by | February 24, 2021 · 6:00 am

Rinaldo and the Enlightenment

The resounding success of the premiere of Händel’s Rinaldo, his first opera in England, was tempered by satirical and sarcastic criticism in The spectator, a weekly journal dedicated to combining wit with morality.

The spectacular scenery and costumes, textual weaknesses, and lack of logic were all points of criticism. Joseph Addison, measuring the performance by the standards of reason, truth, and naturalness, hardly found occasion to mention the music and excellent cast.

The main forum for these ideas of a new moral, social, and national function for opera was the London coffeehouse. Thus the Enlightenment, through the medium of opera, came to influence the thought of large groups and stimulated new social behavior and artistic standards.

This according to “Mit Rindern, Schafen und Spatzenschwärmen: Die Londoner Uraufführung der Oper Rinaldo von Händel” by Wilhelm Baethge (Das Orchester XLIII/11 [1995] 17-22; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1995-14126).

Today is the 31oth anniversary of Rinaldo’s premiere! Below, the opera’s march remains one of its most popular excerpts.

BONUS: John Gay’s celebrated repurposing of the march for The beggar’s opera.

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by | February 19, 2021 · 1:30 pm

Global hip hop studies

 

In 2020 Intellect launched Global hip hop studies, a biannual peer-reviewed, rigorous, and community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates surrounding hip hop music and culture around the world.

The journal provides a platform for the investigation and critical analysis of hip hop politics, activism, education, media practices, and industry analyses, as well as manifestations of hip hop culture in all four of the classic elements—DJing/turntablism, MCing/rapping, graffiti/street art, and b-boying/b-girling/breaking and other hip hop dances—along with the under-examined realms of beatboxing, fashion, identity formation, hip hop nation language, and beyond.

Below, the South Indian rapper Smokey the Ghost, who is interviewed in the inaugural issue.

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by | February 15, 2021 · 6:00 am

Concio et cantio

In the preface to his collection Polyhymnia caduceatrix et panegyrica (1619) Michael Praetorius engaged in a play on words, juxtaposing the similar-sounding Latin terms concio and cantio. But the passage is not a mere display of cleverness—it is a theological assertion that musicologists have described as a manifesto on liturgical music.

Praetorius wrote (translated here): “it is essential to the highest ideals of church government, as well as to a corporate worship service, that there be not only concio, a good sermon, but also cantio, good music and singing.” By stating that worship would be incomplete without “good music and singing” he was expressing the underlying premise of his entire career as a Lutheran church composer and cantor.

This according to Michael Praetorius Creuzbergensis: The man, the musician, the theologian by David Susan, a Master of Divinity thesis accepted by Concordia Seminary in 1971 (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1971-15384).

Today is Praetorius’s 450th birthday! Below, the Monteverdichor Würzburg and the Monteverdi Ensemble, conducted by Matthias Beckert, perform his Puer natus in Bethlehem from the same collection.

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by | February 12, 2021 · 6:00 am

Rocking the (Chinese) tradition

In December 2015, on the Zhongguo zhi Xing (China Star) television program, a reality-show competition among professional pop singers, the singer Tan Weiwei presented a song collaboration with masters of Huayin laoqiang (a xiqu genre originating from Shuangquan village in Huayin), telling her audience that it represented “the earliest Chinese rock music.”

This broadcast, and a second one at the 2016 CCTV Chunjie Wanhui (Spring Festival Gala), led to considerable controversy regarding the three-way negotiation among Chinese rock music, the “Intangible Cultural Heritage’” represented by traditional Hauyin laoqiang, and the political ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

The reception of these performances among various groups of viewers–general audience members, rock music fans, musicians, and government officials–illustrates how different interpretations reflect audience members’ differing social ideologies. The process of combining rock music and traditional culture is given different meanings based on the identity and stance of different viewers.

This according to “Rocking the tradition or traditionalizing rock? A music performance on Chinese reality show China star” by Yang Shuo (Sounding board 2017; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2017-43941). Above and below, the historic performance.

Happy Chinese New Year!

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by | February 8, 2021 · 6:00 am

Cacerolazo and social media

Cacerolazo, a fixture in Latin American protests for decades, involves a group of people making noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils in order to call for attention. The first large-scale cacerolazos in Chile accompanied gatherings in 1971 to protest food shortages and other household stresses as the nation’s economy slid towards a severe depression.

Having solidified its presence in the Chilean protest scene by 1973, cacerolazo was a natural part of the weeks-long protests targeting government economic policies in 2019. Protest songs were also an established tradition in Chile, and the two came together in the social justice rapper Ana Tijoux’s politically charged single #Cacerolazo, which became a rallying cry for the dissent.

The hashtag in the song’s title meaningfully connected it to the newer phenomenon of online social media-based participation blending into offline action, and the protesters’ demands infiltrated the sociopolitical fabric at a pace and level that eventually resulted in Chilean leaders conceding to offer the public a chance to vote on replacing the Constitution in 2020.

This according to “Chilean cacerolazo: Pots and pans, song and social media to protest” by Kaitlin E. Thomas (Sounding board 2020; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2020-3028).

Currently, cacerolazos are part of the protests of the Myanmar coup d’état. Below, the official video for Tijoux’s song.

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by | February 5, 2021 · 6:00 am

Giovanni Stefani’s song anthologies

In 2020 A-R Editions issued Giovanni Stefani’s song anthologies (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2020-14972), which brings together for the first time all three of Stefani’s anthologies in modern transcription, allowing performers to play either from the original alfabeto notation or from a modern realization, given both in modern guitar chord symbols and harmonies in staff notation, making it possible for all instruments to participate in the continuo band.

The three song anthologies of Giovanni Stefani survive as the most abundantly printed seventeenth-century songbooks with the chordal guitar notation known in Italy as alfabeto. Printed in multiple editions from 1618 to 1626, Stefani’s books anthologize nearly one hundred songs, many of which appear copied in numerous other manuscripts, attesting to their widespread appeal in early modern Italy.

While beginners will be drawn to their simplicity, experienced performers will delight in the improvisational opportunities made available by songs built on the spagnoletta, folia, ciaconna, and romanesca.

Above, the cover of Stefani’s first anthology, Affetti amorosi; below, Costanza amorosa as it appears therein.

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by | February 2, 2021 · 6:00 am

Jascha Heifetz and popular culture

Throughout Jascha Heifetz’s career he was celebrated as an epitome of highbrow taste; but he was no stranger to popular culture. He appeared in three films: Carnegie Hall, Of men and music, and They shall have music, in which he performed the finale of the Mendelssohn violin concerto and four other works.

Heifetz also composed popular songs, including “When you make love to me (don’t make believe)” and “So much in love”. “When you make love to me” (1946) was published under the pseudonym “Jim Hoyl” (maintaining the initials J.H.) to prove Heifetz’s point that the name of the composer would have little bearing on its success. The song was recorded by Bing Crosby and sold 300,000 copies when first released.

This according to “Heifetz, Jascha” (Biographical dictionary of Russian/Soviet composers Westport: Greenwood, 1989; this encyclopedia is one of many resources included in RILM music encyclopedias, an ever-expanding full-text compilation of reference works).).

Today is Heifetz’s 120th birthday! Below, his own recording of “When you make love to me”.

BONUS: The Bing Crosby version:

Related article: Paganini and Marfan syndrome (featuring Heifetz on the violin)

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by | January 29, 2021 · 6:00 am

Music research annual

 

Music research annual (ISSN 2563-7290) is the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing review essays from the full range of academic disciplines that study music. Each article explores the current state of scholarship on a key topic within a discipline or interdisciplinary juncture and charts ways forward to new research.

Led by a group of renowned scholars, the journal seeks to forward academic inquiry into music and foster interdisciplinary dialog. MRA is an open-access journal published by the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada).

Below, the Australian magpie figures in an article in the inaugural issue.

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by | January 25, 2021 · 6:00 am

Renfro Valley Barn Dance

First broadcast in 1937, Renfro Valley Barn Dance was the first American barn dance radio program to be performed and recorded in an actual barn as opposed to a radio studio.

The program’s producer, John Lair, propagated his single-minded reconstruction of an idealized past and his own personal image of authenticity in American folk music. Lair constructed his aesthetic within Appalachian stereotypes and definitions of genre in folk and country music, and his interactions with performers, radio regulators, and advertisers illuminate his careful negotiation of the hillbilly icon and of signifiers of truth, sincerity, and authenticity in early country music.

This according to “Encoding authenticity in radio music: Renfro Valley Barn Dance and Kentucky folk music” by Helen Gubbins (Ethnomusicology Ireland V [July 2017] 15–30; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2017-24515).

Above, sheet music for a song that Lair wrote for the show; below, a compilation of radio clips and period photos, featuring Lair himself.

Related article: Happy 90th to the Grand Ole Opry!

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by | January 18, 2021 · 6:00 am

Re-encoding Carmen’s identity

The 2005 film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha is a South African adaptation and reconceptualization of Bizet’s Carmen. The change in culture and context affects the interpretation of the character of Carmen, who emerges as a strong black woman striving for autonomy within a patriarchal and sexist postcolonial South African society.

The film involves an interpretation of identity as a social construct dependent on the interaction between character and place within a specific period of time–in this case, Khayelitsha, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town, at the beginning of the 21st century. Its portrayal of the modern Carmen as an emancipated woman within a postcolonial and postmodernist context can be traced by interpreting semiotic signs and specific narrative strategies.

The re-encoding of Carmen’s identity questions intransigent or stereotypical perceptions of Carmen as the iconic femme fatale to which audiences have become accustomed; the indigenized production offers recourse to alternative perceptions of Carmen’s identity. U-Carmen eKhayelitsha does not deny the sensuality and femininity attributed to Carmen in the precursory texts, but it depicts her as an even more complex character than the one in Bizet’s opera.

This according to “The same, yet different: Re-encoding identity in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha” by Santisa Viljoen and Marita Wenzel (Journal of the musical arts in Africa XIII/1–2 [2016] 53–70; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2016-49747).

Below, the trailer for the film.

Related articles:

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