Music

In the summer of 2013, I began an independent research project in Ireland to explore connections between Western classical music and Irish traditional music. This research provided the initial groundwork for this paper, in which several parameters for the term "virtuosity" are defined and analyzed in relation to traditional Irish music. These parameters were chosen using articles from scholarly journals that examine characteristics of virtuosity beyond exceptional technical ability. The scope for the paper, as well as several of the articles which guided my research on virtuosity, resulted from a class with Professor Mark Katz at UNC-Chapel Hill which explored musical virtuosity.

Teaching critical listening is often one of the main goals in the music history classroom, and a recent roundtable in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy has called for the incorporation of performers and their history into the classroom as well. This article proposes a kind of listening activity in the form of a game that addresses both these problems and makes it engaging for students to compare multiple examples or performances of music. Various versions and applications of the game demonstrate its usefulness in both general music history surveys and advanced seminars.

Studi musicali» pubblica articoli riguardanti tutti i campi della ricerca musicologica in italiano, inglese, francese, tedesco e spagnolo. Gli articoli proposti per una eventuale pubblicazione possono essere inviati in copia cartacea al seguente indirizzo: Agostino Ziino, Via Giovanni Antonelli, 21, 00197 Roma, e, in allegato a una e-mail, all'indirizzo [email protected]. La pubblicazione è subordinata al parere di due studiosi specializzati cui l'articolo sarà sottoposto in forma anonima. Una volta accettato, l'articolo dovrà essere redatto secondo le norme editoriali della rivista disponibili in italiano e in inglese al seguente indirizzo: http://studimusicali.santacecilia.it.

Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto’s lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women’s rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women’s journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women’s movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women’s rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.

With their focus on world musical inspirations, the late suites of Duke Ellington offer a rich source for exploring his relationship with jazz identity beyond the American dichotomy of black and white. While the spread of jazz around the globe during the 1950s and 1960s on one level represented American prosperity, it could also be understood as presenting a threat to the uniquely American identity of jazz. Through his experiences on numerous State Department tours, Duke Ellington also recognized both the positive and negative implications of globalization, as evidenced in many of his comments about musical identity from this time. His own ambivalence resonated with statements of Marshall McLuhan, a popular intellectual icon whose ideas challenged people to reconsider their relationship with media and with others around the globe. When Ellington encountered McLuhan’s ideas, he incorporated them into his presentation of his late suite, the Afro-Eurasian Eclipse (1970). By exploring Ellington’s discussion of the suite, its relation to Marshall McLuhan’s notions of globalization and identity loss, and its employment of musical tropes, we can begin to understand Ellington’s evaluation of jazz identity in a context beyond the stereotypical black and white of America. I argue that the suite represents Ellington’s attempt to negotiate the expanding horizons of jazz in an era when its definition had evolved largely beyond the communities who had directed its development. By incorporating musical signifiers of other cultures into his language, Ellington could reenact a kind of microcosmic “global village” on his own terms, while continually renegotiating his own musical identity as an aging bandleader in a fast changing world.

Unlike Wagner, Mahler, or Schoenberg, Johannes Brahms is often absent from discussions of Viennese fin-de-siècle psychological theories and their intersections with musical culture. The privileged context depicting an aging Brahms resistant to new trends in politics and the arts discourages
the notion that he would have known and been influenced by any such developments in the developing field of psychology or psychological arts. As a case study exploring Brahms’s potential engagement in these areas, this article reexamines the contested “legend” of Brahms playing piano in dive bars as an adolescent, not to determine its veracity, but in part to reveal how this motif functions in two different narrative models of Brahms biographies to about 1933. In the first model, the com- poser emerges spotless from the trials of a low-income childhood; in the second, however, he remains scarred by the unhealthy sexual climate of the bars. I argue that cultural-intellectual contexts in fin-de-siècle Vienna influenced Brahms’s attempts to shape his biographical narratives and that both models could have originated with Brahms himself. From Paolo Mantegazza’s sexology treatises to Hermann Bahr’s scandalous plays, the Viennese reading public was confronted with both scientific and literary material that conflated psychology, sexuality, and personal identity, while other artists such as Max Klinger sought to explore the unconscious motivations behind behaviors. In this context, we may reevaluate anecdotal evidence in which Brahms accords his adult problems to a traumatic childhood experience of playing piano in dangerous establishments: it suggests that Brahms could have taken part in fin-de-siècle trends of self-analysis and psychologized autobiography.

Director Ari Aster has referred to his folk-horror film Midsommar as a "breakup movie," which follows the relationship of protagonist Dani (Florence Pugh) and her emotionally distant boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor). A struggle from the first scene, their relationship falters as they join Christian's graduate cohort in the rural Swedish village of Hårga to study and experience a mid-summer pagan festival. The quaint architecture and sunny scenery belie the true nature of the situation: the locals are cult members looking for fresh blood to sacrifice, and the visiting students are murdered one-by-one, except Dani, who ultimately joins the cult. The events unfold through Dani's perspective, such that the final sacrifice of her boyfriend may be understood as a liberating step in her healing from previous relationship trauma. This short version of the plot omits a key element of the film's emotional atmosphere, namely the sudden and catastrophic loss of Dani's sister and parents in the cold open. As if the struggle to connect with her boyfriend weren't enough, she is now traumatized and lacking the support of family. Dani's post-traumatic stress disorder informs her emotional responses and decisions throughout the film. Triggered at various points, she struggles to breathe and control her emotional responses. At other times, the image of her dead sister appears unexpectedly-a contemporary spin on the classic horror trope of the jump-scare. More significantly, the loss of Dani's family and her emotional vulnerability isolate her from her fellow Americans and make her a prime target for the cult. Problematic as it may be, the final

This article is about the emergence of the 1960s rock musical in Israel as an ambivalent response to Zionist ideology. I demonstrate that in the Israeli context rock music’s countercultural ethos has been just as integral to the genre’s adoption as have been its stylistic innovations. The ‘folk authenticity’ signified by this music empowered playwrights and songwriters like Dan Almagor to simultaneously mobilise and undermine signifiers of the dominant ideology, giving rise to an ‘aesthetics of ambivalence’. In this article, I examine two of Almagor’s musicals—Once There Was a Hasid (1968) and My Jerusalem (1969)—in order to assess how the playwright navigated these cultural tensions. In so doing, I place analysis of the shows’ production and reception in conversation with ethnographic interviews. In light of these materials, I argue that when popular music travels globally, ideologies about music’s power to shape political discourse, rather than its stylistic innovations, often govern local adaptations of the globalised style.

Where does “Intro to World Music” stand in an era of political crisis, globalization, and technological (post)modernity, when relations between self and other are in constant flux? In this article, I critique the colonial underpinnings of “Intro to World Music” while arguing that a recuperated curricular framework can engage students in decolonial praxis via a focus on conversations about self and other. Within such a framework, students can develop a resistance to Eurocentric thinking, and instructors can facilitate encounters with “others” in the context of experiential learning projects. In this way, the teaching strategies I describe may help students move beyond a cultivation of oppositional or analogous thinking about culture (here is how “they” are different from or similar to “us”) to an aspiration toward relational thinking about cultural difference that is other-centered, rather than self-centered.

The past few decades witnessed a growing interest in the music of the Jewish communities of India. Indeed, the emergence of the close-knit community of Indo-Judaic Studies in the academy at-large more or less coincided with this increased attention to Indian Jewish music. Sara Manasseh, an ethnomusicologist who has been at the forefront of this surge, has collaborated with record producer Julian Futter in the release of a fascinating compact disc, entitled Shir Hodu: Jewish Song from Bombay of the ‘30s. The CD features fifteen remastered tracks that were salvaged from a set of 78 rpm records, several of which Futter apparently discovered by chance, according to the press release for the producers’ other collaboration, Shbahoth: Iraqi-Jewish Song from the 1920‘s (2009). This was a significant discovery for the field of Jewish music research because, as the booklet mentions, “Until the release of this compilation it had been assumed by researchers that no recordings of Jewish music ha...

For Arnold Schoenberg, presentation (Darstellung) is an act of conscien- tious composition by which the formal/functional properties of motives and Gestalten, along with any possible development or variation, are real- ized in the creation of a coherent musical artwork. Presentation, then, is the manner by which a musical idea (Gedanke) is made comprehensible. Like the “musical idea,” the concept of presentation assumes a variety of forms and functions in Schoenberg’s theories. In its most general sense, presentation describes abstract musico-compositional practices deduced from a wide range of composers and works from a variety of musical styles and historical periods. Schoenberg distinguishes three forms of presenta- tion in his theoretical writings: “stringing-together” or “juxtaposition” in popular musical forms, developing variation in homophonic music gen- erally associated with the “Viennese Classicist” period, and “unfolding” or “envelopment” (Abwicklung), a form used to describe the polyphon- ic/contrapuntal practices of the Baroque as exemplified by the music of J.S. Bach. In the present essay, I will focus on unfolding by examining this particular method of presentation within the context of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional practices using the Prelude from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 as a case study. As I hope to show, principles associated with unfolding can, with some slight modifications, serve as a viable method of presenting musical ideas in a twelve-tone context.

The Smiths are one of the most commercially successful and influential bands to emerge from the British post-punk movement in the 1980s. Along with elements such as lyrics, harmony, and musical form, a key component of The Smiths’ distinctive musical style involves their sound and, in particular, their sound as represented on studio recordings. Drawing upon the work and insights of scholars such as Albin Zak, Allan F. Moore and Ruth Dockwray, this paper details the complex recording history of the band’s first single ‘Hand in Glove’ in an attempt to trace the development of The Smiths’ unique recorded sound.

In this essay, I examine how aspects of rhythm and metre play a fundamental role in shaping and defining Led Zeppelin’s musical style. At the same time, I will show how Led Zeppelin was able to modify, manipulate, and develop pre-existing musical models and forms through various rhythmic and metric strategies. Comparative analyses will be used in an effort to show how Led Zeppelin’s flexible conception of rhythm and metre enabled the band to put their own stylistic ‘stamp’ on (i) specific musical genres (‘The Crunge’ and the song’s relation to James Brown-style funk), (ii) their riff constructions (‘Black Dog’ in relation to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well’), and (iii) their cover versions (‘Dazed and Confused’). Drawing upon my analytical points, I re-visit the complex issues that persist regarding the possibility that Led Zeppelin even has an ‘original’ or ‘unique’ style given their often overt reliance upon earlier musical models and forms. Therefore, in my conclusion, I argue that the development of any artist or group’s individual style necessarily involves the ability to assimilate and transform pre-existing musical features – features such as rhythm and metre – in novel ways and where issues relating to musical style intersect with influence.

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Zorn's celebrated game piece Cobra, the present article consider the work from a number of perspectives. The first part will describe how the musical game is “played.” Next, I will consider the type of community imagined by Zorn in his game pieces in general and Cobra in particular followed by a consideration of the commercially available recorded versions of Cobra. Finally, I will situate Cobra in relation to works composed by Zorn in the late 1970s through the late 1980s.

For progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, the concept album offered a solution to the problem of large-scale formal coherence in a rock setting. In an effort to elevate a record from a simple collection of separate parts (disconnected songs) to a coherent whole, many artists and bands explored various ways to create continuity and unity over a single record. Given the “high-art” aspirations of these progressive rock musicians, it was, perhaps, inevitable that the many textual and musical methods used in creating larger forms would be extended beyond the single album to include a group of albums. With Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979), The Final Cut (1983), and Roger Waters’ The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), the rock world was presented with its first concept album trilogy. Individually, these three records (which I will refer to collectively as “The Wall Cycle”) explore and describe themes of distance, betrayal, alienation, and estrangement.
Furthermore, each individual record is intrathematically unified by a small group of musical motives or themes. Furthermore, the Wall Cycle is remarkable, and perhaps unique, in that the entire three-album cycle is, from a musical standpoint, interthematically related where a number of musical motives or themes are shared between albums.