Category Archives: Ethnomusicology

by | July 19, 2010 · 9:05 am

Bokoor African Popular Music Archives

Established in 1990 by the journalist, writer, and musician John Collins, the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives is a Ghanaian NGO that aims to preserve, promote, and disseminate Ghanaian and African popular and traditional performance, and to act as a facilitator, consultant, and resource center for various African arts projects in Ghana and the international African community. It also maintains a database and archive of contemporary African arts and performance traditions, and assists and networks with other collectors and organizations doing similar cultural, educational, and archival work. The Archives include freely accessible books, articles, and sound and video recordings.

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by | July 15, 2010 · 5:50 pm

Iconoclastic romanticism

Although the pedagogue and author Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl (1823–97) was not formally trained in music, he wrote extensively about the social significance of music making, and he argued for an approach that treated music history as cultural history. He criticized music histories centered on great composers, and advocated a more inclusive cultural approach that appreciated the unsung heroes and everyday life of the past.

Riehl was even more critical of his own time, lamenting the costs of transforming Germany into a modern industrial society; while he called for a more encompassing definition of Germany’s musical heritage, he rejected all of the art music of the day, and particularly railed against the works of Wagner. Riehl, therefore, is an ambiguous figure: He championed the idea of music as culture, but he explicitly rejected a future for music as art.

This according to Sanna Pederson’s “An early crusader for music as culture: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl”, an essay included in our recently published Music’s intellectual history.

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by | July 12, 2010 · 4:25 pm

From girls to women

 

Designed and edited by Lev Weinstock and Suzel Ana Reily and produced by the Department of Social Anthropology at The Queen’s University of Belfast, Venda girls’ initiation schools presents all of the available materials resulting from John Blacking’s now-legendary fieldwork, undertaken from May 1956 through December 1958, documenting the songs, ceremonies, and dances of the girls’ initiation cycle of the Venda people of the Sibasa district of the Northern Transvaal, South Africa.

The resource includes photographs, sound clips, video clips, texts with translations, transcriptions, and all of Blacking’s writings on this and related subjects.

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by | July 1, 2010 · 9:42 am

Was Kuhač there first?

In his 1882 unpublished essay Die Eigenthümlichkeiten der magyarischen Volksmusik, Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834–1911) used and explained the term musicology. Since the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft appeared three years later with Guido Adler’s definition of the term, Kuhač assumed—and he died with this conviction—that he was the first to have coined it.

Kuhač was also an early visionary in comparative musicology, a stream that fed into the beginnings of ethnomusicology. As he saw it, the discipline’s task was to determine the laws of any given nation’s traditional music so these could be used as the basis for a national style in art music; his overarching goal was to create an awareness of Croatian national music and to establish its place in the context of Central European culture.

This according to “Franjo Ksaver Kuhač and the beginnings of music scholarship in Croatia” by Zdravko Blažeković, an essay included in our recently published Music’s intellectual history.

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by | June 23, 2010 · 4:16 pm

Inbhear: Journal of Irish music and dance

Launched in 2010 by the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, Inbhear: Journal of Irish music and dance is a free online journal devoted to these performing arts as they are “relevant to Ireland, the Irish (wherever they may be), or perceived to be of Ireland or the Irish.”

The journal’s Editorial Board comprises faculty members and researchers from the Academy. The inaugural issue, edited by Niall Keegan, includes articles on Irish traditional fiddling, musical style, and step dancing.

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by | May 3, 2010 · 12:54 pm

Omaha Indian music

Part of the online American memory series sponsored by the Library of Congress, Omaha Indian music presents traditional Omaha music recorded in Nebraska in the 1890s and 1980s. This multiformat ethnographic field collection comprises 44 wax cylinder recordings collected between 1895 and 1897 by Francis La Flesche and Alice Cunningham Fletcher, 323 songs and speeches from the 1983 Omaha powwow (above), and 25 songs and speeches from a 1985 concert at the Library of Congress; contextual information is provided by photographs, field notes, and interviews with Omaha tribe members.

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by | May 2, 2010 · 3:34 pm

Follow the drinking gourd

In 2008 the technology and publishing executive Joel Bresler created the multimedia website Follow the drinking gourd to share his research into the origins and history of the U.S. song, which was popularized by The Weavers and has been recorded some 200 times and reprinted in over 75 songbooks.

While providing ample documentation of the song’s reception history, this unusual resource probes persistent questions regarding the song’s provenance—not least, whether there is any basis for the idea that it was sung by African Americans during the Underground Railroad era. The site presents discussions by authoritative folklorists exploring such questions, and concludes with an invitation to collaborate by supplying further documentation.

Above, the first known publication of the song (Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1928).

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by | April 6, 2010 · 12:18 pm

Rāgs and recipes

In “Why Hindustani musicians are good cooks: Analogies between music and food in North India” (Asian music XXV/1–2 (1993–94), pp. 69–80), Adrian McNeil notes that culinary topics are frequent—sometimes even favorite—subjects of conversation among Hindustani musicians, and that a notable number of top Indian musicians are also expert cooks. He attributes this phenomenon to the similarities between the cognitive and sensory aspects of the two activities, and proposes a “culinary perspective” on rāg.

Offering a basic “culinary recipe” alongside a basic “melodic recipe”, McNeil similarly juxtaposes, in a two-page spread, a photographic “depiction of potato with ginger and puris” with a rāgamālā “depiction of rāg sārant”. Further positing a “melodic conception of food”, he recounts examples of Indian musicians using culinary analogies to illustrate musical matters, and cites a use of the phrase biryāni chicken khā (eat chicken biryāni) to convey a rhythmic pattern to a hungry mrdangam player.

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by | March 24, 2010 · 3:21 pm

English dance & song

Published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, English dance & song has appeared at least four times a year since it was launched in 1936. The magazine presents festival listings and other news, interviews with current English traditional and neotraditional performers, and reviews of current publications, as well as brief research-based articles that explore historical documents and current practices.

The Society, which was formed in 1932 by the merger of the Folk-Song Society (founded in 1898) and the English Folk Dance Society (founded in 1911), also publishes a scholarly periodical, Folk music journal.

Related articles:

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by | March 22, 2010 · 3:11 pm

Association for Cultural Equity

 

Founded by Alan Lomax in 1983, The Association for Cultural Equity‘s mission—“to facilitate cultural equity, the right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage”—is realized through several projects that use and expand upon Lomax’s research, including the digitization and dissemination of his field collections.

As a part of this service, ACE supports a free online research center that includes an archive of Lomax’s collections; the sound recordings are indexed by place in ACE’s Lomax Geo-Archive, which provides excerpts from the recordings along with the full details of each recording session. Through cooperation with ACE, the American Folklife Center houses Lomax’s physical collection.

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