Light Shows as Public, Vernacular Music Theory

This chapter reads light shows as a form of public music theory, examining how the practice of concert lighting expresses a kind of vernacular musical analysis. Light shows are an essential component of the contemporary popular music concert experience, as they help direct the audience’s focus and turn concerts into immersive, multi-sensory experiences. Whether planned in advance or improvised, the work of creating these light shows involves activities essential to musical analysis: skillful listening and expert knowledge of style. Beyond the analytical labor that goes into their creation, some light shows additionally visualize analytical ideas about the music they accompany; examples demonstrate how light shows can help express musical parameters like timbre, form, rhythm, and contour. Such analytical light shows exhibit a kind of broadly accessible, public-facing music theory that need not rely on notation at any stage of production or reception.

A Rising Tide

This chapter reflects on the curriculum outlined in the book and how it fits into the larger music education landscape. While project-based electronic music may not be appealing to all music teachers, the benefits of this approach to music education generally are broad and substantial. An open-enrollment music technology course creates a culture of inclusion that can lend a school’s music program greater cultural authenticity and demographic inclusiveness. When students are able to create music in their preferred styles, it validates their musical identities and helps them build toward lifelong learning. There are racial politics underlying the gulf between “school” music and “popular” music, and the chapter discusses the opposition that each successive form of African-American popular and vernacular music has faced in the academy. Critical popular music studies animated by antiracism can serve to both advance social justice goals, and to strengthen and enrich music programs.

The Fiery Debate

About eight months after Antonín Dvořák became director of Jeannette Thurber’s National Conservatory of Music in New York, he weighed in publicly on the question of American musical identity and argued that African American vernacular music (or “negro melodies”) should become the foundation of a national classical style. The New York Herald, which first printed his remarks, stoked a months-long debate that exposed deep-seated anti-Black racism throughout the country’s classical music industry as many musicians rejected the Bohemian’s suggestions outright. Dvořák remained supportive of African American music and musicians but did not fully understand the political implications of his positions.

The Brewing Storm

A small number of US-based composers began experimenting with the use of African American vernacular music as the basis for instrumental works around 1880, arguing that this music formed a truly American folk repertoire. Their works found public favor in the United States and, more importantly, in several European cities in the months leading up to Dvořák’s arrival as director of the National Conservatory. Dvořák’s own position in the debate about American national style was an open question until May 1893, when he revealed his belief in the authentic American identity of Black vernacular music, thus affirming the approach of earlier American composers.

The Racial Challenge

After the US Civil War, African American musicians and intellectuals had increasingly turned to European classical music as a tool of socioeconomic advancement while acknowledging the importance of antebellum vernacular music for defining racial identity. Violinist and composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) used the platform of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to demonstrate Black achievement in the arts. Meanwhile, Jeannette Thurber and Antonín Dvořák had opened the National Conservatory to Black students free of charge, thus expanding educational opportunities for talented Black musicians. The premiere of the New World Symphony in December 1893 reignited a widespread and vicious public debate about the place of Black music and musicians in American national life.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the “Sweet Thing” scheme through postwar popular music, and defines a scheme as a shared musical structure with predetermined constraints and allowances. The “Sweet Thing” scheme is the result of the intertwining of various musical components of many different sources, some with very deep roots in the past, which penetrated many genres of American vernacular music. With the advent of radio and the phonograph in the early twentieth century—and especially with the widespread circulation of blues, country, and gospel records—the various components of these older forms grouped together and intertwined in different ways, resulting in a number of hybrids and variants. It is this cluster of twentieth-century variants that I call the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Defining its musical characteristics in a way flexible enough to accommodate its substantial variation and exploring the historical sources for its musical attributes are the subjects of this book.

Medievalist Music and Dance

Central to Victorians’ medievalism was the notion, prevalent since the sixteenth century, that English medieval song and dance had been preserved in kernel form by modern folk traditions. This assumption of a hidden medieval-folklore link played out in the main musical medievalisms of the nineteenth century: in antiquarian research on dance and song, both liturgical chant and vernacular music; in the more creative medievalisms of opera and music hall; and in their inheritor, the ultimate song-and-dance entertainment of the machine age, cinema. One exception to the idea of medieval art as preserved by the folk is the curious case of the motet, a quintessentially antiquarian object of study emerging in the late 1900s in connection with the burgeoning industry of academia.

Exploring hip hop music education through online instructional beat production videos

This study explores online instructional beat production videos as a way to inform hip hop and popular music education and diversify scholarship in online music learning. The authors conducted a content analysis of YouTube videos, considering the instructional characteristics and content of these videos and the musical technologies employed within them. Findings highlight the importance of YouTube as a repository of hip hop beat production instructional material. Videos focused on composition of new beats, rather than re-creation of existing material, underlining an important distinction between hip hop musical practices and the ‘listen and copy’ approach identified in other vernacular music research ‐ and a distinction between these videos and others studied in extant music education scholarship that focuses on YouTube. The videos showcased varied technologies, some of which (e.g., FL Studio) seem especially well aligned with beat production practice. The article concludes with considerations for music educators and for future research.