by | January 24, 2024 · 6:00 pm

Mindfulness and music learning

The practice of mindfulness can stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the autonomic nervous system that counteracts the effects of stress in our minds and bodies. Research on mindfulness and meditation has shown that these practices have the capacity to decrease the size of the amygdala, known as the brain’s “panic button” in charge of responses associated with fear, anxiety and strong emotions.

Mindfulness has become increasingly common in the workplace, the healthcare profession, and many school programs.  In recent years, the incorporation of deep breathing techniques, mindful movements, and guided visualizations has also been used at all levels of music teaching, allowing students to leave stressors behind while fully engaging in the learning experience. For instance, when music students learn to utilize their breath as an anchor, they learn to connect to the present moment, to reflect on their playing with self-compassion, and to nurture deeper listening skills.

Some of the possible benefits of mindfulness for musicians include:

Improvement of students’ mood during lessons, making the learning process a positive experience.

Increased body awareness and mind/body connection, promoting healthy technique.

Decreased tension while playing. Increased active listening, shaping, phrasing and musicality.

Improvement in capacity to focus and concentrate during lessons and performances.

Improvement in memorization and reduction in performance anxiety.

Increased self-compassion and kindness in the face of mistakes.

Celebrate International Education Day (January 24) by reading “Mindfulness in music teaching: Practical applications to piano lessons” by Fernanda Nieto (MTNA e-journal 14.3 [February 2023], 28-29). Find it in RILM Abstracts with Full Text.

Below are further ideas from the text related to mindfulness and piano instruction.

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by | January 23, 2024 · 6:00 am

New resources for RILM Music Encyclopedias

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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by | January 19, 2024 · 6:00 am

Turkmen genocide and the Geök Tépé muqam

The 1881 genocidal massacre of Turkmen people by imperial Russian troops in the village of Geök Tépé forever altered the musical culture of the Muslim nomadic tribes of Central Asia. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Tsarist Russia’s thirst for conquering new territories fueled a desire to access commercial routes and the warm water ports of the Indian Ocean. Occupying the Turkmen lands was as a primary goal as the Turkmen nomadic lifestyle in the area presented a threat to the stability of the southern part of the Russian empire. Russians decided to attack the Tekke Turkmens who lived in Akhal to subjugate them. The vast conquest was accompanied by the mass killing of people to gain access to their lands and resources while expanding the Russian empire. In the battle fought at Geök Tépé, approximately 15,000 Turkmens, mostly innocent civilians, were killed while the Russian army suffered only around 400 casualties.

In the absence of written history, Turkmen collective memory predominantly relied on songs and melodies. For the Turkmen, the most important events, including the massacre, were remembered in music passed down from generation to generation, thereby building a collective cultural identity. The melancholic instrumental and vocal muqam performed by traditional musicians have for generations expressed collective grief. Turkmen muqams include three main categories: music inspired by real events in society, heroic and lyrical muqams, and descriptive muqams. In the music inspired by real events in Turkmen society, bagşys performed the role of historians or narrators of the Turkmen history and communicated historical facts through their music. These muqams are often found in times of war conflict, or injustice. The Geök Tépé muqam is likely the most famous of them all.

Learn more in “Geok Tepe muğam: A musical narrative of Turkmen massacre in 1881” by Arman Goharinasab and Azadeh Latifkar, an essay included in the volume Music and genocide (Peter Lang, 2015).  Find it in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.

Below is a video featuring a contemporary muqam performance by Zuleyha Kakayewa and Hatyja Owezowa on television show in Turkmenistan.

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by | January 16, 2024 · 6:00 am

All hail the queens: Women in rap (1984-97)

Roxanne Shante on the mic.

Women have been part of hip hop expression from its early days, primarily as part of MC crews such as the Funky Four Plus One and Sugar Hill’s female group, Sequence. For most of hip hop’s recorded history, however, women MCs were mostly seen as novelty acts, with a few exceptions. In the mid-1980s, some female artists were popularized momentarily through answer songs, which ridiculed popular songs by male acts. These answer songs included Roxanne Shante’s Roxanne’s revenge (responding to UTFO’s 1984 song Roxanne, Roxanne) and Pebblee Poo’s Fly guy (responding to the Boogie Boys’ 1985 song A fly girl).

MC Lyte strikes a pose.
The early rap group, Sequence.

Some of the most enduring female hip hop acts released premiere albums in 1986. Salt-N-Pepa was the most commercially successful hip hop group with its first album, Hot, cool and vicious. Queen Latifah emphasized strong social messages and women’s empowerment on her first album, All hail the queen. MC Lyte recorded her first album, Lyte as a feather, at this time. Many women artists who appeared or recorded during the early 1990s adopted the extant masculine-oriented hip hop images prevalent in hardcore rap music. MC Lyte, for example, recorded a hardcore album in 1993 entitled Ain’t no other–the album’s first hit single, Ruffneck, was MC Lyte’s first gold-selling single. After the decline of gangsta rap music in the mid- to late 1990s, women remained on the periphery of mainstream hip hop, apart from the occasional pop hit, such as the platinum-selling Atlanta-based artist Da Brat’s Funkdafied (1994).

Cover art for Lil’ Kim’s Hardcore and Foxy Brown’s Ill na na.
“Supa dupa fly” Missy Elliot.

By the late 1990s, artists such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown publicly celebrated or exploited female sexuality through explicit lyrics and widespread publicity campaigns that presented these scantily clad artists as sex symbols. For the most part, however, women artists failed to receive respect within the hip hop community as competent MCs and recording artists, although achieving mainstream success. Many of the writers and producers for the female groups were men, particularly through the late 1990s. The year 1998, however, was pivotal for women in hip hop, especially as rapper-producer-songwriter Missy Elliot began gaining notoriety with her debut album, Supa dupa fly (1997).

Learn more in The Garland encyclopedia of world music. The United States and Canada (2013). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

Below are some videos from this early period of hip featuring women rappers. First up is the music video for Queen Latifah’s Ladies first, followed by Roxanne Shante performing Roxanne’s revenge (on VHS tape from around 1984!), and a 1985 recording of Pebblee Poo’s Fly guy.

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by | January 12, 2024 · 6:00 am

AI voice and the posthuman

AI voice, as a groundbreaking phenomenon, highlights two possible meanings that are often not problematized: the voice embedded into AI-based devices and the voice created using AI algorithms. To clarify the distinctions and the intersections of these two meanings, approaches inspired by media archaeology and social constructionism may be used to explore a social phenomenon constructed by the interaction of a discursive level of representation and a non-discursive level of material practice and operation.

The interaction of these two levels results in a tension between anthropocentrism and posthumanism–a characteristic of AI voice. Two case studies represent this tension, namely the commercial of the smart speaker Amazon Alexa and the phenomenon of voice cloning. While the first example demonstrates how at a discursive level the “voice in the machine” is represented to personify AI technology, the second, which consists in the possibility of reproducing the features of an embodied and personal voice, provides an example of how the materialization of that cultural idea depends on the technical possibilities and material practices required by data-driven algorithms.

Read on in “AI voice between anthropocentrism and posthumanism: Alexa and voice cloning” by Domenico Napolitano (Journal of interdisciplinary voice studies VII/1 [August 2022], 35-49).

Below is a video that jokingly explores the voice behind the Amazon Alexa.

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by | January 9, 2024 · 6:00 am

The opera house as architectural space

While the term “opera house”, as a designation of a specific architecturally and institutionally consolidated venue for musical theater works, differs in content rather strictly from the genre-oriented term “opera”–both terms, at least in the European and American language areas, have been closely linked. Part of this is due to an overlap in everyday language and administrative terms where the word “opera” has been used in the official naming of musical theater institutions since the 19th century. Even today, terms such as “state opera”, “state theater”, “music theater”, and “opera” indicate the complex history of the opera house and its relationship to theater construction, urban planning, the opera genre, music theater composition, and the direction of state and city institutions.

Conversely, a convergence of the two terms can also be seen in the social and cultural science-oriented historiography of musical theater, which subsumes under opera not only aspects of composition history but also the institutional and architectural developments of opera houses. This is first and foremost due to the epoch-changing and distinctive social contours of the opera as a courtly or bourgeois institution, whose practical norms and aesthetic innovations can be linked to the architecturally fixed spatial layout of opera houses.

Additionally, comprehensive aesthetic reconceptions of musical theater such as Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk also represent important impulses for greater consideration of the opera house as an architectural space. While more recent scientific emphasis on the symbolism and practical theatrical relevance of opera house architecture can be explained via the turn to cultural studies and praxeology, the reorientation of popular opera, evident since the post-war period, was based on individual venues or with a strong concentration on opera as a spatially bound artistic practice due to the reconstruction of opera houses after World War II.

Read the entire article on the opera house as part of the brand new Free Article feature on MGG Online. New free articles will be updated regularly.

Below is a video on the architectural and cultural history of the Teatro alla Scala (pictured above), a well-known opera house in Milan, Italy. If you don’t speak Italian, turn on the captions function for an English translation.

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by | January 5, 2024 · 6:00 pm

Earl Scruggs, bluegrass banjo innovator

Earl Scruggs, born in North Carolina on January 6, 1924, taught himself the five-string banjo at the age of four and developed his trademark three-finger picking style before he reached his teens. At age 15, Scruggs was playing with a band that performed on a local radio station in Knoxville, Tennessee, and by 1944, he had joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, where he met his future partner, guitarist Lester Flatt. Scruggs played with Monroe’s band until January 1948.

Although the genre was yet to be named, the addition of Scruggs to Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys provided the crowning moment in the definition of bluegrass. Scruggs astounded everyone with an extraordinary banjo style that allowed him to roll out a rapid barrage of notes that nevertheless sounded out the melody as clearly as the fiddle. What is now known as “Scruggs style” banjo playing became the critical component of Bill Monroe’s distinctive sound that would eventually be called bluegrass. In a 2012 interview, Scruggs described his love of the banjo saying, “It produces the sound that my ear’s looking for. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it, but I like the sound that I get out of [the] banjo. I feel at home with it when I take it out of the case and start–you know, when you start with another instrument, they all have their feel, and playing the same instrument, you know what it’s going to feel like when you take it out of the case and start to perform.”

Read on in Encyclopedia of music in the 20th century (2013, RILM Music Encyclopedias) and Homegrown music: Discovering bluegrass by Stephanie P. Ledgin (Westport: Praeger, 2004).

Earl Scruggs’ birthday is January 6! Below he performs Foggy mountain breakdown with some friends.

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by | January 2, 2024 · 6:00 pm

Joni Mitchell and 1960’s women’s sexual freedom

Born in Fort MacLeod, Alberta in Canada, a young Joni Mitchell (born Joan Anderson) moved to North Battleford, Saskatchewan with her parents shortly after World War II. Inspired by an older friend, she begged her parents at age 7 to allow her to take piano lessons which lasted for a year and a half. After moving to Saskatoon, Mitchell contracted polio, which she recovered from with the care of her family and her interest in music. As she recalled in a Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe in 1979, “I guess I really started singing when I had polio. Neil [Young] and I both got polio in the same Canadian epidemic. I was nine, and they put me in a polio ward over Christmas. They said I might not walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn’t go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud. When the nurse came into the room I would sing louder. The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham. That was the first time I started to sing for people.”

In her teens, Mitchell scraped together enough money to buy a ukelele and performed regularly at parties and coffeehouses in Saskatoon. Following high school, in 1964, Mitchell attended the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, but only for a year. Instead, she preferred performing at a local Calgary coffeehouse called The Depression—she moved to Toronto soon after in search of success as a folk singer. In 1966, she managed to secure a spot on the bill of the Newport Folk Festival. It was at this time that her marriage to fellow folk singer Chuck Mitchell ended, and with nothing to tie her down, Mitchell moved to New York City to be closer to venues on the U.S. eastern seaboard. With the recording of The urge for going by Tom Rush and other cover versions by a variety of artists, she was able to get bookings west to Chicago and south to Florida. New York was still elusive but with the help of manager Elliot Roberts she landed gigs in town. While performing in Coconut Grove, Florida she met David Crosby of The Byrds who was impressed enough with her talent to convince Reprise Records to record and release the Joni Mitchell album in 1968.

Mitchell’s early records mapped the sexual terrain of the mid-1960s–the period during which premarital sex lost its taboo status and became a normative part of maturation and development–from a woman’s perspective. Mitchell’s songs employed a strong storytelling component, putting into popular circulation narratives of sexual freedom that engaged with emerging social practices in a manner consistent with countercultural values while helping to legitimize the new choices available to young women of the 1960s.

Learn more in “Feeling free and female sexuality: The aesthetics of Joni Mitchell” by Marilyn Adler Papayanis (Popular music and society XXXIII/5 (December 2010) 641–656. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2010-7782] and in an entry on Joni Mitchell in The Canadian pop music encyclopedia (2020) in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

Below is Joni Mitchell’s 1969 performance of Chelsea Morning, a song addressing the moral codes governing so-called appropriate sexual conduct for women.

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by | December 29, 2023 · 6:00 am

Lionel Hampton brings the beat

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.

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by | December 22, 2023 · 6:00 am

A Christmas ritual of Colombia’s Afro-Andean community

Every year from Christmas to Epiphany, the communities descended from the African slaves who mined gold for the Spaniards celebrate the Adoraciones al Niño-Diós in the Andean valleys of Cauca in southwestern Colombia.

The celebrants sing and dance until dawn in front of a creche set up in one of the village houses. A group of six musicians, unusual because it includes violins, accompanies the women who are the singers and the leaders of the ritual.

The tradition is documented on the CD Colombie: Adoration à l’enfant-Dieu (Département du Cauca) (VDE-Gallo 1349 [2011]).

Revisiting this classic Bibliolore post which originally appeared in December 2017. Happy Holidays from RILM!

Below is a brief documentary on Auroras al Amanecer, the group featured in the recordings.

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