Category Archives: Curiosities

by | August 11, 2016 · 6:00 am

Electro hop and Afrofuturism

Uncle Jamm's Army

Most narratives on Los Angeles hip hop begin with gangsta rap, but recordings, videos, news articles, photographs, interviews, fliers, and memories detail a different story.

Electro hop, or techno hop, was the direct precursor to gangsta rap. This multifaceted and complex period emerged in the early 1980s and was developed on the streets of Los Angeles by adolescent black males.

Expanding from mobile disk jockey crews, electro hop artists produced a musical soundscape and cultivated a cultural landscape that drew from both electro funk and hip hop, demonstrating both how intramusical components are linked to extramusical factors and how Afrofuturist concepts (re)envision (sur)realities. Electro hop sounds off on other/outer ways of reconsidering and reinvigorating planet rock.

This according to “Something 2 dance 2: Electro hop in 1980s Los Angeles and its Afrofuturist link” by Gabriela Jiménez (Black music research journal XXXI/1 [Spring 2011] pp. 131–144). This issue of Black music research journal, along with many others, is covered in our new RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text collection.

Above, Uncle Jamm’s Army, a seminal electro hop group, in the 1980s; below, UJA’s signature hit Dial-a-freak.

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by | August 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Helicopters in music encyclopedias

Helicopter-PNG

The cross-volume search capacity of our new database RILM Music Encyclopedias offers some quirky surprises—for example, this resource currently includes nine different music-related articles with references to helicopters. These include entries on Madonna, Mickey Rooney, and the following excerpt from the article “Highland region of Papua New Guinea” in The Garland encyclopedia of world music:

“The texts [of girls’ coming-of age songs] address topics broadly sorted in four sets: daily routine, recalling netted bags (made by all women), sores (irritated by flies), and pleasure over good food (grown or gathered); unusual events, like sighting a helicopter, European missionaries’ arrival, and death in a hospital; desires, including the romantic, with meanings often hidden in metaphor, but also the adventuresome, like wanting to ride in a vehicle; and the coming-of-age performance itself speaking of dancing together, laughing together, and becoming adults.”

Above, an organization that searches for new species in Papua New Guinea by helicopter—perhaps the subject of the sighting; below, a performance by the Girl Guides Association of Papua New Guinea.

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Filed under Australia and Pacific islands, Curiosities, RILM

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by | June 9, 2016 · 6:00 am

Cruise showbands

cosmic band cruise ship

Cruise ships are among the most visible postmodern tourism products, and cruise tourists are the antithesis of cultural tourists.

Within the physical cocoon of the ship, a social and cultural cocoon is constructed by the cruise line, sheltering the temporary inhabitants of the ship from the realities of the ports visited. Despite the portrayal of a cruise as an exotic holiday, on board the ships construct a representation of Western culture, with the assistance of musical performances.

The contribution of the showband is central to the construction of a Western and cosmopolitan music culture within a deterritorialized and mobile geography. Through performance mode and genre, appearance, repertoire, and nationality, the showband constructs a facade of music culture; but the reality behind the facade is quite different. If the ship may be considered an empty vessel into which culture is poured, it is the music of ensembles such as the showband that creates and defines this culture.

This according to “Corporately imposed music cultures: An ethnography of cruise ship showbands” by David Cashman (Ethnomusicology review XIX [2014]).

Above and below, Cosmic Band in action.

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by | June 6, 2016 · 6:00 am

Figaro and Freud

figaro

In the opening duet of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Figaro makes Freudian errors in counting and in singing. Susanna, needing emotional support and sensitive to Figaro’s psychology, directs his therapy in a manner both manipulative and helpful.

The brief scene is paradigmatic for the opera as a whole, and the duet’s dramatic action is projected by the music at every level, from small details to aspects of global structure.

This according to “Figaro’s mistakes” by David Lewin (Current musicology 57 [spring 1995] pp. 45–60).

Le nozze di Figaro is 230 years old this year! Above, Lydia Teuscher and Vito Priante as Susanna and Figaro; below, the scene in question.

More articles about Mozart are here.

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by | June 2, 2016 · 6:00 am

Musique concrète with grapefruit

grapefruit

Musique concrète has evolved a great deal since its beginnings in the late 1940s; experiments with musique concrète that are presently occurring within the world of electronic dance music (EDM) and other musical genres are quite different from Pierre Schaeffer’s original work.

In 2013 Brian Speise was composing credits music for a short zombie film and thought that the project would be perfect for experimenting with musique concrète. This was not a work of dance music at all, but it had elements of electronic music that producers of EDM can appreciate. Balloons and a grapefruit were brought into play.

This according to Mr. Speise’s “From grapefruit to plastic surgery: Experiments in contemporary musique concrete” (Dancecult VI/1 [2014]).

Above, the author records a grapefruit peel with a contact microphone; you can hear the sound here.

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by | May 26, 2016 · 6:00 am

Moondog makes it big

moondog

Louis T. Hardin, known to all as Moondog, was celebrated among New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious and extravagantly clothed blind street performer; but he went on to win acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty.

From the late 1940s until the early 1970s Moondog stood like a sentinel on Avenue of the Americas near 54th Street. Rain or shine, he wore a homemade robe, sandals, a flowing cape, and a horned Viking helmet, and clutched a long homemade spear.

Most of the passers-by who dismissed him as “the Viking of Sixth Avenue” and offered him contributions for copies of his music and poetry were unaware that he had recorded his music on the CBS, Prestige, Epic, Angel, and Mars labels.

Although many New Yorkers assumed that he had died after he vanished from his customary post in 1974, Moondog had actually been invited to perform his music in West Germany and decided to stay.

In his later years he produced at least five albums in Europe, and regularly performed his compositions with chamber and symphony orchestras before tony audiences in German cities as well as in Paris and Stockholm.

This according to “Louis (Moondog) Hardin, 83, musician, dies” by Glenn Collins (The New York times CXLVIII/51,643 [12 September 1999] p. I:47).

Today would have been Moondog’s 100th birthday! Below, his 1971 album Moondog 2.

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by | May 12, 2016 · 6:00 am

Meet the gamelatron

The gamelatron, a robotic gamelan built by the sound artist Aaron Taylor Kuffner, has appeared regularly at events such as Burning Man, raves, and exhibitions.

Breaching the conceptual divides between instrument and art installation, performance and recording, sculptor and composer, and prosthesis and robot, the gamelatron is a singular site for investigating imaginaries of the human, machine, and media.

This according to “Atmosphere as a concept for ethnomusicology: Comparing the gamelatron and gamelan” by Andrew McGraw (Ethnomusicology LX/1 [winter 2016] pp. 125–147.

Below, the gamelatron in action.

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by | May 5, 2016 · 6:00 am

The smell of jazz

People can systematically match information from different senses; these matches are known as crossmodal correspondences.

A 2013 study demonstrated that at least some color-music correspondences can be explained by emotional mediation.

A later study investigated the emotion mediation hypothesis for correspondences between odor and music, testing whether the strength of odor-music matches for particular odors and musical selections can be predicted by the similarity of the emotional associations with the odors and music. These researchers found that perceived matches were higher when the emotional responses were similar and that a model including emotional dimensions captured a significant amount of the variance of match scores, providing new evidence that crossmodal correspondences are mediated by emotions.

This according to “The smell of jazz: Crossmodal correspondences between music, odor, and emotion” by Carmel A. Levitan, Sara A. Charney, Karen B. Schloss, and Stephen E. Palmer, a paper included in Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Austin: The Cognitive Science Society, 2015, pp. 1326–1331).

Many thanks to Improbable Research for bringing this to our attention, and for noting that “fishy was comprehensively unpopular, except with the category heavy metal, where it was first on the list.”

More posts about synesthesia are here.

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by | April 30, 2016 · 5:08 pm

Richard Strauss’s 2% solution

 

The German physician Hans Leicher undertook an operation on Richard Strauss’s nose in 1928, when the composer was working on his opera Arabella.

Leicher subsequently recalled that Strauss drafted two numbers for the work in the hospital immediately following the operation, after two cotton balls impregnated with a 2% cocaine solution had put him into such a state of stimulation that instead of resting he was inspired, and worked intensively.

The numbers were the duets Aber der Richtige, wenn’s einen gibt für mich and Und du wirst mein Gebieter sein, often described as the finest moments in the score.

This according to “Richard Strauss und die Hals-Nasen-Ohren-Heilkunde: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der zwei schönsten Duette der Oper Arabella” by Herbert Pichler (Richard Strauss-Blätter I [June 1979] pp. 46–53).

Below, Aber der Richtige.

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by | February 18, 2016 · 6:00 am

Toothwalker sounds

 

In 1996 a two-week expedition to the Walrus Islands in the Bering Sea was undertaken to record the sounds of Pacific walruses, both for use in musical compositions and to add to the baseline data on acoustic disturbance and walrus behavior collected by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

There was an opportunity during the expedition to use a hydrophone to record the animals’ underwater communications, which include a gonging sound, whistling, grunting, roaring, and clacking of teeth.

This according to “Toothwalkers” by Douglas Quin (Terra nova: Nature and culture II/3 [summer 1997] pp. 88–96). Toothwalker refers to Linnaeus’s designation of the walrus as Odobenus rosmarus (tooth-walking sea horse).

Below, the celebrated E.T. demonstrates his repertoire and expertise.

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