Established by Kjetil Maria Aase in 1990, RoJaRo is a continuously updated index of jazz and popular music magazines. This resource is intended to be inclusive, indexing little-known fanzines as well as well-known publications; it also presents hyperlinked lists of relevant magazines and record labels.
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Filed under Jazz and blues, Music magazines, Popular music, Resources
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.
Filed under Africa, Ethnomusicology, Popular music, Resources
An initiative of the Department of Special Collections of the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project presents digital remasters of nearly 8000 cylinders that are catalogued according to standard library rules for sound recordings. The collection may be searched by keyword, author, title, subject, year, or call number, or it can be browsed by genre, instrument, topic, or language. The recordings can all be heard and downloaded for free; the project is happy to receive donations of further recordings and financial support.
Among the collection’s rare gems are 225 recordings of pre-1902 popular music, including cylinders of Sousa’s Grand Concert Band.
Related article: John Philip Sousa, violinist
Filed under Popular music, Resources, World music
Produced under the Australian government’s Broadband Production Initiative, Ether Multimedia’s The pure drop is a free online resource that describes itself as “an exploration and celebration of traditional and world music”.
The site is organized around eleven short videos—all under six minutes—that explore topics such as instruments, lyrics, and transmission; links to further information about the specific topics in the videos are provided, and study guides, maps, a hyperlinked index of persons, and other supporting materials are included.
While this resource is clearly intended for use in secondary schools, and is so used throughout Australia, it is available to anyone interested in video interviews, performances, and mp3 audio by traditional, neotraditional, and popular musicians such as Billy Bragg, Värttinä, and Yothu Yindi.
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Filed under Pedagogy, Popular music, Resources, World music
Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid‘s The people’s choice music: The most wanted song/The most unwanted song (Dia Center for the Arts, 1997) presents the results of a research project that used a questionnaire to determine the most desired and most undesired characteristics of popular songs. Two new songs—both composed by Dave Soldier, with lyrics by Nina Mankin—exemplify the poles of the questionnaire results.
The most wanted song is five minutes long and comprises a medium-sized group (guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, violoncello, synthesizer, and low male and female voices) performing in a rock/R&B style. It narrates a love story and has a moderate tempo, volume, and pitch range. It will be enjoyed by approximately 72% of listeners.
The most unwanted song is 22 minutes long and features accordion and bagpipe (tied at 13% as the most unwanted instruments) along with banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, and synthesizer (the only instrument to appear in both ensembles). It involves an operatic soprano rapping and singing atonal music; advertising jingles, political slogans, and elevator music; a children’s choir singing jingles and holiday songs; and dramatic juxtapositions of loud and quiet sections, fast and slow tempos, and very high and very low pitches. Fewer than 200 individuals in the entire world will enjoy it.
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Filed under Curiosities, Humor, Popular music
Auction catalogues are sources for iconography and history; for example, Christie’s has mounted over 200 auctions of rock and pop memorabilia, issuing catalogues that illuminate the stories of performers and groups as well as events like the Woodstock festival. Other catalogues offer biographical details; a 2003 catalogue from Sotheby’s documents Elton John’s changing taste, while others, like the 1999 catalogue page reproduced above, represent the posthumous dispersal of personal effects—in this case, Yehudi Menuhin’s collection of instruments and bows.
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Filed under Instruments, Popular music, Publication types
In October 2009 the Finnish branch of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML) inaugurated the series Advanced musicology (ISSN 1798-3754) with Esa Lilja’s dissertation Theory and analysis of classic heavy metal harmony. The book’s author explores the implications of the harmonic language of heavy metal from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, with examples from bands including Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden.
Related article: In Extremo and Walther
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Filed under New series, Popular music, Theory
Established in 1997, Signal to noise is a quarterly magazine devoted to improvised and experimental music, focusing on “the confluence of avant-garde jazz, electro-acoustic improvisation, and left-of-center modern rock, with an emphasis on independent production and promotion.” Recent issues have featured the saxophonist Marshall Allen, the groups Sonic Youth and Cheer-Accident, and the duo Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone.
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Jazz and blues, Music magazines, Popular music
Record album covers comprise a genre of music iconography that shows how musicians wish to be perceived—or how their producers wish them to be perceived. This type of iconography makes no claim to objectivity; rather, it explicitly presents images meant to arouse specific associations with the recorded music inside.
For example, the cover of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s 1977 album Zombie shows him brightly dressed, singing and gesturing defiantly, facing images of Nigerian soldiers: the zombies of the scathing title song, which satirizes these enforcers of the military government. The singer appears as a vibrant, strong leader, while the soldiers are depicted in a jagged, grey collage—as dehumanized and sinister as the zombies of horror fiction.
Below, Sahr Ngaujah and the cast of Fela! perform Zombie on Broadway.
Click here for more on music iconography.
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Filed under Africa, Iconography, Politics, Popular music
Etnoumlje: Srpski world music magazine (ISSN 1452-9920) has been published quarterly by the World Music Asocijacija Srbije since the summer of 2007.
The magazine provides insight into the Serbian world music scene through interviews and profiles of members of Serbian bands and reviews of recordings, events, and publications, as well as regular features on Serbian traditional music.
Its editor, Oliver Đorđević, defines it as a periodical for “theory, history, aesthetics, and criticism of world music, with the aim of promoting and advancing Serbian world music.” Etnoumlje also collects information for a future Web-based register of Serbian world music bands and artists.
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Filed under Europe, Music magazines, Popular music, World music
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