japanese immigrants brought various folk, popular, and classical music and dance to places such as California and Hawai’i. After 1965, the constituency of Asian America was transformed by an influx of different types of migrants including laborers from the Philippines, China, and Japan, war refugees (Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan), and educated professionals and wealthy entrepreneurs from across Asia.
Active scenes for various genres of Asian music and dance emerged along with newer styles blending Asian and Western musical elements. The establishment of San Jose Taiko in the context of the 1960s Asian American political movement opened a space of racial consciousness even as it forced dancers, choreographers, and musicians to navigate the external pressures of representing the often essentialized ideals of Asian America. Some immigrant musicians enthusiastically learned instruments such as piano and violin and became active in Western art music, citing it as a form of social capital that could lead to upward mobility. Others immersed themselves in jazz and hip hop, creating new experimental genres. Today, Asian Americans are singer-songwriters, metalheads, rappers, and performance artists as well as butoh dancers, taiko performers, and bhangra musicians. Each of these shifting artistic identities has contributed to the nuanced complexity of representation that comprises Asian American music and dance.
The following bibliography represents selected texts taken from RILM Abstracts of Music Literature that enhance our knowledge of music, dance, theater, and Asian American experiences. It comprises publications that detail varying perspectives, genres, mediums, and activities.
Written and compiled by Russ Skelchy, Associate Editor, RILM
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Baily, John and Asif Mahmoud. Tablas and drum machines: Afghan music in California (London: Goldsmiths College, 2005, motion picture). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2005-17147]
Abstract: A film exploring the musical life of the Afghan community in Fremont, California, with particular attention to issues of cultural identity.
Bryant, Lei Ouyang. “Performing race and place in Asian America: Korean American adoptees, musical theatre, and the land of 10,000 lakes”, Asian music: Journal of the Society for Asian Music 40/1 (winter–spring 2009) 4–30. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2009-344]
Abstract: The Walleye kid: The musical, written by R.A. Shiomi and Sundraya Kase with music and lyrics by Kurt Miyashiro, was one of two musical productions incorporating themes of transracial and transnational adoption staged in the Twin Cities in the spring of 2005. The musical, produced by the Minneapolis-based Asian American theater company Mu Performing Arts, follows a young Korean American adoptee’s journey of self-discovery while adjusting to life in rural, white Minnesota. The production is used as a case study to examine the creative processes used in contemporary Asian American artistic expression, the Korean American adoption experience in Minnesota, and the use of the musical theater to express complex issues surrounding the transnational adoption experience.
Cayari, Christopher. “The education of Asian American music professionals: Exploration and development of ethnic identity”, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 228 (spring 2021) 7–24. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 2021-3584]
Abstract: Asian American people make up approximately 5.8% of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019) and pursue careers in a variety of musical professions. However, a monoracial view of Asian Americans that conceives of all Asian Americans as a homogenous group without regard to ethnicity or cultural background has led to widespread stereotypes. The desire to acculturate to U.S. culture and Western European art music ideals can pressure Asian Americans to play certain instruments, restrict their involvement to areas of music, or force them to portray their ethnicity in offensive ways. This study looked at the racial and ethnic identity development of nine Asian American music professionals from various career paths in education, performance, curation, and history through a Web survey and subsequent semistructured interviews. Findings pertained to the musical upbringing of participants both inside and outside of school, the social contexts that affected participants’ musical endeavors, pressures from dominant cultures that participants faced while in school and during their careers, and the actions participants took in their careers that were a result of growing up as Asian Americans in various music learning contexts (e.g., school, community, familial, and informal).
Chambers-Letson, Joshua. A race so different: Performance and law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-29192]
Abstract: Taking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, the author argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, the book explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. The last chapter examines the group Dengue Fever and the racialization of Cambodian-America.
Hong Sohn, Stephen. “Calculated cacophonies: The queer Asian American family and the nonmusical musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland“, The journal of American drama and theatre (JADT) 29/1 (fall–winter 2017) 20p. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-50880]
Abstract: Chay Yew’s productions commonly address queer Asian American experiences and associated themes, including the struggle to survive amid hostile familial ties and exclusionary social contexts. This article explores such issues through an extended analysis of Wonderland, a dramatic production involving four roles. Three of the roles—a Man, a Woman, and a Son—comprise an Asian American nuclear family. The fourth figure, a Young Man, is revealed to be playing the Son as an adult. Each role bears the burden of expanding the audience’s vision to include the queer Asian American as part of a domestic social construct that better integrates non-normative sexualities as part of its core foundation. The article shows how Wonderland diagnoses this problem through its thematic depictions and offers an intriguing intervention through its deployment of form—what Yew describes as a “nonmusical musical”. I investigate the “nonmusical musical” as a quintessentially queer racial performance form that employs what I term as calculated cacophonies, which elucidates how Wonderland uses dialogic, sonic, and thematic relationalities to undercut the portrayed destruction of the Asian American family. The presence of calculated cacophonies allows Wonderland to spotlight some guarded optimism: there may be a sustained possibility for the queer Asian American son to find a place in the heteronuclear family.
Liu, Sissi. “‘Kungfu/jazz’ as a new approach to music theatre making: Fred Ho and ‘manga opera'”, Studies in musical theatre 11/2 (2017) 197–214. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literaturewith Full Text, 2017-35087]
Abstract: Kung fu and jazz—performing art forms that originated from the racial others—will be used as shorthand for two concurrent, interdependent, and dialectically opposing cultural processes: one that prioritizes boundary formation or reinforcement, and one that favors boundary elimination or crossing. The processes of kung fu and jazz are analyzed in the case of Ho’s Voice of the dragon (2006), and the paradoxical process of negotiating between the two are explored in Ho’s creation of a new genre, manga opera. I propose that in a world of increasing global encounters, racial and ethnic multiplicities, and political and cultural complexities, kung fu/jazz provides a politically progressive and transgressive approach to the process of boundary-conscious musical theater-making.
Nguyen, Mimi Thi and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Alien encounters: Popular culture in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2007-17171]
Abstract: Showcases innovative directions in Asian American cultural studies by exploring topics ranging from pulp fiction to multimedia art and import-car subcultures. Contributors analyze Asian Americans’ interactions with popular culture as both creators and consumers. The volume reflects post-1965 Asian America paying nuanced attention to issues of gender, sexuality, transnationality, and citizenship, while unabashedly taking pleasure in pop culture. Issues of cultural authenticity are raised by addressing Asian American participation in hip hop and jazz, the emergence of an orientalist “Indo-chic” in U.S. youth culture, and the circulation of Vietnamese music variety shows. Taking popular culture seriously reveals how people imagine and express their affective relationships to history, identity, and belonging.
Sharma, Nitasha Tamar. Hip hop desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a global race consciousness. Refiguring American music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2010-5669]
Abstract: Explores the worldviews of young U.S. people of South Asian descent (self-identifying as Desis) who create hip hop music. Through their lives and lyrics, hip hop Desis express a global race consciousness reflecting both their sense of connection with Black Americans as racialized minorities in the U.S. and their diasporic sensibility as part of a global community of South Asians. The author emphasizes the role of appropriation and sampling in the ways that hip hop Desis craft their identities, create art, and pursue social activism. Some of the Desi artists at the center of her ethnography produce what she calls ethnic hip hop, incorporating South Asian languages, instruments, and immigrant themes. Through ethnic hip hop, Desi artists such as KB, Sammy, and Bella Deejay express alternative desiness, challenging assumptions about their identities as South Asians, children of immigrants, minorities, and U.S. people. Desi artists also contest and seek to bridge perceived divisions between Black and South Asian Americans through racialized hip hop. It is described how they uncover connections between South Asians and Black Americans, highlighting in their lyrics links such as the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Mahatma Gandhi. By taking up themes considered irrelevant to many Asian Americans, Desi performers including D’Lo, Chee Malabar of Himalayan Project and Rawj of Feenom Circle create a multiracial form of Black popular culture to fight racism and enact social change.
Villegas, Mark R., Kuttin Kandi, and Roderick N. Labrador, eds. Empire of funk: Hip hop and representation in Filipina/o America (San Diego: Cognella, 2014). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2014-5390]
Abstract: Gives long overdue attention to the most popular cultural art form practiced by recent generations of Filipina/o American youth. The anthology features the voices of artists, scholars, and activists to begin a dialogue on Filipina/o American youth culture and its relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. The text also offers the opportunity to question the future of hip hop itself. Individual chapters explore Filipina/o American hip hop aesthetics, community-building, the geography of hip hop in Filipina/o America, sexuality and power, activism and praxis, visual culture, and navigating the hip hop industry. This text gives readers a thoughtful introduction to an often-overlooked aspect of American society and culture.
Wang, Oliver. Legions of boom: Filipino American mobile DJ crews in the San Francisco Bay Area (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-13936]
Abstract: Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. This book chronicles the remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping create and unify the Bay Area’s Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene’s centerpieces were showcases—or multi-crew performances—which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.
Wong, Deborah. Louder and faster: Pain, joy, and the body politic in Asian American taiko. American crossroads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2019-7730]
Abstract: A cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Immersed in the taiko scene for 20 years, the author has witnessed cultural and demographic changes and the exponential growth and expansion of taiko particularly in Southern California. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American internment and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism. Exploring the materialities of the drums, costumes, and bodies that make sound, analyzing the relationship of these to capitalist multiculturalism, and investigating the gender politics of taiko, the book considers both the promises and pitfalls of music and performance as an anti-racist practice. The result is a vivid glimpse of an Asian American presence that is both loud and fragile.
Wong, Yutian, ed. Contemporary directions in Asian American dance. Studies in dance history (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-1207]
Abstract: The definition of Asian American dance is as contested as the definition of “Asian American”. The term encompasses not only a range of national origins but also a dazzling variety of theoretical frameworks, disciplinary methods, and genres—from traditional to postmodern to hip hop. Contributors to this volume address such topics as the role of the 1960s Asian American movement in creating Japanese American taiko groups, and the experience of internment during World War II influencing butoh dance in Canada. Essays about artists look closely at the politics of how Asian aesthetics are set into motion and marketed. The volume includes first-person narratives, interviews, ethnography, cultural studies, performance studies, and comparative ethnic studies.
Yoshihara, Mari. Musicians from a different shore: Asians and Asian Americans in classical music (Philadelphia: University of Temple Press, 2007). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2007-5967]
Abstract: An examination of the phenomenon whereby musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories, and classical music performance competitions. A confluence of culture, politics, and commerce after World War II made classical music a staple in middle-class households, established Yamaha as the world’s largest producer of pianos, and gave the Suzuki method of music training an international clientele. Soon, talented musicians from Japan, China, and South Korea were flocking to the U.S. to study and establish careers, and Asian American families were enrolling toddlers in music classes. This historical backdrop is punctuated by interviews with Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan, Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be. A Japanese translation is cited as RILM 2013-34104.
Zhu, Ying and Quynh Nhu Le. “Body, time, and space: Poetry as choreography in Southeast Asian American literature”, Dance chronicle: Studies in dance and the related arts 39/1 (2016) 77–95. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-26748]
Abstract: This collaboration between a dance scholar and a literary/critical race studies scholar engages cross-disciplinary strategies of reading poetry to complicate contemporary discourses surrounding Southeast Asian American cultural productions. We offer an analysis of Phayvanh Luekhamhan’s Rubber bands and Diep Tran’s Schools, focusing on their incorporation of elements integral to both dance and Southeast Asian diasporic poetry: body, time, and space. Choreographic in form and content, these poems shed light on the embodied repercussions of imperialism, war, and migration, and call forth the moving body as central to both recording and cultivating the formation of communities in diaspora.
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In an experiment, two musicologists analyzed J.S. Bach’s sonata for unaccompanied violin, no. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001 from the standpoint of how its structural features were associated with the expression of different emotional categories from the perspective of the composer and through the eyes and ears of the analysts themselves.
They then constructed two empirical experiments to test whether contemporary listeners could identify the same emotions identified by the analysis, targeted at two groups of subjects: relatively inexperienced popular music students; and musicians, composers, and music academics (including some of the world’s leading Bach scholars).
Results suggest that emotional attributions by low-level experts are led by surface acoustic features, and those by high-expert listeners are led by both acoustic and formal features; that this applied much more to the emotions of sadness and tenderness rather than to anger or fear; and that despite the common confusion between anger and fear in real life, listeners were capable of differentiating these emotions in the music, supporting analytical findings in the score.
This according to “The effects of expert musical training on the perception of emotions in Bach’s sonata for unaccompanied violin no. 1 in G minor (BWV 1001)” by Michael Spitzer and Eduardo Coutinho (Psychomusicology: Music, mind and brain XXIV/1 [March 2014] 35–57).
The Jazzomat Research Project takes up the challenge of jazz research in the age of digitalization, opening up a new field of analytical exploration by providing computational tools as well as a comprehensive corpus of improvisations with MeloSpyGUI and the Weimar Jazz Database.
The volume Inside the Jazzomat: New perspectives for jazz research (Mainz: Schott, 2017; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2017-48411) presents the main concepts and approaches of the ongoing project, and includes several case studies that demonstrate how these approaches can be included in jazz analysis in various ways.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
