{"title":"The Queen of the Violin","authors":"Maeve Nagel-Frazel","doi":"10.52214/cm.v109i.8994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v109i.8994","url":null,"abstract":"The commercialized nineteenth century lyceum circuit provided the vehicle for Camilla Urso (1840-1902) to become America's first celebrity female violinist. Vizualizing six seasons between 1873-83 where Urso toured under lyceum bureau management in digital maps of my own creation, I argue industrialized transportation networks combined with the commercialized advertising and publicity of the lyceum circuit created a popular concert model that expanded Urso's audience and raised her concert fees. Urso's time on the lyceum circuit laid the foundation for her transnational career. Urso was never solely a lyceum musician, though exploring the role of lyceums and their bureaus in her career plays a key role in determining how she rose to fame and became America's most celebrated female violinist. Futhermore, Urso's lyceum career argues for classical music as a rural and commercial phenomenon of American popular culture in the nineteenth century. ","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45818017","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":"Emotional Storms, Passion and Melancholy when Symphonic Music is Legitimated as an Emotional Resource","authors":"Åsa Bergman","doi":"10.52214/cm.v109i.9892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v109i.9892","url":null,"abstract":"In some contexts, classical music is described as capable of evoking powerful emotional experiences in listeners, while in others it is associated with a restrained response on the part of the audience. Against the backdrop of this observation, the article aims to apply a discourse-analytic approach to investigating how symphonic music is constructed and legitimated as an emotional resource, and how listeners’ reactions are articulated in relation to ideas about the emotional qualities of music. The material comprises texts and a small number of images taken from concert programs of two leading symphony orchestras: the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO). \u0000The results demonstrate variation in both the feelings that are highlighted in the concert programs and the conceptions or ideas about musical meaning that are referred to in the descriptions. While some descriptions draw on a formalist artistic ideal, emphasizing the music’s independent esthetic value, others exhibit a romantic understanding of music, emphasizing its metaphysical qualities. Music is furthermore legitimated as an emotional resource by being characterized as a bearer of specific feelings, in other words, in line with a conception of musical meaning as representational. When it comes to audiences’ listening positions, it is shown that two contrasting listening ideals are articulated in the concert descriptions, one introspective and one that involves the manifestation of powerful emotional experiences. \u0000The variation in listening ideals and conceptual assumptions is found to agree with the individualized understanding of musical meaning that is typical of neo-liberal consumer culture. At the same time, however, because emotional extremes are given space alongside traditional esthetic ideals, historically formed ideals are perpetuated.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47910779","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":"Reverse Extensions and Multi-Layered Experiences of Harmony in Drake’s Harmonic Loops","authors":"Stephen Hudson","doi":"10.52214/cm.v109i.10139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v109i.10139","url":null,"abstract":"Drake's music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and conflicted to listeners. Sometimes these multilayered harmonies are created through what I call \"reverse extensions,\" where the bass line moves one or more thirds below the root of the chord in a fixed harmonic loop. These reverse extensions can sometimes be heard as a \"harmonic-bass divorce\" (de Clercq 2019) in which the bass line moves independently from the harmonic layer. However, I argue that they often can also be heard as single integrated harmonies, and that these plural hearings draw on intra- and inter-textual memory to create multilayered harmonic experiences which help evoke the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that Drake's lyrics are famous for. \u0000The plural identities of these chords can be understood by adapting elementary concepts from jazz theory, in which extended chords can be mimicked by or substituted with \"slash chords\" that add a bass note below the base triad; for example, G/A (G major triad with A in the bass, or AGBD) sounds like Am11 (ACEGBD). This chord sometimes seems to convey a double function of both G and Am. Relationships like this create an \"extension-related family\" of chords which often easily substitute for one another in chord progressions. I argue that by enumerating possibilities for chord substitutions, and plural hearings of extended chords, reverse extensions are an “enactive music theory” which frames chord identity as a structure subjectively enacted by an individual, rather than an objective property inherent “the music itself.”","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48418130","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":"Valuing Whiteness: The Presumed Innocence of Musical Truth","authors":"Erin Johnson-Williams","doi":"10.52214/cm.v109i.8729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v109i.8729","url":null,"abstract":"The end of 2020 presents a crucial time to reflect on the challenges that lie ahead for decolonizing and disrupting musicology. While many have flocked to what I call here the “presumed innocence of musical truth” during the time of Covid-19, any move to disaggregate music from political realities—both the contexts within which it was first created, and those that have upheld the musical traditions that are now in place—carries the risk of perpetuating the destructive possibility that loving the canon can also be our alibi for (or, as I propose here, our “claim to innocence” about) why the discipline of musicology has been so slow to engage with antiracist and decolonial debates in a sustained way. Thinking critically about systemic racism at the end of a particularly challenging year, the time is ripe for interrogating how the institutional structures that uphold western art music are still tied to values about aesthetic truths that have yet to be decolonized. In this article I respond to critical race and Indigenous studies theorists Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their renowned 2012 article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” by outlining three “moves to innocence” that are prevalent in music academia, followed by a proposed “move to disruption” about musical value that contributes to an actively “decolonizing” musicology. Focusing on the themes of truth and value, I argue that the next decade holds an opportunity to engage with the ideas that might productively disrupt our discipline the most.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48404422","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":"Dub Writing in Marcia Douglas’ The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim","authors":"Treviene A. Harris","doi":"10.52214/cm.v111i.11042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v111i.11042","url":null,"abstract":"Formal experimentation allows writers to critique long-standing notions of tradition and propriety. Within Caribbean literary discourse formal interventions are used to assert Caribbean life, art, and history as its own distinct expression. Particularly in relation to history and origin, or the history of our origins, Caribbean writers have experimented with literary form to articulate the region’s own peculiar understanding of its place within a time/space continuum as outside of conventional structures of knowledge. In this essay, I explore the adaptation of form across creative, artistic genres. Specifically, I look at how writing leverages sound in ways that disturb the belief that writing is a singularly privileged form in which knowledge circulates. Looking at the musical form of Jamaican Dub Music, I consider how the structural features of the sound such as fragmentation, reverb, and echo play out on the pages and in the story of Marcia Douglas’ Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim. I argue that Douglas’ novel enacts what I term “dub writing” that draws on the structure of dub music and that the novel suggests how we can imagine new ways to interpret and re/present histories. These new ways—creative interventions—effectively yield versions of history in much the same way that dub music results from the versioning of an orginary text or record. Further, versions are aspirations towards destabilizing the rigid nature of linearity that sustain our conception of time and how it structures history. \u0000 ","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42742598","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":"Simon, Andrew. 2022. Media of The Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.","authors":"J. Rubin","doi":"10.52214/cm.v111i.11633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v111i.11633","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p>-</jats:p>","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45066116","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":"Deciphering Guarapachangueo: Formulas and Formulaic Variation in Contemporary Rumba Percussion","authors":"Johnny Frías","doi":"10.52214/cm.v111i.11696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v111i.11696","url":null,"abstract":"This article serves to further the conceptual and musical analysis of guarapachangueo, a key influence in the contemporary style of the percussion in Havana-style rumba. I follow Turino’s (2009) lead in distinguishing between improvisation and formulaic performance in analyzing the rhythmic vocabulary of guarapachangueo as a set of related formulas and variations. In doing so, I expand upon and refine some of the characteristics of guarapachangeuo described by Bodenheimer (2015), particularly the common and yet nebulous idea that the style entails increased improvisation in the lower register of the percussion. As an active performer of the style who specializes in the lower register percussion, I will draw upon my experiences and those of fellow rumberos, as well as commercial recordings and online videos of rumba in highlighting the structural formulas used in rumba’s contemporary rhythmic vocabulary. I argue that rather than increased improvisation, guarapachangueo comprises an aesthetic approach to playing rumba in which unique formulas are employed, representing a break with the standardized formulas of traditional rumba from the second half of the 20th century. These formulas produce a heightened sense of tension and release in which increased space and the interactive exchange of percussive phrases are central. Internalized by drummers, these formulas and variations become part of the performer’s musical habitus and are drawn upon—often unconsciously—by the musicians in the form of musical decisions that “say something” in the flow of a rumba performance.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47301540","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":"Fake Radiolab: Audio and Ideology","authors":"Akiva Zamcheck, A. Mirza","doi":"10.52214/cm.v111i.11045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v111i.11045","url":null,"abstract":"Fake Radiolab is the name of an ongoing duo performance project in which we interrogate mediated “facts” through explorations in the podcast media form. We adopt the mannerisms and mania of radiophonic personalities and a variety of media genres (e.g., podcasts, YouTube rants, ASMR sessions, self-help narrations, dream sequences, radio plays, nature documentaries) to playfully/seriously jar the clarity and authority imparted to “content” by contemporary audio production. Acting as (unreliable) hosts of a live podcast, we present a kind of musicalized speech performance that juxtaposes multiple modes of audio narration against live synths, processed violin, and sampled audio fragments. During live performance, the opening narration, which is pre-recorded, presents an acousmatic pun to the audience who sees us on stage in front of our microphones; instead, our improvised performance inserts other manipulated material in counterpoint to the pre-recorded “backing-track.” \u0000Our project self-consciously addresses radiophonic matter as both our subject and form. The result is a technologically and culturally hybridized discourse in which power-symbols presented as performative utterances are subsumed within an assault of genres. In particular, we use audio production to highlight and amplify the transformation of text into performance, and performance into text, powerful manipulations which we see as ubiquitous and scarily efficient throughout contemporary media culture(s). Through all the surface misdirection and dislocation, there remains a through-line in the narration of the title track which offers an analysis of the history and present presence of the radiophonic voice. ","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48142824","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":"Transitional Functions: The Emergence of the Anticipatory Transition in Nineteenth-Century Sonatas","authors":"Luis Matos-Tovar","doi":"10.52214/cm.v111i.11041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v111i.11041","url":null,"abstract":"In sonata form, the transition module has specific primary functions and labels any other uncommon ones as deformations or, rather, idiosyncrasies. Considering the difference in compositional styles and techniques used between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the latter undergoes a trend explored by some nineteenth-century composers: a development in its transition module, which ostensibly confining it to an idiosyncratic feature or a lower-level default of the transition (Hepokoski and Darcy, 2011). I argue that composers utilized this technique in transitions to foreshadow themes in subsequent modules, yielding an additional function of the transition. This paper examines nineteenth-century sonatas, providing an analytic overview of my findings and introducing a concept I call the “Anticipatory Transition,” offering an additional function to the transition–—distinct from other concepts by previous scholarship.\u0000 \u0000Building off the work of Schenker's concept of “linkage technique” and its contribution to the development of new themes in subsequent thematic modules (Smith, 2007), as well as Schmalfeldt's adoption of Dahlhaus’s’ “processual” ideas (Schmalfeldt, 2011; Carro, 2020), the anticipatory transition is employed through two avenues: first, a literal “copy-and-paste,” and second, a “spun-out” transition. I analyze four case studies that utilize anticipatory transitions in nineteenth-century sonatas. It is important to examine the function of transitions more deeply and explore other possible outcomes because the material within can inform other thematic modules and contribute to the cohesiveness of the work. My analyses demonstrate that anticipatory transitions—profound than mere deformations and limitations—offer a deeper sense of unity and a broader perspective within sonata form.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45024945","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":"Dal Bon, Bruno. 2020. La Gioia Sovrana: Nietzsche e la Musica come Filosofia. Milano: Mimesis Edizioni.","authors":"Pietro Molteni","doi":"10.52214/cm.v111i.10982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cm.v111i.10982","url":null,"abstract":"La Gioia Sovrana, Nietzsche e la Musica come Filosofia is a book written by the Italian conductor and philosopher Bruno Dal Bon. It demonstrates that music is one of the fundamental driving forces that moved Nietzsche in his philosophical activity. ","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49508777","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}