by | April 30, 2015 · 6:00 am

“They don’t die, they’re killed”

Sok Duch_22-02-13 copy

As ethnomusicology increasingly engages the topic of genre viability, the rhetoric used to characterize the issues must be carefully considered.

Parallel concerns in the field of linguistics have long involved the term language endangerment, and some linguists have argued for the use of more uncomfortable terms—language death, language murder, language genocide, and even language suicide—in an effort to convey strong messages about the agency and urgency of particular situations.

The current focus of some ethnomusicologists on ecological concepts such as sustainability is encouraging, but few scholars are bold enough to use more violent rhetoric when it is justified.

This according to “‘They don’t die, they’re killed’: The thorny rhetoric around music endangerment and music sustainability” by Catherine Grant (Sound matters 15 April 2015).

Above, Master-musician Sok Duck, 87 years old and one of the very few artists to survive the Khmer Rouge regime, continues to make efforts to pass on his skills to younger-generation Cambodians; below, the video for the SoundFutures research project draws on the ecosystem metaphor to argue for the need to support music sustainability.

Comments Off on “They don’t die, they’re killed”

Filed under Ethnomusicology

Tagged as ,

by | April 27, 2015 · 6:00 am

Bruckner online

Bruckner online

Bruckner online is a large-scale Anton Bruckner Internet portal that includes complete digital copies of all manuscripts and first editions along with information on relevant persons and places. This new joint venture of the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung and the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften aims to  create unique opportunities for research and concert practice.

Currently 730 signatures are available, most with philological commentary. In addition, around 7,000 high-quality color illustrations of sources in Austrian archives are presented.

Comparisons of different versions of the same work are easily facilitated. A compilation of important episodes from the composer’s life and a literature database complete the current phase of the project.

Below, Sergiu Celibidache conducts Bruckner’s seventh symphony.

Comments Off on Bruckner online

Filed under Resources, Romantic era

Tagged as ,

by | April 23, 2015 · 6:00 am

The Gibbons hymnal

Gibbons hymnal

The Gibbons hymnal: Hymns and anthems (London: Novello, 2013) presents the 17 hymn tunes composed by Orlando Gibbons for George Wither’s The hymnes and songs of the church (1623), many of which are still popular today. This is the first modern edition that incorporates Wither’s hymn texts beyond the first verses.

Gibbons composed treble and bass lines for the hymns; the editor, David Skinner, has constructed the inner voices to create a collection of pieces that can be performed either as hymns or as simple anthems. Also in this volume are Gibbons’s ten surviving full anthems.

Below, Gibbons’s O clap your hands, one of the anthems included in the edition.

Comments Off on The Gibbons hymnal

Filed under New editions, Renaissance

Tagged as , , ,

by | April 20, 2015 · 6:00 am

The encyclopaedia of music in Ireland

irish encyclopedia

Edited by Barra Boydell and Harry White, The encyclopaedia of music in Ireland (EMIR; Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2013) is the first comprehensive attempt to chart Irish musical life across recorded history. It also documents Ireland’s musical relations with the world at large, notably in Britain, continental Europe, and North America, and it seeks to identify the agencies through which music has become an enduring expression of Irish political, social, religious, and cultural life.

EMIR is the collective work of 240 contributors whose research has been marshaled by an editorial and advisory board of specialists in the following domains of Irish musical experience: secular and religious music to 1600; art music, 1600–2010; Roman Catholic church music; Protestant church music; popular music; traditional music; organology and iconography; historical musicology; ethnomusicology; the history of recorded sound; music and media; music printing and publishing; and music in Ireland as trade, industry, and profession.

EMIR contains some 2,000 individual entries, which collectively afford an unprecedented survey of the fabric of music in Ireland. It records and evaluates the work of hundreds of individual musicians, performers, composers, teachers, collectors, scholars, ensembles, societies, and institutions throughout Irish musical history, and it comprehends the relationship between music and its political, artistic, religious, educational, and social contexts in Ireland from the early middle ages to the present day.

In its extensive catalogues, discographies, and source materials, EMIR sets in order, often for the first time, the legacy and worklists of performers and composers active in Ireland (or of Irish extraction), notably (but not exclusively) in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It offers to the general reader brief lives of Irish musicians throughout history, and it affords the specialist a detailed retrieval of information on music in Ireland hitherto unavailable or difficult to access.

Below, the nocturne in B flat major by the widely influential John Field, one of the composers covered in the book.

Comments Off on The encyclopaedia of music in Ireland

Filed under Europe, Resources

Tagged as ,

by | April 18, 2015 · 6:00 am

Museo universal, sobre sonidos mexicanos

museo universal

Museo universal, sobre sonidos mexicanos, a virtual museum of pre-Columbian Mexican tlapitzalli (aerophones), is universal because it does not include language-based information; all it requires is Internet access and the ability to use a computer mouse.

Clicking on an illustration takes the user to an enlargement of the image along with a sound file of a brief performance on the instrument and a spectrograph of the sound. Written in the standard HTML markup language, it can operate on all major platforms.

Above, a screenshot of part of the museum; below, a brief demonstration of pre-Columbian Mexican instruments.

Comments Off on Museo universal, sobre sonidos mexicanos

Filed under Antiquity, Instruments

Tagged as , ,

by | April 13, 2015 · 6:00 am

Nudie Musicals in 1970s New York City

 

What is most striking about the nudie musicals that ran in New York in the 1970s—aside from the many naked, jiggling bodies, of course—was just how conventional they were.

Even the raunchiest of the bunch espoused the same basic messages: Human bodies are beautiful! Sex, regardless of with whom, is natural and fun! The seismic cultural shift that is taking place right outside this theater is not threatening or confusing or scary at all!

In marked contrast with XXX theaters, peepshows, and sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat, the sex that nudie musicals featured was simulated—never real—and was almost always packaged in a familiar, age-old format: the musical revue.

This according to “Nudie musicals in 1970s New York City” by Elizabeth L. Wollman (Sound matters 16 June 2014; RILM Abstracts 2014-15971). Wollman’s monograph on this topic is Hard times: The adult musical in 1970s New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Above, one Kenn Duncan’s photographs of the members of the original Broadway cast of Hair, now part of the New York Public Library’s Kenn Duncan Photograph Archive. Below, the finale of Oh! Calcutta!

Comments Off on Nudie Musicals in 1970s New York City

Filed under Dramatic arts

Tagged as , , , ,

by | April 11, 2015 · 6:00 am

Seventeenth-century Italian motets with trombones

motets w trombones

The specification of instruments in vocal-instrumental compositions began in the final decades of the 16th century in Italy and gained momentum in the early decades of the 17th, including in church music. Trombones, in particular, were increasingly specified and often used interchangeably with voices.

Seventeenth-century Italian motets with trombones, edited by D. Linda Pearse, (Middleton: A-R Editions, 2014) is a new edition of concerted motets composed between 1600 and 1640 with explicitly labelled parts for trombones; the works are small scale, containing fewer than eight parts (excluding basso continuo). Unlike other editions of similar repertoire, the works selected here provide a representative sample of a significant repertoire and present music of high quality by lesser-known composers whose output is largely unavailable.

Below, Carlo Fillago’s Confitemini Domino, one of the motets included in this edition, performed by ¡Sacabuche!

Comments Off on Seventeenth-century Italian motets with trombones

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , ,

by | April 9, 2015 · 6:00 am

Folkways in Wonderland

Frishkopf fig. 1

Folkways in Wonderland (FiW) is a cyberworld for musical discovery with social interaction, allowing avatar-represented users to explore selections from the Smithsonian Folkways world music collection while communicating through text and audio channels. FiW is built on Open Wonderland, a framework for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds.

FiW is populated with track samples from Folkways Recordings. Since acquiring the label in 1987, Smithsonian Folkways has expanded and digitized the Folkways collection while enhancing and organizing its metadata, all of which are now available electronically.

FiW is collaborative: multiple avatars can enter the space, audition track samples, contribute their own sounds (speech or other) to the soundscape, and also communicate through text chat. Nearby users can hear music together, as well as hear and see each other. Wonderland also provides in-world collaborative applications, such as a shared web browser or whiteboard. Thus users are provided with a real-time, immersive, audiovisual representation of the virtual sociomusical environment, together with multiple means of communicating within it.

This according to “Folkways in Wonderland” by Rasika Ranaweera, Michael Frishkopf, and Michael Cohen (Sound matters 3 March 2015).

Above, a screenshot of a typical session (click to enlarge); below, a brief demonstration.

Comments Off on Folkways in Wonderland

Filed under Resources, World music

Tagged as , ,

by | April 7, 2015 · 6:00 am

Billie Holiday’s first session

 

In a 1956 interview, Billie Holiday recalled her first recording session, with Benny Goodman’s band in 1933:

“I got there, and I was afraid to sing in the mike…I was scared to death of it.”

The pianist, Buck Washington, leveraged the fact that the two of them were black, while most of the band members were white: “You’re not going to let these people think you’re a square, are you? Come on, sing it!”

When asked what she thinks of that recording now, she replied “I get a big bang out of Your mother’s son-in-law. It sounds like I’m doing comedy—my voice sounds so high and funny!”

This radio interview is transcribed as “The Willis Conover interview” in The Billie Holiday companion: Seven decades of commentary (New York: G. Schirmer. 1997, pp. 62–70).

Today is Holiday’s 100th birthday! Below, that first recording.

Comments Off on Billie Holiday’s first session

Filed under Jazz and blues

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | April 5, 2015 · 6:00 am

BOSS

boss

 

Launched in 2014, BOSS: The biannual online-journal of Springsteen studies publishes scholarly peer-reviewed essays pertaining to Bruce Springsteen.

This open-access journal seeks to encourage consideration of Springsteen’s body of work primarily through the political, economic, and sociocultural factors that have influenced his music and shaped its reception.

BOSS welcomes broad interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to Springsteen’s songwriting and performance. The journal aims to secure a place for Springsteen Studies in the contemporary academy.

Below, Born in the USA, the subject of the first article in the first issue.

Comments Off on BOSS

Filed under New periodicals, Popular music

Tagged as ,