Since 1914 a Winter Carnival has been held in February in the picturesque resort town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to promote skiing and celebrate the season. Events include ski races, ski jumping, dogsled pulls, skijoring, and fireworks.
The main attraction, though, is the performance of the Steamboat Springs High School Band in the parade held on the last day of the carnival.
Every year since 1935, members of the band have donned red wool uniforms, fixed plastic mouthpieces to their instruments and lubricated them with no-freeze valve oil, attached shortened skis to their boots, and skied in formation as they played.
This according to “The Steamboat Springs High School Ski Band 1935–2005” by Daniel S. Isbell (Journal of historical research in music education XXVIII/1 [October 2006] pp. 21–37). Below, the band in performance.
The Bizet catalogue is a searchable online list of Georges Bizet’s works, providing essential information about the history and content of each one.
This open-access website gives information on manuscript and printed sources and provides documentary materials relating to the composition, performance, and publication of each work. It is intended to provide a full historical documentation of Bizet’s work as composer and transcriber.
Popular records often include accidents, indicating something about the flexibility of musical practices and the limits of theories. Musical hooks provide useful test-cases because they are normally considered the least accidental part of a song.
One imagines the hook emerging fully formed in a moment of inspiration—the catchy phrase that comes into a songwriter’s head—or at least of calculation: But hooks sometimes incorporate accidents or happen accidentally. If hooks are less than completely determinate, then every aspect of a popular record must be subject to contingency.
This according to “Accidents, hooks, and theory” by Charles Kronengold (Popular music XXIV/3 [October 2005] pp. 381–397).
Above and below, Pérez Prado’s Cherry pink and apple blossom white, one of the examples cited in the article. The intended hook was the prominent trumpet lip slurs; the accidental hook, which made the record a number one U.S. hit in 1955, was Prado’s occasional interpolated vocalizations.
On this Valentine’s Day let’s look at how two ways of performing Cole Porter’s So in love illustrate how musical language can be used strategically to represent and signify constructs of gender and power.
The customary torch-song presentation, as used in the 1953 Hollywood film version of Kiss me Kate directed by George Sidney, is a traditional patriarchal narrative; k.d. lang’s 1991 video cover, by contrast, clearly defies traditional societal gender values.
This according to “Genre, gender, and convention revisited: k.d. lang’s cover of Cole Porter’s So in love” by Lori Burns (repercussions VII–VIII [spring–fall 1999–2000] pp. 299–325).
Above, a still from lang’s video; below, Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel in the 1953 film; further below, lang’s version.
Launched byEquinoxin 2014, Journal of world popular music is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes research and scholarship on recent issues and debates surrounding international popular musics, also known as world music, global pop, world beat, or, more recently, world music 2.0.
The journal provides a forum for exploring the manifestations and impacts of post-globalizing trends, processes, and dynamics surrounding these musics today. It adopts an open-minded perspective, including in its scope any local popularized musics of the world, commercially available music of non-Western origin, musics of ethnic minorities, and contemporary fusions or collaborations with local traditional or roots musics with Western pop and rock musics.
Placing specific emphasis on contemporary, interdisciplinary, and international perspectives, the journal’s special features include empirical research and scholarship on the global creative and music industries, the participants of world music, the musics themselves, and their representations in all media forms today, among other relevant themes and issues, alongside explorations of recent ideas and perspectives from popular music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, musicology, communication, media and cultural studies, sociology, geography, art and museum studies, and other fields with a scholarly focus on world music.
Along with regular articles that focus on the study of world music in all its forms from a variety of academic and other perspectives, the journal also features alternative means of representing research and scholarship through creative and visual means such as photography, poetry, and artwork, and audio and video means through an accompanying website. It also includes reviews of relevant books, special issues, magazines, CDs, websites, DVDs, online music releases, exhibitions, artwork, radio programs, and world music festivals.
Below, a performance by Yothu Yindi, the subject of one of the articles in the inaugural issue.
The Deák–Szentes manuscript includes the most important melodies of the second part of the hymn text collection Cantionale catholicum, compiled by the Franciscan János Kájoni (Ioan Căianu) in 1676, and revised by Balás Ágoston for a new edition in 1719.
These tunes preserve the Székely hymn tradition of Csík, Transylvania, in the customary notation of the 18th century. Along with the songs from Kájoni’s Cantionale, the manuscript contains Masses, Kyries, Baroque hymns, and traditional hymn texts.
Although today the manuscript is incomplete, it has been reconstructed with the help of earlier copies for a new edition: A Deák-Szentes kézirat/The Deák–Szentes manuscript, edited by Réka Kővári (Budapest: Magyarok Nagyasszonya Ferences Rendtartomány, 2013).
Below, a selection from the Cantionale catholicum.
Throughout Bob Marley’s life, and perhaps even more since his death at the age of 36, his music has demonstrated a unique ability to combine with almost any cultural setting, no matter how different the elements might at first appear. Through his adaptable yet enduring musical messages, he represents an especially articulate type of singer-songwriter.
Marley released a large quantity of introspective, autobiographical material at the height of his success, providing a deep understanding of who he was and what he hoped to achieve through his life and music. Salient themes include protest, revolution, love, hate, biblical concepts, and Rastafari culture.
This according to The words and music of Bob Marley by David Vlado Moskowitz (Westport: Praeger, 2007).
Today would have been Marley’s 70th birthday! Above, a photo by Ueli Frey from 1980, a year before Marley’s death; below, performing with The Wailers the same year.
The song of the hermit thrush, a common North American songbird, is renowned for its apparent musicality and has attracted the attention of musicians and ornithologists for more than a century.
Recent research has shown that hermit thrush songs, like much human music, use pitches that are mathematically related by simple integer ratios and follow the harmonic series. These findings add to a small but growing body of research showing that a preference for small-integer ratio intervals is not unique to humans; such findings are particularly relevant to the ongoing nature/nurture debate about whether musical predispositions such as the preference for consonant intervals are biologically or culturally driven.
This according to “Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music” by Emily Doolittle, et al. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America CXI/46 [18 November 2014] pp. 16616–16621).
Below, a hermit thrush video that will fascinate your cats; more recordings, including slowed-down ones, are here.
He subsequently worked to infuse traditional music into mainstream culture and, in so doing, to publicize his interpretation of American culture and society—an interpretation that placed the American people, a category that included racial and ethnic minorities as well as the economically dispossessed and politically disenfranchised, at the center of the nation’s identity.
During the 1930s and 1940s he pursued this goal by developing radio programs that highlighted the music of American traditional communities. These included shows designed for children, including Folk Music of America, which aired weekly on CBS radio’s American School of the Air.
Lomax used this program as a forum to teach children about American cultural and political democracy by highlighting the music of socially, economically, and racially marginalized communities, often including guests from these groups to sing and explain musical traditions on the air.
An examination of the principles that motivated Folk Music of America, along with the artists, songs, and commentary that Lomax included, reveals a strong connection between the ideas of cultural pluralism that emerged during the World War I era and popular constructs of Americanism that developed during the later decades of the 20th century. Ultimately, Lomax’s radio work helped to lay the foundation for the multicultural movement that developed during the early 1970s.
This according to “Broadcasting diversity: Alan Lomax and multiculturalism” by Rachel C. Donaldson (Journal of popular culture XLVI/1 [February 2013] pp. 59–78).
Today would have been Lomax’s 100th birthday! Below, an example of his move to PBS in 1990.
Born Josep Andreu i Lassere in Catalunya in 1896, Charlie Rivel’s career began at the age of three and continued until two years before his death in 1983.
He joined a circus as an acrobat when he was 15, and performed in a successful trapeze act with his brother Polo.
In the late 1910s Lassere developed a trapeze act based on Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character. The act was enormously popular, and reportedly was admired by Chaplin himself; along with this new-found fame, Lassere adopted the stage name Charlie (the provenance of Rivel is unknown).
The late 1930s brought fame and fortune, but he was so unnerved by the events of World War II that he stopped performing; his 1952 comeback was hugely successful, and he performed as a living legend almost until his death.
While he sometimes incorporated a concertina into his act, he is most often associated with the guitar; in his later years he typically entered dragging a chair and carrying his guitar, which he used for a parody of flamenco.
This according to “Concertina clowns. III: Charlie Rivel” by Göran Rahm (Concertina world CDLX [December 2014] pp. 22–27).
Above, Lassere as Rivel in 1967; below, his classic opening routine sometime in the 1970s.
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 →
