In 2016 the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro launched MusMat: Brazilian journal of music and mathematics, which brings together articles, interviews, and news on the interactions between music and mathematics in applications in analysis and composition. The journal is peer-reviewed and open-access.
Below, a work by Rodolfo Coelho de Souza, who discusses his compositional methods in the inaugural issue.
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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Analysis, New periodicals, Science
During 1957 and 1958 Frank Lloyd Wright was working on what might have become his magnum opus: beginning with a commission for an opera house in Baġdād, he developed a far-reaching Plan for Greater Baghdad.
Wright arrived in Iraq in May 1957, just one month short of his 90th birthday, and after two audiences with King Faisal II he left with permission to build an opera house and incorporate it into development of a vast site in the middle of the Tigris River—an uninhabited area that Wright believed was the site of the Garden of Eden.
In July 1957, in a speech back in the U.S., he said “I happen to be doing a cultural center for the place where civilization was invented—that is, Iraq. Before Iraq was destroyed it was a beautiful circular city built by Harun al-Rashid, but the Mongols came from the north and practically destroyed it. Now what is left of the city has struck oil and they have immense sums of money. They can bring back the city of Harun al-Rashid today.”
Unfortunately, following the military coup of July 1958 the project was rejected; it was too extravagant for the military leadership, and too closely identified with the old monarchy.
This according to “Arabian opera nights” by John Allison (Opera LIX/1 [January 2008] pp. 26–30).
Today is Wright’s 150th birthday! Inset, a drawing of the full cultural center (click image to enlarge); below, a computerized 3-D rendition of the opera house.
Filed under Architecture
In 1946 the Hormel company created a unique organization to employ World War II veterans as musicians to market food products.
Over a seven-year period the Hormel Girls, a drum-and-bugle corps, conducted door-to-door sales, worked with local retailers in cities and towns across America, formed a professional orchestra and a choir to enhance their stage shows, and produced a weekly national radio broadcast.
This was possibly the most successful musical-marketing strategy in the history of partnerships between music and industry. The women received outstanding pay and benefits, the company doubled its profits during the group’s existence, and the performers were professional-level musicians on a par with members of other professional ensembles of the era.
This according to “The Hormel Girls” by Jill M. Sullivan and Danielle D. Keck (American music XXV/3 [fall 2007] pp. 282–311). Top, the group ca. 1947; center, in 1952. Below, Elisa Korenne’s Hormel Girls, illustrated with vintage photographs.
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Filed under Curiosities, Performers, Popular music
For 20 years Edward Elgar worked for The Gramophone Company as both an advocate of his music and an advocate of the gramophone.
During this period, recording technology changed from the cramped conditions of the acoustic studio of 1914 (above) to the specialized recording studio of Abbey Road using the electrical system of 1933, in which year Elgar conducted his last recordings, with the extraordinary appendix of Elgar supervising a recording by telephone connection from his deathbed in 1934.
As an interpreter of his own music—we cannot comment from direct experience on his success with the music of others, for nothing was recorded—he was as fine a conductor as Furtwängler for Wagner and Mengelberg for Brahms. His conducting ability extended to every aspect of the art, from the purely technical quality of the playing he repeatedly drew from orchestras to the inexhaustible fascination of the interpretations themselves.
This according to “Elgar’s recordings” by Simon Trezise (Nineteenth-century music review V/1 [2008] pp. 111–31).
Today is Elgar’s 160th birthday! Below, Elgar conducts the prelude to The dream of Gerontius in 1927, a recording singled out for praise in the article.
BONUS: Elgar conducts the trio of Pomp and circumstance march no. 1 at the opening of the Abbey Road Studios on 12 November 1931. After mounting the podium, he says to the orchestra “Good morning, gentlemen. Glad to see you all. Very light programme this morning. Please play this tune as though you’ve never heard it before.”
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Filed under Romantic era
When he was about ten years old, Joseph Pujol discovered that he had the rare ability to draw air into his anus and expel it at will.
Not content to have a simple party trick, he trained his sonic instrument just as others would train their vocal chords, and by young adulthood he could produce a startling range of sounds, nuanced with tonal, timbral, and dynamic variation, and animated by his natural sense of humor. By the 1890s he was performing as Le Pétomane to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge.
Pujol’s idiosyncratic career has rarely been considered as an historical object—and when it has, the gaze has been light-hearted and filled with puns, much like those that surrounded him in his lifetime. But if the temptation to giggle is resisted for a moment, Le Pétomane can teach us much about symbolic physiological meanings in late nineteenth-century Paris.
This according to “The spectacular anus of Joseph Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s unique historic context” by Alison Moore (French cultural studies XXIV/1 [2013] pp. 27–43).
Today is Pujol’s 160th birthday! Below, Le Pétomane in action (silent).
BONUS: A recording from 1904.
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Filed under Dramatic arts, Humor, Performers
In 2016 the Beogradski centar za muziku i umetničku igru launched Accelerando: Belgrade journal of music and dance (ISSN 2466-3913), an open access, double-blind-peer-reviewed, international scholarly journal.
BJMD aims to provide high-quality, original academic articles and research reports for students, researchers, and professionals in various fields of dance, music, and the performing arts. Its goals include developing academic collaboration between scholars, introducing the traditional arts of any nation, introducing modern and contemporary tendencies in music and dance, and introducing qualitative approaches in music and/or dance education.
Below, an excerpt from a performance by the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, an organization discussed in the inaugural issue.
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Filed under Dance, New periodicals
The pianist, composer, and bandleader Reginald Foresythe occupied a critical location as a black British musician within Anglo-American jazz culture and the African diaspora. Foresythe warrants attention for his highly influential yet neglected contribution to 1930s jazz during a crucial period in which the rapid proliferation and commodification of recorded jazz meant that it increasingly became the focus of searching critique.
In this respect, he stands at a fascinating conjunction of three intersecting critical discourses. First, Foresythe offers an opportunity to reconsider modernist concerns about the form and functions of jazz in social relations as expounded by Theodor Adorno. Second, Foresythe offers an opportunity to develop broader transnational perspectives of jazz’s modernity, derived from his position within the spaces of movement that Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic. Third, the double consciousness suggested by such a figuring is further complicated by Foresythe’s sexualized performance as a decidedly camp figure in this arena.
The resulting interplay of such triple consciousness in the person of Foresythe offers an illuminating new way to reflect on how Adorno and Gilroy understood jazz’s role in modernity.
This according to “Camping it up: Jazz’s modernity, Reginald Foresythe, Theodor Adorno and the Black Atlantic” by George Burrows, an essay included in Black British jazz: Routes, ownership and performance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 173-198).
Today is Foresythe’s 110th birthday! Above, entertaining members of No. 325 Wing RAF in Setif, Algeria, ca. 1941; below, The Duke insists from 1934.
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Filed under Jazz and blues, Performers
HipHop Academy Hamburg’s rappers, dancers, and beatboxers use hip hop as a platform of integration, shaping feelings of belonging and perceptions of dual identities.
The Academy’s 2013 production DISTORTION examined migrant descendants’ places in Germany and provoked audiences to contemplate the new faces of the nation. This symbiosis of hip-hop and contemporary dance performed macro- and micro-political integration, illuminating how the boundaries of German national identity are disrupted by the presence of interculturality.
This according to “Ich fühle mich Deutsche: Migrant descendants’ performance of integration through the Hamburg HipHop Academy” by Emily Joy Rothchild, an essay included in Transglobal sounds: Music, youth and migration (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 155–76).
Above and below, excerpts from DISTORTION.
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Filed under Curiosities, Dance, Pedagogy, Popular music
Bibliolore now has over 300 followers! Sure, plenty of music blogs have more, but we have staked out such a tiny niche that we are truly honored. Many thanks to all of our followers and friends!
Below, we celebrate by watching someone turn 300 napkins into something resembling wooden tiles.
In 2016 Svenskt Visarkiv launched Puls: Musik- och dansetnologisk tidskrift/Journal for ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal (EISSN 2002-2972).
While the main focus of the journal is ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, it also embraces adjacent disciplines, such as other aspects of musicology and choreology, folklore, literature, and related studies of traditional and popular culture. The journal focuses on discussion of the expressions, roles, and functions of music and dancing in society. Articles are published in Scandinavian languages or in English.
Below, Frode Fjellheim’s Eatnemen vuelie as heard in Disney’s Frozen, the subject of a discussion in the inaugural issue.
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Filed under Ethnomusicology, New periodicals
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