(Re)writing Music History: Television, Memory, and Nostalgia in The People’s History of Pop

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Leanne Weston
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
History Of

Nashville Cats

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Global View ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Hall Of Fame ◽  
The City

Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first history of record production during country music’s so-called Nashville Sound era. This period of country music history produced some of the genre’s most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Yet, despite country music’s overwhelming popularity during this period and the continued legacy of the studios that were built in Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s, little attention has been given to the ways in which recording engineers, session musicians, and record producers shaped the sounds of country music during the time. Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first book to take a global view of record production in Nashville during the three decades that the city’s musicians established the city as the leading center for the production and distribution of country music.

scholarly journals Latvian Music History in the Context of 20th-century Modernism and Postmodernism. Some Specific Issues of Local Historiography

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-139
Author(s):  
Jānis Kudiņš
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History Of

Do the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism” objectively characterize the trends in the music history of the 20th century or are they merely theoretical abstractions? How can they be applied to the music history of specific countries, for example, when analysing a local historical experience? The article will consider these questions primarily to focus on the representation of the modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in the stylistic developments of the 20th-century Latvian music history.

scholarly journals Roland Barthes' "Text" and aleatoric music: Is "The birth of the reader" the birth of the listener?

Muzikologija ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Jeongwon ◽  
Hoo Song
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compositional Control

The history of Western classical music and the development of its notational system show that composers have tried to control more and more aspects of their compositions as precisely as possible. Total serialism represents the culmination of compositional control. Given this progressively increasing compositional control, the emergence of chance music, or aleatoric music, in the mid-twentieth century is a significantly interesting phenomenon. In aleatoric music, the composer deliberately incorporates elements of chance in the process of composition and/or in performance. Consequently, aleatoric works challenge the traditional notion of an art work as a closed entity fixed by its author. The philosophical root of aleatoric music can be traced to post structuralism, specifically its critique of the Enlightenment notion of the author as the creator of the meaning of his or her work. Roland Barthes' declaration of "the death of the author" epitomizes the Poststructuralists' position. Distinguishing "Text" from "Work," Barthes maintains that in a "Text," meanings are to be engendered not by the author but by the reader. Barthes conceives aleatoric music as an example of the "Text," which demands "the birth of the reader." This essay critically re-examines Barthes' notion of aleatoric music, focusing on the complicated status of the reader in music. The readers of a musical Text can be both performers and listeners. When Barthes' declaration of the birth of the reader is applied to the listener, it becomes problematic, since the listener, unlike the literary reader, does not have direct access to the "Text" but needs to be mediated by the performer. As Carl Dahlhaus has remarked, listeners cannot be exposed to other possible renditions that the performer could have chosen but did not choose, and in this respect, the supposed openness of an aleatoric piece is closed and fixed at the time of performance. In aleatoric music, it is not listeners but only performers who are promoted to the rank of co-author of the works. Finally, this essay explores the reason why Barthes turned to music for the purpose of illustrating his theory of text. What rhetorical role does music play in his articulation of "Work" and "Text"? Precisely because of music's "difference" as a performance art, music history provides the examples of the lowest and the highest moments in Barthes' theory of text, that is, those of Work and Text. If, for Barthes, the institutionalization of the professional performer in music history demonstrates the advent of Work better than literary examples, the performer's supposed dissolution in aleatoric music is more liberating than any literary moments of Text. This is because the figure of music - as performance art-provides Barthes with a reified and bodily "situated" model of the Subject.

On the Foundations of Dahlhaus’s Foundations

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-229
Author(s):  
Tobias Robert Klein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Music History ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Structural History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

In the foreword to his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977), translated into English as Foundations of Music History (1983), Carl Dahlhaus names three reasons for writing the book: the lack of theoretical reflection in his own field; the problem of mediation between methodological maxims and their political implications; and the difficulties he encountered while preparing his history of nineteenth-century music. Each of the three reasons can now be understood more precisely and historically contextualized in light of recently uncovered letters and notes. Dahlhaus’s methodological critiques of political music as conceptually distinct from aesthetically autonomous works—contrary to a popular claim by Anne Shreffler (2003)—were directed mainly at the “Western left.” Moreover, in the 1980s this controversy became intertwined with historiographical questions regarding the concept of “event” that was reinforced in publications by the “Gruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik.” A postscript discusses the English translation of the book and the concept of “structural history” in late Dahlhaus.

Music in Central America

2021 ◽  
pp. 163-172
Author(s):  
Rachel Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Central America ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Music History ◽  
West African ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
Indigenous Music ◽  
History Of

This chapter presents a history of music genres in Central America and chronicles Indigenous music and dance, the arrival of European music, and West African influence. An awareness of music history of the region frames the repertoire within a larger cultural context and can inform how this repertoire is presented to students....

Music History and Its Relations to the History of Ideas

1948 ◽  
Vol 2 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Charles van den Borren ◽  
Edward E. Lowinsky
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History Of

Isaac's Signature

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob C. Wegman
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Personal Style ◽  
Contractual Obligation ◽  
Commercial Transaction ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACT The notion of the signature could serve as an appropriate metaphor by which to explore Heinrich Isaac as a man of his time and world. It may be mere coincidence that he has left more documents signed in his own hand than contemporary composers, but some of the documents he authenticated in this way really do attest to a new idea of professional musicianship that Isaac was the earliest and most successful in implementing: that of the professional composer who undertakes to produce new works under contractual obligation. Isaac is the first-known musician who signed a document specifically in this capacity. Yet his signature, or at least the assurance that he personally composed and signed a musical work, is also found in the context of practical musical sources, where they would appear to have no legal significance. Martin Just has shown, however, that the particular folios containing these compositions, in the manuscript Berlin 40021, were originally sent as letters. The implication is that Isaac's signature, in this case, is not an attribution so much as a mark of authentication—something that would have been required only if the musical works in question were sent, and changed hands, as part of a commercial transaction. Taking the metaphor of the signature in a broader figurative sense, one could suggest that Isaac's work also bears his musical signature—namely in the personal style that his contemporaries tried to recognize and in some cases to characterize in words. Two authors who tried to capture the peculiar quality of Isaac's music are Paolo Cortesi and Heinrich Glarean. The latter's attempt is especially significant, since Glarean seems to attest to a new way of hearing and conceptualizing polyphony. Although it is hard to identify specifically which passages in Isaac's music he would have had in mind, the key to his appraisal seems to lie in a different way of conceptualizing the interplay of contrapuntal voices in contemporary music. To the extent that we can associate this with Isaac's musical signature, it would appear, once again, that this composer, more than any other, was at the forefront of some of the most significant developments in the music history of his time.

scholarly journals Musical Speech Analogy in Ernő Dohnányi’s Der Schleier der Pierrette

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Daniel-Frédéric Lebon
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Igor Stravinsky ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Rhythmic Structure ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Ballet Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Speech Imitation

Following a brief survey into the history of the ballet d’action, the article examines the techniques of musique parlante Dohnányi used in his pantomime Der Schleier der Pierrette. The subcategories illustrated with music examples include the direct speech imitation (focusing on the syllabic and rhythmic structure of single words) and the musical analogy of the question-answer complex. The analytical overview is extended to further indirect categories such as the recitative-like structures (built up not merely on speech, but on an already emancipated equivalent, the instrumental recitative) and the leitmotif technique which – although being more distant from speech – can, in some cases, still be seen as part of musique parlante. In an attempt to describe the position of Der Schleier der Pierrette in ballet music history, the author addresses Béla Bartók’s reception of Dohnányi’s pantomime and distinguishes the tradition followed by Dohnányi from the denial of musique parlante characteristic of the works Igor Stravinsky composed for the Ballets Russes.

scholarly journals The Middle East in Music History: An Ethnomusicological Perspective

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Martin Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Music History ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Long Line ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Majority

A glance at the ethnomusicology of the Muslim-majority Middle East might suggest it is peculiarly exposed to historiographical problems now familiar thanks to decades of orientalism critique. Namely, that music is understood in this part of the world via a peculiarly objectivising colonial ethnography, that it is understood in ways that deny its historical circumstances, and that it is subject to a relentless aestheticisation, which is to say, treated in analogous way to the Islamic art objects and miniatures ripped out of context and put on display in the museums of the western metropolis. The history of ethnomusicology suggests a long line of exceptions to this ‘rule’. The chapter explores the work of Villoteau, Lachmann and more recent work in and around sound archives asking to what extent we might see this work prefiguring recognisably modern and critical dispositions towards ethnography.

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