The women herders of aylluQaqachaka in highland Bolivia sing to their llamas in various ceremonial occasions during the year, and also on a more pragmatic daily basis to accompany their herding activities.
But their songs have other, more magical functions, involving the increase of the flocks, when they become a part of the body-centered knowledge and practices that comprise a female aesthetics and poetics of creation that parallels men’s more destructive activities in war.
Many of the principal singers are elderly midwives, and in a lifetime of learning they practice the art of wrapping their animals in song. This wrapping in song also serves to transform and domesticate the spirits of dead enemies, embodied in the animals, and to rebirth them into human society.
Key concepts such as jawi, that glosses as both fleece and river, are ontological expressions of flowing musical sound in woven substance. A mating song for the female llamas, a marking song for the ewes, and a song of blessing for the female llamas reveal how specific musical and lyrical structures express the women’s preoccupations with the generation of beautiful fleece and its weaving into sung wrappings.
This according to “Midwife singers: Llama-human obstetrics in some songs to the animals by Andean women” by Denise Y. Arnold, an essay included in Quechua verbal artistry: The inscription of Andean voices/Arte expresivo Quechua: La inscripción de voces andinas (Aachen: Shaker media, 2004, pp. 145–179).
Below, a visiting delegation passes through Chucura.
Distinguished for his achievements in both the jazz and classical worlds, Joe Wilder performed as lead trumpet and soloist with Lionel Hampton, Jimmy Lunceford, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie.
He was also a pioneer who broke down racial barriers. Wilder was a founding member of the Symphony of the New World, the first racially integrated orchestra in the U.S., where he played first trumpet; the first African American to hold a principal chair in a Broadway show orchestra; and one of the first African Americans to join a major network studio orchestra
Wilder’s modesty and ability to perform in many musical genres may have prevented him from achieving popular recognition, but his legacy and contributions to music and culture are far-reaching.
This according to Softly, with feeling: Joe Wilder and the breaking of barriers in American music by Edward Berger (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).
Today is Wilder’s 100th birthday! Above, performing in 2006 (photo by Professor Bop, licensed under CC BY 2.0); below, playing the jazz standard Cherokee in 1956.
Each Olympic Games is an excellent opportunity for the host country to showcase its soft power; we saw the pop music elements in the opening ceremony of London 2012, a combination of local and international performances in the opening ceremony of Seoul 1988, as well as the German works presented by the Nazis through the music competition of Berlin 1936. Of course, the Olympics cannot be divorced from politics, and the Los Angeles, Moscow, and Munich Games were inevitably colored by the Cold War. What role did music play in this? And finally, what is the relationship between the individual and the times in these grand narratives?
-Mu Qian, Editor, RILM
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Porta Navarro, Amparo, José María Peñalver Vilar, and Remigi Morant Navasquillo. “Music of the inaugural ceremony of London 2012: A performance among bells”, International review of the aesthetics and sociology of music 44/2 (December 2013) 253–276. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-15376]
Abstract: The music of the Olympic Games, especially that of their grandiose rituals and ceremonies, can be considered a great study laboratory due to its relevance, selection of contents, production forms, diffusion, and also because of its capacity of being a synthesis of mediums, supports, and musical tendencies. This research studies the music of the inaugural ceremony of London 2012, and examines it by means of musical analysis and also content revision, studying the music that is listened to and its characteristics, the way it is built up, and its effects and tendencies. This ceremony would not make any sense without music. Music acts as an emotional catalyst and also as a metronome of the dynamism of the show and, finally, it shows its capacity to persuade, to move, and to become a symbol of identity, achievements, and agreements among cultures.
Dilling, Margaret. “The script, sound, and sense of the Seoul Olympic ceremonies”, Contemporary directions: Korean folk music engaging the twentieth century and beyond, ed. by Nathan Hesselink. Korea research monograph (Berkeley: University of California, 2001) 173–234. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2001-10756]
Abstract: From the outset, the scenario planning committee for the 1988 Games of the XXIV Olympiad in Seoul identified three crucial desiderata: a universal theme, a distinctly Korean approach, and a sense of something new and different. Musically, the first goal was met with the official song, Hand in hand with music by Georgio Moroder and lyrics by Tom Whitlock; the second by the inclusion of modified examples of indigenous Korean music and dance genres; and the third by the inclusion of music by contemporary Korean composers. The processes through which these elements were implemented are explored through interviews with those involved; particular attention is given to the controversies surrounding new works by Kang Sukhi and Hwang Byung-ki (Hwang Byeong-gi).
Gilbert, Janet Monteith. “New music and myth: The Olympic Arts Festival of Contemporary Music”, Perspectives of new music 22/1–2 (fall–winter–spring–summer 1983–1984) 478–482. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 1984-14276]
Abstract: Report on the festival held in Los Angeles in June 1984. Many of the works programmed expressed a common theme: the creation of mythological or cosmic music produced or supported by a sophisticated technology.
Kuharskij, Vasilij Feodos’evič. “Vospevaja idei mira, družby, gumanizma…”, Sovetskaâ muzyka: Organ Soûza sovetskih kompozitorov i Sektora iskusstv Narkomprosa 6 (1980) 2–5. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1980-20149]
Abstract: Deals with the tasks and goals of the cultural program for the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. Surveys the musical undertakings, concert programs, and the participation of well-known Soviet performers.
Wichmann, Siegfried, ed. World cultures and modern art: The encounter of 19th and 20th century European art and music with Asia, Africa, Oceania, Afro- and Indo-America—Exhibition on the occasion of the games of the 20th Olympiad, Munich 1972: June 16 to September 30, Haus der Kunst (München: Bruckmann, 1972). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1974-43]
Abstract: Abbreviated version of the German exhibition catalogue. Contains several additional contributions. The relevant chapters are Orientalism in music, Asia and music since Debussy, Music of Negroes and American Indians, and Sound Centre (an attempt at a synthesis of global music cultures). Contributions are by Ramón Pelinsky, Claus Raab, and Dieter Schnebel.
Lazzaro, Federico. “800 mètres d’André Obey: Drame sportif, grec et musical”, Les cahiers de la Société Québécoise de Recherche en Musique 20/1 (printemps 2019) 57–80. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 2019-23489]
Abstract: 800 mètres is a sports drama born out of the stadium for the stadium, staged at Roland-Garros in 1941 together with Aeschylus’s The suppliants. The music for both plays, now lost, was by Arthur Honegger. Inspired by Greek tragedies in both its formal and dramaturgical conception, 800 mètres is the translation into words, gestures, and sounds of the thoughts that André Obey expressed at the time of the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Obey was one of the main actors in the reflection on the relationship between music and sport. In promoting sports among French intellectuals, Obey advocated for the birth of an Olympic art and elaborated a rich metaphorical portrait of sport as music. Based on textual, iconographic, and sound archival documents, the genesis of 800 mètres is reconstituted, how this drama stages Obey’s philhellenic ideas is shown, and the complex musical-dramatic conception of the work is discussed.
Heinze, Carsten. “Der Kunstwettbewerb Musik im Rahmen der Olympischen Spiele 1936”, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 62/1 (2005) 32–51. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2005-1103]
Abstract: Although the Olympic Art Competitions were introduced in 1912, they generated little public interest until 1932. The Nazis were determined to set new standards with this concomitant event in 1936 and used the forum to present to the world the towering achievements of German art, which in the meantime had been purged of all elements considered degenerate. The exploitative process is reconstructed as it pertained to the musical segment of the competition, which culminated in a grand Olympic concert, the first of its kind. Leaving nothing to chance in their erection of a new monumental style, the Nazis awarded medals to each of the four German works submitted.
Jiang, Zhiguo. “Taiwan wuqu hesheng yanjiu”, Zhongguo yinyuexue/Musicology in China 1:82 (2006) 32–42. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2006-3847]
Abstract: Analyzes harmonic material in Jiang Wenye’s orchestral work Taiwan wuqu (Taiwan dances), op. 1 (1934). Jiang Wenye (1910–83) was a pioneer among Chinese composers using modern composition techniques, and his was the first Chinese work to receive a top prize in international competition, at the Olympic International Music Competition in Berlin, 1936.
Although the notion that Musicae rudimenta was written by Nicolaus Faber has persisted for centuries, internal evidence points conclusively to the Bavarian historian and philologist Johannes Aventinus (Johann Turmair or Thurmayr, 1477–1534) as its author. One of the first music treatises to use German as well as Latin, it borrows heavily from other sources, usually with due citations.
The author’s unequivocal style is striking: for example, the table of contents lists Chapter 1 as “The origins of music, a subject about which the barbarians err disgracefully, not to say ignorantly”, while other entries include such observations as “I am embarrassed to report what empty, fatuous things some writers have to say on this topic” and “In this matter, the run-of-the-mill singers are like night owls in the sunlight—blind!”
Nor does he spare himself, noting of his second chapter that “Most of the things here are quoted from others and are not very important, being pedantic and technical.” His preface concludes: “Look me over and buy me, the price is so low. Believe me, you won’t regret it.”
This according to “Musicae rudimenta: Augsburg, 1556” by T. Herman Keahey in Paul A. Pisk: Essays in his honor (Austin: University of Texas, 1966).
The Beijing Winter Olympic Games have become one of the biggest hot spots in the world’s attention at the moment, and among musicians it is no exception. The Olympic Games and music have always been inextricably linked. In ancient Greek times, music was an essential part of the Olympics. The large crowds brought by the Olympics made it an ideal venue for musicians to perform as well. At the same time, many competitions were called by trumpeters to start.
For the modern Olympics, music is even more ubiquitous. Coubertin‘s Olympic ideology was directly inspired by the opera libretto L’Olimpiade; the Olympic Games from 1912 to 1948 included musical competitions and medals were awarded like sporting events; and today’s Olympic-related musical events are a constant source of cultural and commercial competition.
Let’s take a glimpse at the relationship between music and the Olympics through relevant literature included in RILM.
– Mu Qian, Editor, RILM
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Segrave, Jeffrey O. “Music as sport history: The special case of Pietro Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade and the story of the Olympic Games”, Sporting sounds: Relationships between sport and music, ed. by Anthony Bateman and John Bale (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2009) 113–127. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2009-1570]
Abstract: Pietro Metastasio’s popular 18th-century libretto L’Olimpiade publicized and transmitted a particular ideological and historicized conception of the Olympic Games that would ultimately contribute to the rationalization and legitimization of Pierre de Coubertin’s own idiosyncratic Olympic ideology, a philosophical religious doctrine that embraced a noble and honorable conception of sport at the same time as it served discrete class, race, and gendered ends. The hegemony of the contemporary Olympic Games movement is grounded in part on the appropriation of the classicism and Romanticism transmitted in Metastasio’s work. Musicological readings of opera, sociolinguistic conceptions of meaning, and postmodern social perspectives on material culture are addressed. Metastasio’s L’Olimpiade, in narrative, music, and production, sustained a particular image of the games, an image that nourished Coubertin’s own ideological formulation at the same time as it paved the way for further musical representations of the Games that to this day lend authority to the hegemony of the Olympics by appealing to a musically transmitted, mythologized, and Hellenized past.
Charkiolakīs, Alexandros. “Music in the first modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896: Cultural and social trends”, Mousikos logos 1 (January 2014) 51–64. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 2014-4634]
Abstract: Music, without any doubt, has been one of the main features during both the opening ceremony and on the concert that was given in the end of the first day in the Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens. Actually, there were two new works commissioned for performance during that first day: the Olympiakos ymnos (Olympic hymn) by Spyridōn Samaras on a text of Kōstis Palamas and Pentathlon by Dionysios Lauragkas on poetry of Iōannīs Polemīs. Here, we show the cultural and social trends that are implied in these two works and are characteristic of the developing ideologies in Greece of that time. Furthermore, we emphasized our scope towards the impact that these two works had on the contemporary Athenian society of that time.
Segrave, Jeffrey O. “‘All men will become brothers’ (“Alle Menschen werden Bruder“): Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Olympic Games ideology”, Sport, music, identities, ed. by Anthony Bateman. Sport in the global society, contemporary perspectives (London: Routledge, 2015) 38–52. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2015-99]
Abstract: First performed in an Olympic context as part of the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has become a popular mainstay of modern Olympic protocol. Part of a ritualized entertainment spectacle that enhances the appeal and popularity of the Games, the Ninth Symphony elevates the prestige of the Games and helps to sustain the Olympic Movement’s political and commercial dominance within the panoply of institutionalized sport. It is argued here that the normalization of the Finale of the Ninth Symphony in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games not only transmits and reinforces the traditional Olympic ideology, but also reaffirms the ascendant hegemony of the Olympic movement within the world of elite international sport. This study is a critical reading of the Olympic musical ceremonial as a site of ideological production, especially as it pertains to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Dümling, Albrecht. “Zwischen Autonomie und Fremdbestimmung: Die Olympische Hymne von Robert Lubahn und Richard Strauss”, Richard Strauss-Blätter 38 (Dezember 1997) 68–102. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text, 1997-52827]
Abstract: When the Olympic Games were to be held in Berlin in 1936 Strauss was chosen as composer of an Olympic Hymn. Early in 1933 he agreed in principle, but on the condition that he was provided with an appropriate text. Four poems out of 3,000 entries were selected and sent on to Strauss with no mention of the poets’ names. He decided on a text, written by the hitherto unknown poet Robert Lubahn. Despite the favorable response of committees and German music critics, the belongs to Strauss’s weaker works.
Barney, Katelyn. “Celebration or cover up? My island home, Australian national identity and the spectacle of Sydney 2000″, Aesthetics and experience in music performance, ed. by Elizabeth Mackinlay, Denis Collins, and Samantha Owens (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005) 141–150. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2005-18443]
Abstract: Addresses the conflicts and complexities inherent in musical statements of Australian national identity as represented by Neil Murray’s My island home and Christine Anu’s performance of it at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Her performance functioned simultaneously as a site for celebration of indigeneity and Australian national identity yet also as a concealment or cover-up of the social and political positioning of indigenous Australians within Australian history and contemporary society. As it celebrated localized Torres Strait Islander culture and identity as part of the Australian national imagination, it also concealed the realities of indigenous issues and race relations within Australia.
Newman, Melinda and Michael Paoletta. “Goodsports”, Billboard: The international newsweekly of music, video and home entertainment 118/5 (4 February 2006) 22–23. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2006-2393]
Abstract: Established stars including Andrea Bocelli, Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, and Lou Reed, as well as new and developing acts like James Blunt, Switchfoot, Flipsyde, Morningwood, the Donnas, Rock ‘N Roll Soldiers, We Are Scientists, and OK Go are hoping for a career boost from their ties to the Olympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy. By using hip, under-the-radar acts, NBC hopes to connect with the much-coveted youth demographic. NBC uses music in four ways for the Olympics: network campaigns in advance of the Games; co-branding opportunities; features and interstitial footage broadcast during the athletic events; and nightly concerts.
Lawson, Francesca R. Sborgi. “Music in ritual and ritual in music: A virtual viewer’s perceptions about liminality, functionality, and mediatization in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games”, Asian music: Journal of the Society for Asian Music 42/2 (summer–fall 2011) 3–18. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2011-12007]
Abstract: Concepts such as liminality, functionality, and mediatization were clearly exemplified in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The fascinating use of the ancient practice of liminal integration of music and ritual in a modern mediatized performance illustrates both indigenous Chinese and contemporary Western performance theories. Despite the spectacular nature of the opening ceremony, however, it is doubtful that international viewers fully understood the complex messages communicated through this modern ritual performance.
Juzwiak, Rich. “Village Person says Y.M.C.A. isn’t about gays, is probably lying”, http://gawker.com/village-person-says-y-m-c-a-isnt-about-gays-is-pro-1493380284. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2014-293]
Abstract: A common reading of the Village People’s Y.M.C.A. (1978) posits the song as a post-Stonewall stealth attack on heteronormative America. From discos to weddings to sports arenas across the country, millions have contorted in acronymal glee, singing the praises of the male-only fitness center/boarding house where you can “hang out with the boys” and “do whatever you feel”. The song first appeared on an album titled Cruisin’. Despite the seemingly obvious subtext, members of the Village People deny any subtextual intent. Victor Willis, the first lead singer of the Village People who played the role of “cop” and co-wrote Y.M.C.A., recently spoke out against using the song as Team USA’s entrance music at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics–intended in protest of Putin’s anti-gay mandate and the rash of violent hate crimes in its wake (not to mention the Sports Minister’s threat to jail gay athletes). The author notes that “the inherent gayness of the Village People has been a point of contention between the people who were (and are) in the group and its creators, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo. Morali, who died in 1991, was gay and in last year’s documentary about the politics of disco, Secret disco revolution, Belolo said that the Village People were Morali’s statement of his own gay pride, as well as an exercise in double entendre”.
Cottrell, Stephen. “Glad to meet you: North Korea’s pop orchestra warms hearts in the South”, The conversation (UK) (9 February 2018) https://theconversation.com/glad-to-meet-you-north-koreas-pop-orchestra-warms-hearts-in-the-south-91499. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-52079]
Abstract: Describes a performance by Samjiyon Band, a well-known fixture from North Korea’s cultural scene, on the first night of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
Charles Dickens’s works attest to a keen familiarity with the ballads and traditional songs of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Less obvious from his writings is his deep love of Western classical music—he adored the lieder of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, he championed Arthur Sullivan, and he reported being “overcome” by Gounod’s Faust.
Still, Dickens found a rich vein of humor in the music making of the common folk—not least in the character of Mr. Morfin in Dombey and Son:
“He was a great musical amateur in his way…and had a paternal affection for his violoncello, which was once in every week transported from Islington, his place of abode, to a certain club-room hard by the Bank, where quartettes of the most tormenting and excruciating nature were executed every Wednesday evening by a private party.”
“He was solacing himself with this melodious grumbler one evening, and, having been much dispirited by the proceedings of the day, was scraping consolation out of its deepest notes…[but] his landlady…was fortunately deaf, and had no other consciousness of these performances than a sensation of something rumbling in her bones.”
This according to “Dickens and music” by Charles Cudworth (The musical times CXI/1528 [June 1970] pp. 588–590. Today is Dickens’s 210th birthday!
In the “Sirens” episode of UlyssesJames Joyce made words represent music by playing with or even overcoming certain conventional features of language. Particularly notable are Joyce’s representation of polyphony, melody, rhythm, and of music’s traditional absence of conventional meaning.
The essence of Joycean onomatopoeia in “Sirens” is not that it represents music iconically, but that it makes music linguistically. Joycean onomatopoeia is not the natural union of meaning and form, of signified and signifier—it is the signifier freeing itself from the link with the signified.
“Sirens” is a step toward absolute form and abstraction; it breaks with the representational conventions of naturalistic and realistic fiction and points the way toward modernism.
This according to “Strange words, strange music: The verbal music of ‘Sirens’” by Andreas Fischer, an essay included in Bronze by gold: The music of James Joyce (New York: General Music, 1999).
Ulysses was first published 100 years ago today! Above, Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s wife and muse, on their wedding day in 1931; the novel takes place on the day they met in 1904. Below, Cathy Berberian reads an excerpt from the “Sirens” episode.
RILM has acquired the full rights to the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), published between 1983 and 2005 by the renowned Italian publisher of reference works UTET Grandi Opere under the editorship of Alberto Basso. With its three thematic sections (Le biografie; Il lessico; and I titoli e i personaggi) containing some 35,000 entries, DEUMM is the most important modern music dictionary in the Italian language.
The content of the original printed edition, along with some updated and new entries, will be the starting point for DEUMM Online, to be offered as one of RILM’s suite of reference works. RILM plans to launch DEUMM Online in winter 2023 on RILM’s platform Egret, which offers advanced search and browse capabilities. DEUMM Online will be an essential electronic resource for music scholarship world-wide.
The founding editor of DEUMM, Dr. Alberto Basso, said “I feel particularly honored and therefore happy to have been included among the initiatives that RILM is proposing to the world in the context of scholarship and musical history. The fact that DEUMM has been taken into consideration satisfies me in a particular way and certainly would have satisfied the management of the former UTET that is unfortunately no longer present on the market. I hope that the work I have done creating DEUMM some forty years ago will continue and that DEUMM will be updated.” (The original interview with Dr. Basso may be heard below.)
Today, on Delius’s 160th birthday, let’s eavesdrop on the reminiscences of his friend Percy Grainger.
“Composer never had truer colleague than I had in Frederick Delius, and when he died I felt that my music had lost its best friend.”
“Our outlook on life was very similar, our artistic tastes met at many points. Both of us considered the Icelandic sagas the pinnacle of narrative prose. Both of us knew the Scandinavian languages and admired the culture of Scandinavia as the flower of Europeanism.”
“Both of us worshipped Walt Whitman, Wagner, Grieg, and Jens Peter Jacobsen. Both of us detested music of the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven period. ‘If a man tells me he likes Mozart, I know in advance that he is a bad musician’ Delius was fond of saying.”
“One year he would ask for Bach; the next year he would say ‘You know, Bach always bores me.’ But Chopin and Grieg he never turned against. He preferred Ravel to Debussy. He had no patience with Richard Strauss, Mahler, or Hindemith.”
This from “About Delius”, reprinted in Grainger on music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999, pp. 361–368). Above, Grainger and Delius in 1923. Below, Delius’s On hearing the first cuckoo in spring.
Plans for the publication of a bibliography of writings concerning art history were announced in the summer of 1974. The project’s vision was born much earlier, in large part influenced by the publication of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature in early 1967.
RILA (Répertoire International de la Littérature de l’Art) borrowed the model for its name from RILM, as well as the concept of international cooperation first proposed at the conference held in Paris under the auspices of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1969 and then confirmed in Washington, D.C., under the sponsorship of the College Art Association of America in October 1971. RILA was conceived to provide substantial abstracts and detailed subject indexes of art-historical scholarship concerning post-classical European art and post-conquest American art published in periodicals, books, Festschriften, congress reports, exhibition and museum catalogues, and dissertations.
The project took off in 1973 as the bibliographic pilot project of the American Council of Learned Societies, with the RILM office at the CUNY Graduate Center initially providing editorial and technological support. RILA was intended to be the first addition to a proposed interdisciplinary group of bibliographies in the humanities, initiated with RILM. In the Demonstration issue (above) , which tested RILM’s bibliographic models applied to art-historical literature, the editor Michael Rinehart wrote “Continued regular publication of RILA will depend on response to this issue, and particularly on two factors essential to its long-range success: the willingness of authors to contribute abstracts of their work, and the extension of international participation through a free exchange of materials among existing and future organizations and publications.”
RILA was initially produced with RILM’s computer program, which ran on the IBM mainframe computer System 360 at the computing center of The City University of New York—the most advanced computing machine at the time. RILM’s founder Barry S. Brook was among the key advisors on the project, and the format of the bibliographic entries, the classification schema, and the indexing practices in RILA echoed those in the printed volumes of RILM. In this form RILA (ISSN: 0145-5982) was published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute from 1975 through 1989, when it merged with Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA).
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