Blues magazines like Living blues, Real blues, and Blues revue attest to the continuing vitality of a genre that dates at least back to the 1910s, when the first blues songs were published. Unlike the recording companies that capitalized on the “blues craze” of the Roaring Twenties, these magazines are interested in all forms of African American roots music—including sacred and other secular traditions—and their modern counterparts, including zydeco, gospel, and so on, fostering a thriving community of enthusiasts.
Like postage stamps, musical subjects depicted on money represent a type of iconography that is controlled by governmental organizations; their didactic goals are minimal, and their political role is paramount. Most often they involve the celebration of a national composer whose work embodied and enacted a national character—but their symbolism occasionally misfires.
For example, the above Romanian 50,000 lei banknote pictures George Enescu on the front alongside some recognizable musical images, but the depiction of a Bucegi-Mountains rock formation known in Romania as The Sphinx, which appears to be a reference to the character of the Sphinx in the composer’s opera Oedipe, was judged to be sufficiently puzzling to merit a redesign omitting the image.
This according to “Music on money: State legitimation and cultural representation” by Marin Marian-Bălaşa (Music in artXXVIII 1–2, pp. 173–189.
The Music Council of Australia launched the Journal of music research online (ISSN 1836-8336) in 2009. The journal intends to publish English-language articles on composition, early music, ethnomusicology, gender studies, interdisciplinary studies, music technologies, musicology, pedagogy, performance practice, and popular music; its first issue presents articles on Ravel and the influence of online social networking on music making and higher education.
Res musica (ISSN 1736-8553), a peer-reviewed annual journal, was launched by the Eesti Muusikateaduse Selts and the Eesti Muusika- ja Teatriakadeemia in 2009; its editor-in-chief is Urve Lippus (above). The journal aims to be a widely disseminated forum for Estonian researchers in all areas of music, making a unique contribution to the international discipline by synthesizing German- and English-language scholarly traditions with Estonian musicological discourse. Articles in volume 1 focused on historical studies of Baltic music, pedagogy, and musical life.
The České Muzeum Hudby in Prague launched its semiannual journal Musicalia: Časopis Českého muzea hudby (ISSN 1803-7828) in late 2009. Founded in 1976, the museum owns about 750,000 items including music and nonmusic manuscripts, books, iconography, composers’ estates, instruments, sound recordings, and press clippings; the Muzeum Bedřicha Smetany and the Muzeum Antonína Dvořáka are under its auspices. Musicalia, which is published bilingually in Czech and English, is devoted to sources for the history of music and musical culture and to information about the museum’s acquisitions, exhibitions, conferences, and publications. The journal is edited by Jana Vojtěšková and Dagmar Štefancová; its first issue includes essays about Martinů, Dvořák, Vinzenz Maschek, the Missale Olomucense, and a piano played by Mozart.
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Conference reports illuminate intellectual history with a window on a particular moment. Since conference papers present the most current scholarship, a collection from a single conference provides a glimpse of the state of research on many topics at that time.
The choral scholar (ISSN 1948-3058), a peer-reviewed journal launched in 2009 by the National Collegiate Choral Organization, is dedicated to “presenting outstanding scholarship related to the study and performance of choral music”—including such topics as conducting and pedagogy, in addition to musicological research; it also welcomes studies that directly involve choral music from fields other than music. The journal’s first issue includes articles on vocal physiology, performance practice, repertoire, and compositional style.
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.
In 2009 the Sankt-Peterburgskaâ Gosudarstvennaâ Konservatoriâ imeni N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova launched Opera Musicologica (ISSN 2075-4078). This peer-reviewed quarterly journal aims to provide a platform for dialogues between different schools and areas of musical scholarship, to present a wide spectrum of topics and methods, and to give space to understudied areas, new scholarly problems, and interdisciplinary approaches. Edited by the scholar of twentieth-century American music Olga Manulkina, Opera Musicologica is published in Russian with Russian and English abstracts. The first issue presents archival documents and essays highlighting the Conservatory’s history on the eve of its 150th anniversary; the issue’s table of contents and English abstracts are here.
Before RILM set up online forms for sending us citations and abstracts, all submissions were made by writing or typing on forms like the one pictured above. We had forms in all necessary languages, color-coded for sorting. As was the case with most manual typewriters, corrections and diacritics all had to be added by hand. After we received completed forms, everything had to be retyped into the database (and, for non-English titles and abstracts, translated into English) at the International Center.
Over the years, countless volunteers have made such contributions to RILM, including some very distinguished figures in musicology and ethnomusicology. The example above was submitted by the preeminent Spanish musicologist José López-Calo (b.1922) for the retrospective project undertaken by RILM’s founder Barry S. Brook in the 1970s—a project that finally reached fruition with the publication of Speaking of Music: Music conferences, 1835–1966 in 2004.
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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 →
