In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sly and the Family Stone were pioneers of funk music. Different from other funk acts of that era, Sly and the Family Stone’s funk variant fused psychedelic rock stylings with classic soul, and in that sense, their style differed considerably from the bass-heavy grooves of mainstream funk. The band’s success on the pop charts as well as with urban Black youth made the group especially influential, especially evident in the music of crossover giants such as George Clinton, Rick James, and Prince.
Born in Denton, Texas and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Vallejo, Sylvester Stewart (better known as Sly Stone) developed an impressive music business resumé in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, excelling as a radio disc jockey, songwriter, and record producer for the likes of The Beau Brummels, Bobby Freeman, and The Mojo Men. His first attempt at heading a group, the Stoners, failed in 1966; however, Sly and the Family Stone, which included his brother, guitarist Freddie Stone and sister Rosie Stone, who sang and played keyboards and harmonica, and a cousin, bassist Larry Graham drew sufficient attention locally in 1967 to garner a contract from Epic Records.
Sly and the Family Stone played a crucial role in introducing Black church aesthetics to mainstream popular music audiences in the late 1960s. Sly introduced secular audiences to what James Cleveland called “the Sanctified Church” through his personal experiences in the Black Pentecostal church. In the foreground of Sly’s work was the recording Stand! (1969), particularly the single I want to take you higher. Furthermore, the band’s integrated gender and racial demographic along with an overall message that all people need to work together in harmony represent the epitome of post-Civil Rights culture. In a 2023 interview, Sly spoke about his work and the transformative power of music. According to him, “I know music can always make a difference. I knew it back when I was [a radio DJ]. People would call into the station and say that they wanted me to play this song or that song and I could tell how much it meant to them. That was what we wanted to do with the music that we made. That’s what we did.”
Sly Stone turns 81 on 15 March 2024.
Read the full entry on Sly and the Family Stone in the Encyclopedia of recorded sound (2005; find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias), and in “Sly Stone and the sanctified church” by Mark Anthony Neal, an essay included in The funk era and beyond: New perspectives on Black popular culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; find it in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature).
Below, Sly and the Family Stone perform If you want me to stay on the television show Soul train circa 1970.
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On 9 February 2024, RILM presents a panel titled “Towards Global Knowledge, Decolonization, and Preservation—Challenges and Opportunities Through Culture and Arts Education” as part of the UNESCO World Conference on Culture and Arts Education 2024. The four presentations in this side event are all rooted in the understanding that information literacy is a fundamental pillar in education—each presentation pivots on the notion of global knowledge as a foundation of culture and arts education. After RILM Director Tina Frühauf opens the panel with discussion of a broader theoretical framework, the second presentation by Executive Editor Zdravko Blažeković examines RILM as a model that underlines the importance of a global approach to information literacy. The following presentation by RILM Associate Editor Farah Zahra presents a local perspective, using the case of Iraqi literature and knowledge as an example. The final presentation by RILM Editor MU Qian highlights decolonization (understood here as an ongoing process) as an additional objective for the UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts Education, taking the treatment of Uygur culture as a case in point.
For further information on RILM’s panel and information on joining the presentation, please visit https://www.rilm.org/wccae2024/
Also, be sure to check out RILM’s resources for learning including materials for teachers, students, performers, and music researchers interested in RILM’s rich music databases, research tools, and full-text publications. Learn more at https://www.rilm.org/classrooms/
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Referred to as the “dean of modern jazz drumming,” Max Roach spent his formative years in Brooklyn and received a degree in composition from the Manhattan School. While still in his teens, Roach became one of the innovators of the bop drumming style at jazz fountainheads such as Minton’s Playhouse and Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem. Among his collaborators have been Coleman Hawkins (with whom he made his first recording in 1944), Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and many others. Known for his melodic, formally structured solos, and compositional experimentation, Roach moved from bop to cool and free jazz styles, and his creative talents were recognized with commissions and awards from various sources, including the MacArthur Foundation and Down Beat magazine.
Roach’s We insist! Freedom now suite, recorded in 1960, moves from depictions of slavery to Emancipation to the Civil Rights struggle and African independence. The work draws on both long-standing symbols of African American cultural identity and a more immediate historical context. It is a modernist work as well, as Roach and his musicians used African and African American legacies in new and novel ways. In a 1987 interview, Roach commented on whether by the time he recorded the Freedom now suite, he had become a Civil Rights activist:
“Well, I guess [Black jazz musicians] always have been [activists], you know? I go back to Bessie Smith with Black mountain blues and then to Duke Ellington’s Black, brown and beige. It’s always been there. Leadbelly always spoke about the issues and the times that existed. And many of the old Black folk singers from the South to street musicians dealt with it. I’ve always been an activist. At that time [in the 1960s], my children were young. But you’re always thinking about their future as well. And if they’re going to come up and be responsible human beings, they have to have education, and the things like everyone else has. And society has to accommodate that. So, I guess I’ve always been activist because of them.”
Listen to the entire We insist! Freedom now suite recording below.
Decades after its initial release, the Freedom now suite remains fresh and significant, foregrounding the ways that jazz has been in consistent dialogue with social and cultural movements, and has been at its most inspired when engaged in social commentary.
Celebrate the beginning of Black History Month by reading the entry on Max Roach in Percussionists: A biographical dictionary (2000, RILM Music Encyclopedias) and “Revisited! The Freedom now suite” by Ingrid Monson (JazzTimes XXXI/7 [September 2001], 54–59.
Below is a performance of We insist! by Abbey Lincoln and the Max Roach group in 1964.
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New for 2024! RILM Music Encyclopedias has just added four new titles to its continuously growing collection of historic and current reference works. Embrace a global scope in your research with new, multilingual, full-text content for a new year. Here is a list of the new resources.
Felipe Pedrell, gen. ed. Diccionario técnico de la música (1st ed.; Barcelona: Isidro Torres Oriol, 1894) xix, 529 p. In Spanish.
Felipe Pedrell, gen. ed. Diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de músicos y escritores de música españoles, portugueses e hispano-americanos antiguos y modernos: Acopio de datos y documentos para servir a la historia del arte musical en nuestra nación (1st ed.; Barcelona: Tipografía de Víctor Berdós y Feliú, 1897) 2 vols., xix, 715 p., 88 p. In Spanish.
Nancy Groce. Musical Instrument Makers of New York: A Directory of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Urban Craftsmen (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1991) xxi, 200 p. In English.
Warren Bebbington, ed. A Dictionary of Australian Music (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998) xiv, 361 p. In English.
Start your search in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
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Lionel Hampton is known to be responsible for popularizing the vibraphone in the jazz genre. Hampton grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and moved to the Chicago area in 1916, where learned snare drum from a nun at the Holy Rosary Academy in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He first performed as a member of the Chicago Defender Newsboys Band and later studied xylophone with Jimmy Bertrand and drums with Clifford Jones.
After making his debut on drums in 1923 with Louis Armstrong’s backup band (Les Hite) in Culver City, California, Hampton moved to Los Angeles in 1927 and worked with the Spikes Brothers, Paul Howard’s Quality Serenaders, and the Louis Armstrong/Les Hite Band (1930-34), making what is regarded as the first recorded vibraphone solo, on Memories of you, with Armstrong in 1930. Legend has it that Armstrong saw a set of vibes in a room and asked Hampton if he knew how to play them; Hampton immediately responded by playing Armstrong’s entire trumpet solo from Big butter and egg man as an audition!
Jazz critics and fans who admired other aspects of Hampton’s musicianship also criticized him for his raw blues riffing, hard backbeat, screaming and honking saxophones, and stunts like marching into the audience with his horn players while getting the audience to clap along. As Hampton explained in a 1987 interview, “I learned all that in the Sanctified Church: the beat, the handclapping, marching down the aisles and into the audience. When I was six or seven and temporarily living with my grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama, she’d take me to the Holiness Church services, not just on Sundays but all the time. They’d have a whole band in the church–guitars, trombones, saxophones, drums–and they’d be rocking. I’d be sitting by the sister who was playing the big bass drum, and when she’d get happy and start dancing in the aisle, I’d grab that bass drum and start in on that beat. After that, I always had that beat in me.”
Hampton formed his first big band in 1940, toured throughout the world in the 1950s, and introduced new talent to U.S. audiences including Betty Carter, Dinah Washington, and Joe Williams. It is also believed that he was the first to incorporate the electric organ and electric bass in a jazz group. Due to financial issues, he dissolved the big band in the 1960s and established a touring sextet in 1965. His long career also included several film appearances, including A song is born (1948), The Benny Goodman story (1955), and Rooftops of New York (1960).
Read on in an entry on Lionel Hampton in Percussionists: A biographical dictionary (2000, RILM Music Encyclopedias) and “Lionel Hampton, who put swing in the vibraphone, is dead at 94” by Peter Watrous (The New York times CLI/52,228 [1 September 2002]).
Listen to Hampton on vibraphone on a recording of Buzzin’ around with the bee below.
Italian opera has played an important role in Russian musical life since the early 17th century, but by the 19th century it was being promoted there more than Russian opera. In retaliation, Russian composers used their operas to make fun of Italian opera’s stock situations and styles, and brought Russian opera back into prominence.
For example, in his early comic farce Богатыри (Bogatyri, Heroic warriors), Alexander Borodin used familiar music and arias from Italian and French operas (by Rossini, Verdi, Offenbach, Meyerbeer, and others) to set up situations where the original intention of the music and its new setting were at humorous extremes.
Read more in “Italians in a Russian manner: One step from serious to funny” by Svetlana Sergeevna Martynova (Fontes artis musicae LVI/1 [January–March 2009] pp. 1–6). This post originally appeared in Bibliolore 10 years ago this week.
Below is the opening of his B-minor symphony, which Massine used for his ballet Bogatyri, illustrated with images of the heroic warriors of Russian folklore.
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During his life, Bach was primarily known as a dazzling organist with virtuoso improvising abilities. Not surprisingly, his prowess gave rise to a number of urban legends.
One such legend had him traveling incognito, dressed as a village schoolmaster, going from church to church to try out the organs—prompting one local organist to cry out, “I don’t know who’s playing, but it’s either Bach or the Devil!”
Read on in “Tod und Teufel” by Frieder Reininghaus, an essay included in Bach-ABC (Sinzig: Studio-Verlag, 2007, pp. 91–93). This post originally appeared in Bibliolore on March 21, 2015 but it seems appropriate for Halloween 2023.
The manual addresses a multitude of special problems faced by writers on music—problems rarely solved by general writing guides. It applies an international perspective to matters often handled piecemeal and in ethnocentric fashion: work titles, manuscript sources, transliteration, non-Western theoretical systems, opus and catalogue numbers, and pitch and chord names, to name just a few. Detailed guidelines are provided for the bibliographic handling of standard print, audiovisual, and electronic sources, as well as specialized ones such as program notes, liner notes, and music videos. A chapter on indexing is also included. Throughout, abundant examples illustrate each point.
The first edition (2005) reflected many years of experience and thought, working with a wide variety of terms and concepts from around the world; the second edition (2006), roughly one-third larger than the first, included both revisions and new material. This third edition incorporates numerous updates, many of them reflecting developments in writing and publishing over the past 17 years—not least, those involving the online environment. Unlike the earlier printed editions, it is an electronic edition that will be continuously updated.
“Students, scholars, librarians, critics, and performers will find this third edition of the manual indispensable. It takes into account a bibliodiversity hardly found in similar such ventures and is reflective of RILM’s global mission,” writes RILM Executive Director Dr. Tina Frühauf.
How to Write About Music is available through EBSCO’s eBook Collection, on EBSCOhost. For questions and purchase, please contact information@ebsco.com or your EBSCO sales representative.
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New York. — January 17, 2023 — Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) has entered a three-year collaboration with the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (IMA, Arab World Institute) that aims to increase public engagement, advance global cultural understanding, and connect diverse communities by highlighting and sharing the Institute library’s holdings on music from the Arab world. RILM, which documents and disseminates music research worldwide, supports this initiative by drawing on its comprehensive digital resources to create blog posts about a selection of Arabic music literature. Each post is enhanced with an expertly curated bibliography.
The bibliographic references stem from one of the richest and most exhaustive resources of global music research,RILM Abstracts of Music Literature™, which contains 1.5 million bibliographic records from relevant writings on music published from the early 19th century to the present in over 170 countries and in more than 140 languages.
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York: RILM is committed to the comprehensive and accurate representation of music scholarship in all countries and languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. It publishes a suite of digital resources aimed at facilitating and disseminating music research. Its flagship publication is RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, the international bibliography of writings on music covering publications from the early 19th century to the present, now available in an enhanced version that includes the full text content of over 260 music journals. RILM Abstracts is available on the EBSCOhost platform along with RILM Music Encyclopedias, a full-text repository of a wide-ranging and growing list of music reference works, and the Index to Printed Music, a finding aid for searching specific musical works contained in printed collections, sets, and series. Distributed worldwide on RILM’s own platform are the continually updated music encyclopedia MGG Online, RILM Music Encyclopedias, and the Dizionario Enciclopedico Universale della Musica e dei Musicisti (coming in mid-2023). RILM is a joint project of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML); International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM); the International Musicological Society (IMS); and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). www.rilm.org
Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris: The Institut du Monde Arabe was founded to create strong and durable cultural ties while cultivating constructive dialogue between the Arab world, France, and Europe. This cross-discipline space is the central place for the development of cultural projects, in collaboration with institutions, creators and thinkers from the Arab world. The Institut du Monde Arabe is fully anchored in the present. It aims to reflect the Arab world’s current dynamics. It intends to make a distinctive contribution to the institutional cultural landscape. No other organization in the world offers such a wide range of events in connection with the Arab world. Debates, colloquia, seminars, conferences, dance shows, concerts, films, books, meetings, language and culture courses, and large exhibitions all contribute to raising awareness of this unique and vibrant world. https://www.imarabe.org
For more information, please contact:
Michael Lupo Marketing & Media Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 3108 • New York, NY 10016-4309 mlupo@rilm.org • Phone 1 212 817 1992 • www.rilm.org
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The practice of using music incipits for identifying compositions occupies an important place among the many musicological research tools that Barry S. Brook conceived. “The thematic index derives its superiority over non-thematic lists because it can not only arrange a body of music in a systematic order,” he wrote, “but it provides, at the same time, positive identification in a minimum of space and symbols. It does so by the use of the incipit, or musical citation of the opening notes. For most music, an incipit of no more than a dozen pitches is required. When rhythmic values accompany the pitches, the incipit’s uniqueness quotient is astonishingly high” (Notes, 29/3, 1973).
He promoted this idea through the publication of facsimile editions of The Breitkopf thematic calagoue (1967) and The Ringmacher catalogue (1773; 1987); he organized the index to his edition The symphony, 1720–1840 (1986) in the form of a thematic catalogue; and he published the definitive catalogue of thematic catalogues (1973; 2nd ed. 1997). In 1970 he made a proposal for his Plaine and Easie Code, a computer-readable coding system for music incipits in modern or mensural notation, and when RISM initiated the cataloguing of manuscripts in the A/II series he was a strong advocate for the inclusion of the incipit in the bibliographic description of each work.
Brook’s enthusiasm for incipits was sparked when he was writing his dissertation in Paris. His daily correspondence of 1958/59 with his wife Claire—whom he married only a few months before the trip to France—was full of notated incipits for works that he mentioned in his work, La symphonie française dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, and she patiently copied them and organized them in the thematic finder to be included with the final dissertation. His system of organizing incipits was a response to the index of eighteenth-century compositions that Jan LaRue was working on at the time, and the Dictionary of musical themes by Sam Morgenstern and Harold Barlow, both of which he found unsatisfactory.
In February of 1959 he told Claire in a letter about his thoughts for organizing the index:
“I think it will be number of #’s + ♭’s, with minor in with the majors since in some instances it is not immediately apparent from incipit if it is in minor; then subdivided into 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 3+6/8; then in alphabetical order note by note. If you run into LaRue you might ask him to explain his system—or even better ask him how he would do it if he were to start all over again….Then there is that crazy suggestion of Chailley, which he put very strongly, to transpose all themes into C and list them by letters alphabetically. — Take a look at appendix of Morgenstern-Barlow Dictionary of musical themes that we have and you’ll see what he wants. This looks like another big job for you.
e.g. EFGGGGGGGGABGBA = Gossec #1
GCCDGDDEGEEF = Gossec #2
CDCGCDE♭F = Gossec #3” (15 February 1959).
A week later Barry returned to the topic and again asked Claire to have a talk with LaRue about how his finding system works, and whether or not he counted grace notes in alphabetizing. As LaRue was at the time still collecting incipits for his thematic identifier, he warned Claire not to reveal all that he was doing: “A little birdie keeps tweeting me about what Chailley said about keeping everything (i.e. finds) under wraps until after the thèse” (21 February 1959).
As Barry studied scores in Parisian libraries, he found more works that needed to be included in the finding aid for his thèse, and more incipits were included in his trans-Atlantic letters to Claire. Almost every letter he sent her in the late winter and spring of 1959 included a few handwritten incipits, a new consideration about their ordering, or a question about this or that detail.
A page of incipits sent to Claire on 14 March.
Replies from Claire included “just finished cutting a complete set of corrected insipids [sic], wrapped, stored, and next set ready to go” (19 April 1959), and “I refused to allow myself to sit down and write to you until the thematic index was cut and packed for mailing. A sort of external discipline—childish but effective. Just finished tying the string and lettering in the beloved name of my husband, and here I am” (27 March 1959). It seems that Claire worked on his dissertation in New York as hard as Barry did in Paris! It is impressive to see how they worked together on the intricate project of organizing the musical index of incipits, without having instant messaging, a possibility of online conversations in real time, and any other benefit of communications that we take for granted today.
At one point he was frustrated with difficulties in sorting incipits, and described to Claire his idea about an incipit box. Claire was confused by his eccentric idea and asked him to describe his concept better. In his second attempt he drew the design of the box along with his explanation of the concept: “Incipits are arranged in order in the box like file cards in a filing box or fiches in a fichier. Only the box is very flat—just high enough for the incipits to stand up in” (24 March 1959). As the deadline for submitting the dissertation was approaching fast, there was no time for constructing the box.
Brook’s drawing of the incipit box.
On 29 June the thesis—which included some 60 pages of incipits in addition to some 800 items that converted incipits to alphanumeric strings—was “delivered to [Jacques] Chailley at 5:30 in the afternoon”. This might have been one of the earliest dissertations that included such an extensive catalogue of incipits. A week after it was delivered, Claire landed in Paris for their belated honeymoon.
Above, one of Barry and Claire Brook’s wedding photographs from June 1958.
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 →
