Tag Archives: Mass media

by | February 9, 2011 · 1:00 am

Black Grooves

Hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture at Indiana University, Black Grooves is a review site that aims to promote black music by providing monthly updates on interesting new releases and quality reissues in all genres—gospel, blues, jazz, funk, soul, and hip hop, as well as classical music composed or performed by black artists.

Reviews of selected new discs and DVDs are featured, with occasional attention to books and news items. An extra effort is made to track down releases by indie, underground, foreign, and other labels that are not covered in the mainstream media. While the primary focus is on African American music, related areas such as Afropop and reggae are also covered.

This post is part of our series celebrating Black History Month. Throughout February we will be posting about resources and landmark writings in black studies. Click here for a continuously updated page of links to all of our posts in this category.

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by | January 23, 2011 · 7:31 am

Fonoteca: Radio Nacional de Colombia

 

Fonoteca: Radio Nacional de Colombia presents over 29,000 historical recordings, including speeches by presidents and public employees since 1940, serials since 1941, interviews since 1944, religious music festivals, llanera, bagpipes, porro, vallenato, rock, reggae, and Native American music from 1975 to date, as well as lectures and high school class broadcasts from 1960 through 2004.

The site also features the virtual Fonoteca radio station, whose broadcasts have long been part of the youth-oriented Radionica, the Radio Nacional de Colombia FM station.

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by | December 27, 2010 · 9:49 am

Karaoke and class

Karaoke challenges the hegemony of the status quo by breaking down the received rules of cultural production and challenging binary notions of high vs. low art, live vs. recorded performance, and amateur vs. professional performers.

In so doing, karaoke engenders liveness anxiety—a territorial behavior among social critics, scholars, and performers that comprises a fear of performances that do not fit the template dictated by the wielders of cultural power. Karaoke is a viable site for mounting a lower-class defense against the onslaught of cultural elites; and its multibillion-dollar industry continues to grow every year.

This according to “Liveness anxiety: Karaoke and the performance of class” by Kevin Brown (Popular entertainment studies I/2 [2010], pp. 61–77). Thanks to the Improbable Research blog for bringing this article to our attention!

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by | December 9, 2010 · 6:32 am

Francophone Music Criticism, 1789–1914

Launched by the Institute of Musical Research at the University of London in 2010, Francophone Music Criticism, 1789–1914 is a repository of digitized, searchable reviews relating to French music and ballet. Texts are grouped into collections devoted to particular works, events, series, performers, or authors. Bibliographical resources and work in progress of a more general nature are also included. The database’s development network is headed by Katharine Ellis and Mark Everist.

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by | November 21, 2010 · 8:39 am

Dancecult: Journal of electronic dance music culture

The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London launched Dancecult: Journal of electronic dance music culture (ISSN 1947-5403), a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal, in 2009. The journal is a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of electronic dance music cultures worldwide, including studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception.

The inaugural issue featured articles about rave, neotrance, psychedelia, DJ culture, and the concept of IDM (intelligent dance music). The journal is published biannually.

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by | November 9, 2010 · 6:52 am

Sephardic music: A century of recordings

Sephardic music: A century of recordings showcases and discusses over 100 years of recorded Sephardic music, from the 78 rpm era to the present. Created by Joel Bresler, this resource includes information on repertory and performance practice and a comprehensive discography of Sephardic 78s in Hebrew and Ladino ordered by label, song, or artist. Numerous illustrations are provided, including reproductions of record labels and covers.

Above, the label from Haim Effendi’s 1907 recording of the popular Sephardic song A la una; the recording can be heard here.

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by | October 15, 2010 · 7:37 am

La revue musicale

Founded in 1920 by the musicologist Henry Prunières (1886–1942), La revue musicale aimed to support the profound changes taking place in music at that time while simultaneously inspiring a love for the music of the past.

Eschewing the intransigent nationalism that marked French music before World War I, the journal became a beacon for a segment of the European musical milieu that might well have disappeared in its wake; but after 20 years of methodically constructing a new music firmly grounded in its attachment to the classicism of the Enlightenment, the events of World War II permanently extinguished its flame.

This according to “La revue musicale (1920–40) and the founding of a modern music” by Michel Duchesneau, an essay included in our recently published Music’s intellectual history. Two other articles in the volume explore further aspects of this journal: “Towards a topology of aesthetic discussion contained in La revue musicale of the 1920s” by Danick Trottier and “Dance in Henry Prunières’s La revue musicale (1920–40): Between the early and the modern” by Marie-Noëlle Lavoie.

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by | September 3, 2010 · 4:41 pm

Sheet music consortium

An open collection of digitized popular sheet music from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, Sheet music consortium is hosted by the UCLA Digital Library Program, which provides an access service to sheet music records at the host libraries. Each of the over 100,000 entries includes full bibliographic information; links to further resources, such as full reproductions, may be provided depending on the host institution.

The consortium members are the Archive of Popular American Music at the University of California, Los Angeles; IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana at Indiana University; the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music at Johns Hopkins University; and the Historic American Sheet Music collection at Duke University.

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by | August 21, 2010 · 2:33 pm

Horror studies

 

Launched by Intellect in 2010, Horror studies (ISSN 2040-3275) is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to research on cultural manifestations of horror, including the familiar forms it assumes in literature and film as well as its expressions in fashion, dance, fine art, music, and technology. The journal’s editors write that it “aims to extend both the formal study and the informal appreciation of horror into hitherto overlooked critical terrains, seeking in the process to appeal not only to the international academic community, but also to enthusiasts of the horror mode more generally.”

The inaugural issue of Horror studies includes “Of submarines and sharks: Musical settings of a silent menace” by Linda Maria Koldau, an essay that explores how film composers have depicted the primal fear of the silent monster stealthily approaching from the depths.

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Animals, Curiosities, Nature, New periodicals

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by | July 7, 2010 · 2:53 pm

The Frog blues & jazz annual

Launched by Frog Records in 2010, The Frog blues & jazz annual is a book series that presents original research and articles on early jazz and blues. The inaugural issue, The musicians, the records & the music of the 78 era, includes articles about the Mississippi Jook Band’s Graves brothers, the pianist Arnold Wiley, and the vocalist Ida Cox.

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