ARSC Journal最新文献

{"title":"Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording","authors":"Rob Haskins","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-0751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-0751","url":null,"abstract":"Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. By David Grubbs. Durham, NC: DU.K.e University Press, 2014. xxvi +220pp (paperback). Illustrations, Discography, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-8223-5590-8. $23.95. In the decade of the 1960s, John Cage turned his attention to exploring the limits of indeterminacy in composition and performance. Works such as Variations 111 (1963) are so open that they include the performer's note that any activities can be considered part of the piece; Richard Kostelanetz recalls a remark by Cage that reveals the implications of this instruction: \"We could be performing [Variations III] right now, if we decided to do so\" (John Cage: An Anthology, pp. 195-196). Cage also expressed his disdain for recordings during the period, precisely because indeterminate compositions could sound completely different each time the work was performed. As David Grubbs argues in this well-written monograph, Cage was one of (and perhaps influenced some members of a number of musicians, composers, and sound artists who were equally dismissive of recordings as artistic documents. Nevertheless, many of these unrepeatable performances were recorded--some released commercially, some held by private individuals or institutions --and their increased accessibility today presents the opportunity to consider the changing listening practices and assumptions from then and now. This he does, selectively but effectively in five chapters. The first examines the avant-garde underdog Henry Flynt, who stopped making music decades ago but whose work was widely released only after 2001 and is perhaps better known now than ever. Chapter 2 concerns Cage's ideas about recordings and their reception (especially through a close look at Luc Ferrari's tape piece Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (Almost Nothing, or Daybreak at the Seaside, 1967-1970), a 20-minute work that artfully assembles a number of different recordings of an outside environment to give the impression it is nothing but a sonic photograph of that environment. In the next chapter, Grubbs considers Cage as performer, particularly on the recording Indeterminacy made with David Tudor. Chapter 4 investigates various figures associated with the free improvisation movement including Derek Bailey and AMM. The final chapter brings the investigation unambiguously into the present by discussing the advent of online free repositories such as ubuweb and the ubiquitous mp3, through which the ontological status of recordings and the nature of listening practices have been decisively transformed. Scholars of experimental music--and especially of Cage--will no doubt find themselves, as I did, feeling like the choir to whom Preacher Grubbs is delivering an obvious sermon, as when he cites Benjamin Piekut's video Henry Flynt in New York (2008), wherein Flynt reveals that he and Tony Conrad talked about rock and listened to Phil Spector, James Brown, and others in Conrad","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127531743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now","authors":"D. Wells","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-5500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-5500","url":null,"abstract":"Opera at the Bandstand: Then and Now. By George W. Martin. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2014. 254pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8108-8853-1. $85 In the nineteenth century, public concerts by wind bands were a popular form of entertainment in the United States. In an era in which the country had only a handful of major orchestras, thousands of bands--local and touring, amateur and professional, large and small--brought a wide array of music to the ears of the general public. A surprisingly large portion of the repertoire of these bands consisted of arrangements or transcriptions of excerpts from contemporary operas. This practice, along with the spread of popular song and dance sets based on opera, meant that the average nineteenth-century American was likely familiar with operatic melodies even if he or she had never had the opportunity desire, or disposable income to see fully-staged grand opera. George W. Martin sets out here to examine in detail the role of American wind bands in disseminating operatic repertoire, a subject that has not previously attracted much scholarly attention. But in order to accomplish this, he has written what amounts to a survey of the history of bands in the United States. Martin does not attempt to be comprehensive; rather he focuses on the activities and programming of some of the most prominent bands. To this end, he discusses the bands of Dodworth, Jullien, Gilmore, Sousa, and others. Throughout, he provides a thorough account of the operatic selections played by these bands. Moving into the twentieth century, Martin tracks the various technological, economic, social, and musical factors that contributed to the decline in wind bands in the mold of the great ensembles of the previous century. A handful of groups, most notably the U.S. Marine Band and the Goldman Band, did of course survive, and Martin continues his survey with these groups. He also details the new kinds of wind groups that emerged in the twentieth century: dance bands and the school-based wind ensemble. He argues that the latter of these, now the most common modern incarnation of the band, represents a break from the traditional role of wind bands. Rather than presenting a mixed array of popular and serious music (including operatic transcriptions), they generally focus on works specifically composed for band. Martin's writing is clear and well structured, and he presents a good deal of compelling evidence for the prevalence and importance of operatic repertoire within the programming of nineteenth-century bands. …","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"226 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114747432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Duke, A Life of Duke Ellington","authors":"Dexter Morrill","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-4937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-4937","url":null,"abstract":"DUKE, A Life of Duke Ellington. By Terry Teachout. NY: Gotham Books, 2013. ISBN 978-1-592-40749-1 More has been written about Duke Ellington than any other jazz figure, so it is remarkable that Terry Teachout has written a book that will be required reading on Ellington, along with Mark Tucker's Ellington, the Early Years (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Duke Ellington Reader (Oxford University Press, 1993), and Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1968). The book's title DUKE, A Life of Duke Ellington is well chosen, because the main focus of the book is about Ellington's personality and character, set in a historical chronology of his band and the music, topics so well documented by a host of writers. For the most part, the author has wisely avoided music analysis and quotes Schuller and others when he writes about Ellington's music in the context of his narrative. The chapters are laid out in conventional chronological fashion, beginning with Ellington's youth in Washington, D.C., and ending in the early 1970s. The book has an appendix, a list of important recordings, a long section on source notes, and a general index. The author has done a good job of listing sources, found at the end of the book, but there are no endnote numbers in the text to connect with the sources, making it awkward for readers. The Prologue to the book is the most important chapter, setting the tone and objectives of his writing, and it serves as a summary of Ellington's behavior, his relationships, and his unorthodox way of composing, with a critical assessment of his shortcomings and limitations in composing. Teachout digs more deeply into his subject than most writers, who are content to report on Ellington's great fame, the band travels, lists of recordings, and anecdotes. The brief \"Afterword\" is a kind of bookend, precisely describing what Teachout is striving to achieve in the book; \"DUKE ... is not so much a work of scholarship as an act of synthesis, a narrative biography that is substantially based on the work of academic scholars and other researchers who in recent years have unearthed a wealth of new information about Duke Ellington and his colleagues.\" DUKE could not have been written until years after the death of Ellington, because of his candid writing about Ellington's character, his shortcomings, and sometimes troubled relationships with his musicians. Ellington's huge reputation and successful career left thousands of devoted listeners, performing musicians and writers who were often careful not to be critical. A noteworthy aspect of Teachout's book is the detail in which he describes how Ellington composed with his band in rehearsal, playing short phrases and interacting with them to get the sound he wanted. His lack of formal music training in harmony and composition led partly to Ellington's unorthodox way of working, with interesting results. Teachout skillfully connects his writing on Ellington's personal relations","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125508844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP","authors":"Kathryn Metz","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-6082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-6082","url":null,"abstract":"Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. By Susan Schmidt Horning. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 292pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Notes, Essay on Sources, Index. ISBN 13: 978-1-4214-1022-7 Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock 'n'Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians' Union, 1942-1968. By Michael James Roberts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 254pp (softcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5475-8. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, I have been fortunate to have engaged with sound engineers and music producers from different eras and styles of music, from Glyn Johns to Louise Boddie to Steve Jordan to Young Guru. Their profession is one complicated by a technological divide between the studio and the audience; the listener is rarely aware of the recording process, let alone understands it. Susan Schmidt Horning's recent book, however, is a compelling exploration of a world largely hidden from view that has been shaped by scientists and recording engineers whom she calls tinkerers. More importantly, Chasing Sound is a vital contribution to sound studies that traces the shift from the aesthetic of live performance to the recorded object that has dominated the popular imagination for nearly a century. Schmidt Homing's early chapters document the earliest recording studios, describing recordists--proto-sound engineers--as tinkerers who learned their techniques through experimentation and by rote. Here the author artfully depicts the bare laboratories where sound scientists experimented--tinkered--marginalizing musicians in the service of optimal sound. Schmidt Horning explores the solidification of niche markets that cater to different audiences and tastes (hillbilly, race, jazz, blues, gospel). The studio is electrified, streamlining the recording process and improving sound with microphones instead of recording horns; and radio technologies evolve and proliferate, giving listeners much easier, more affordable and quicker access to music. Recording professionalizes, and the studio becomes the canvas as those new professionals become known for sound styles. While the focus of the book is the evolution of recording sound, it also documents changing business models in the early twentieth century as the United States digs into individualism and the pursuit of capital in the growth and development of the small business (small record label)--and soon large corporate--model. The descriptions of recording spaces are particularly fascinating, especially given the relationship between the recordist and musician. Bare, sterile rooms in which musicians crowded on top of one another--making many musicians uncomfortable and nervous--in front of a recording horn and a recordist obscured by curtains eventually become sound proof, cozy, furnished vestibules where the recordist is now the engineer. The changes in recording spaces i","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134633174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'N' Roll","authors":"Bill Dahl","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-5498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-5498","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122286634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"More Important Than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography","authors":"Cary Ginell","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-4929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-4929","url":null,"abstract":"More Important Than the Music: A History of Jazz Discography. By Bruce D. Epperson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 284pp (hardback). ISBN 978-0-226-06753-7 The intriguing title of Bruce Epperson's book gives a hint as to the direction his prose takes in attempting to untangle the knotted history of jazz discography. Indeed, it seems that the music that discographers have been trying to document since the discipline's birth has taken a back seat to the jealousy ego, stubbornness, bias, and obsessions of its practitioners. To Epperson's credit, what could have been a dull and dry subject has been enlivened by the personality studies of the major contributors to jazz discography through the years. Jazz discography has been like the Wild, Wild West, with rules being made up as time went along, with practitioners acting like lone gunmen, fending off rivals in dusty street showdowns for supremacy in the genre. Musicologist James Patrick probably said it best when he defined discography as \"a bibliographical quirk of a small band of monomaniacal jazz collectors,\" which is a perfect launching point for Epperson's historically based study. The best parts of the book are the first chapters, in which we learn that the word \"discography\" first appeared in an editorial written by Compton Mackenzie, owner and editor of the Gramophone, in its January 1930 issue. Hilton R. Schleman is given the credit for publishing the first book-length discography dedicated to jazz, Rhythm on Record, which came out in April 1936. After Frenchman Charles Delaunay published the first edition of his Hot Discography a few months later, the word \"discography\" was in wide circulation. The definition of the word, however, has changed over the years, and Epperson does a superb job laying out the chronology of not only what was included in discographies, but who their targeted users were. Delaunay is recognized as the first important jazz discographer, a successful Parisian graphic artist whose historically-based approach to discography was a direct reflection of his own history and personality. Delaunay got hooked on jazz while creating advertising artwork for a Paris music store. Jazz became a new religion to Delaunay and he soon joined the Paris Hot Club, where he met Hughes Panassie, one of the more colorful characters in jazz criticism. Epperson has a wonderful way with words; he describes Panassie as a \"wealthy solipsistic misanthrope,\" a walking embodiment of the \"mouldy figge,\" a term coined by Leonard Feather to label intransigent lovers of traditional jazz music. The initial discographies of the 1930s were quite different from the ones we use to today. In the beginning, discographies were conceived as guides for collectors, hip-pocket books to be taken to estate sales and record stores, with highly subjective listings of recommended records. These listings actually elevated the value of certain records, while devaluing discs that were not included in its pages. Det","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125591720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music","authors":"Rob Haskins","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-3766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-3766","url":null,"abstract":"Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music. By Alvin Lucier. Middletown, CT Wesleyan University Press, 2012. xiv + 218pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Index. ISBN 978-0-81957297-4. Price: $24.95 Those who know the composer Alvin Lucier may know him best for his 1969 electronic work I Am Sitting in a Room, in which he records a short text, plays it back while recording the playback, and repeats the process until the natural resonance of the room's architecture pulverizes the speech into ghostly musical tones. His later works, however, are no less novel; one of my favorites is Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (1988, recorded on Mode 178), a twenty-minute work in which a percussionist gradually reveals the many acoustic properties of a triangle through varying in performance the tempo, loudness, damping, damping location, and beater location. During his career, Lucier has heroically and uncompromisingly explored a simple question: what is the effect of listening carefully to different kinds of sounds in particular kinds of spaces? For his admirers, the answer is an experience unlike any other, and one not infrequently very beautiful. Music 109 refers, as Lucier relates in a short note at the end of the book, to lectures on new music he taught at Wesleyan University for over forty years. Most of the music he discusses was written by composers who, in one way or another, produced experimental music of their time: Ives, Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Ashley Glass, Reich, Anderson, Kagel, and Lucier himself. Compositions and techniques are introduced in the context of broad topics: genres, places, concepts, and so on--a partial list includes Symphony, Town Hall, Bell Labs, Repetition, Prose, Long String Instrument, Opera, Words, and String Quartets. Is the text here literally a transcription of class lectures? I sometimes think so, as in this part of a description of the first movement from Ives's first symphony: \"This movement is only about three minutes long. It's marked maestoso. That's Italian for majestic or stately.\" At other times, I'm not so sure. Either way, this book doesn't simply present lecture notes: Lucier knows personally many of the composers he mentions and more than often enough worked with them, too. I love reading stories about new music composers and concerts, and Lucier tells many good ones. Here's a sample (an excerpt from his account of the New York Philharmonic's notorious performance of Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis and works by Feldman and Wolff): Bernstein gave a little speech before performing the three works, denigrating the music. …","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"160 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124469395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio","authors":"Rob Haskins","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1982","url":null,"abstract":"Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio. Edited by Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. x + 412pp (softcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4946-4. Price: $27 As Timothy D. Taylor observes in his general introduction to this extraordinary volume, the burgeoning research disciplines of Science and Technology Studies and Sound Studies are focusing scholarly attention on the interaction between technology and culture as a whole. Musicologists and ethnomusicologists, likewise, have not been tardy in exploring the important role technologies have had in shaping the way cultures have consumed and conceptualized music in everyday life. (It has long been central, for instance, in studies of popular music or jazz.) Still, a general history that emphasizes the technology over the musical products that it mediates has not yet appeared. This book offers the next best thing: an engaging anthology of primary sources that trace the developing cultural awareness of sound-capturing and/or reproducing technologies as well as the use of real-time acoustic voices or instruments or pre-recorded sounds to accompany motion pictures. The readings span the years from 1878 (the earliest entry Edison's article \"The Phonograph and its Future\") to 1945, the year when, as Taylor claims, all three technologies reached a state of maturity and were fully integrated into American life (p.6). Of particular interest is the emphasis on everyday life that all three editors employ in their choice of texts. The narrators of this history in sources come from every walk of life, including professionals in the field--Edison, radio and TV pioneer David Sarnoff and Joseph N. Weber, president of AFM from 1915 to 1940--hobbyists, journalists, and many others. The selection guarantees the widest possible representation of the complex cultural reception of these technologies, along with a range of differing reactions--from sober objectivity to unadulterated wonder--and a freshness and spontaneity that could not be achieved in any other way. The three large sections of readings--one each for sound recording, cinema, and radio --are arranged topically, not chronologically. Principal headings for the sound recording section, for instance, include predictions; men, women, and phonographs; and the pro and con view of the phonograph. …","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127564530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II","authors":"P. Gronow","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-5570","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-5570","url":null,"abstract":"Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II. By Christina L. Baade. NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. 275pp. Photos. Index. Bibiliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-537201-4 Victory through Harmony is a study of the role of popular music in BBC broadcasts during the war, but the book's range is much wider. It also tells us a great deal about the history of broadcasting and music broadcasting, popular music and jazz in Britain, British-American relationships, and the role of women and blacks in British broadcasting. It is thoroughly researched and documented, but also entertaining to read. The British Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1922, was the first national broadcasting company in Europe. It established the \"public service\" model of broadcasting, which was followed by many other countries. In this system, broadcasting was not financed by advertising like in the United States, but by license fees collected from listeners. In practice, European broadcasting did not differ that much from American. Broadcasting time was divided between speech and music. Most broadcasting was live from the studio; records were seldom used. By the end of the 1930s, the BBC had become the biggest employer of musicians in Britain and the most important source of income for the Performing Rights Society (the British equivalent of ASCAP). However, there were important distinctions in their relationship to popular music. In order to maintain their credibility, European public broadcasters developed a policy of \"uplift\": they saw it as their duty to educate audiences to appreciate good, preferably classical music, and shunned the more vulgar forms of popular music. Nevertheless, they could not deny the wide appeal of popular music to the listening audiences. In the 1930s, the core of BBC's popular music programs consisted of well-trained restaurant dance bands and theatre organists. There is as good opening chapter on British popular music in the 1930s. It is interesting to learn that even at this early time, the BBC already had a \"payola\" problem--not in the form of payments from record companies to disc jockeys, but from music publishers to bands with regular radio programs. The outbreak of the war forced the BBC to change its programming in many ways. All programming was reduced to a single national wavelength. Popular music presented a special problem. There were influential voices suggesting that in the time of war, popular music would be dangerous to the morale of the troops. On the other hand, there was the urgent task of maintaining the productivity of war workers on the home front. One of the first results was the program Music While You Work, which became very successful. It was the first example of functional background music on the BBC. It was performed live from the studio, with various dance bands playing non-stop carefully selected popular tunes. The author follows the development and planning of MWYW, quoting preserved progra","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131380441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song","authors":"C. E. Pena","doi":"10.4324/9781315609898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315609898","url":null,"abstract":"Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. By Allan F. Moore. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 395pp (hardcover). Music Examples. Bibliography. Index. ISBN 9781409428640 Allan F. Moore, Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey, has published extensively on pop music, having written short books about the Beatles and Jethro Tull and edited collections such as Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge, 2003) and Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (Ashgate, 2007). Song Means builds upon foundations he laid in Rock: The Primary Text (published in its second edition in 2001) to codify his philosophy and methodology of popular song interpretation. Moore begins by explicating his aims, motivations, and assumptions. He aims to balance broad hermeneutics with narrower technical analyses. It is clear that he will draw from disciplines outside musicology, and throughout the book he references work in sociology cognitive science, literary theory linguistics, and other fields; large parts of Moore's approach rest on theoretical constructs adapted from these areas. He distinguishes between songs, performances, and tracks, with the combination of song and performance equating to his primary concern, the track. Moore builds his case logically unveiling several such valuable conceptualizations along the way. Early chapters focus on musical structural elements and ideas about how these can lead toward interpretations. Noteworthy is his prioritization of texture, the first element he discusses in detail. Technical analysis of melody and harmony can obscure the fact that most listeners, lacking such training, derive a great deal of meaning from timbre and texture. Moore's functional layers of music, corresponding roughly to an ensemble of drums, bass, chording and melodic instruments, are graphically shown to occupy the soundbox, which illustrates the locations of sounds within the stereo spectrum. The following chapters find Moore detailing his analytical approaches to rhythm, meter, harmony melody, and form. For consistency's sake, he insists on analyzing harmony in terms of modes, which is awkward when a composer's intention is clearly non-modal (the Kinks' \"You Really Got Me\" is Ionian?). Moore also provides a history of popular song with the hope of enabling listeners to gauge a track's place on the continuum of style. In later chapters, Moore synthesizes these structural considerations into broader interpretations. His concept of friction explores how meaning is derived from a track's deviations from expected norms. He sets up a distinction between performer (a real person), persona (the public and artistic image that person assumes), and protagonist (a character in a song who is not necessarily the performer or persona). Moore bases his concept of authenticity partially on the perceived closeness or distance between performer and persona. Other potential considerations are whether songs' personas and situations seem realistic or fict","PeriodicalId":158557,"journal":{"name":"ARSC Journal","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115329419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}