{"title":"Brahms, Autodidacticism, and the Curious Case of the Gavotte","authors":"M. Ennis","doi":"10.7916/D8-FS3M-Q660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8-FS3M-Q660","url":null,"abstract":"On 23 February 1896, after an excursion into the countryside outside Vienna, Richard Heuberger found Brahms in uncharacteristically expansive mood. Brahms spoke at length about the relative merits of Mozart and Beethoven, making it clear his sympathies lay with the former, before turning to Haydn’s “extraordinary greatness.”2 He entered his stride, however, when the conversation turned to musical education:","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"104 1","pages":"139-178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46700645","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":"Ricardo Lorenz: A Post-Colonial/Modern Latin(o) American Composer","authors":"Hermann Hudde","doi":"10.7916/D8-NTMP-3G40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8-NTMP-3G40","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Venezuelan composer Ricardo Lorenz (b. 1961), whose music and writing both focus around the concept of transculturation. First used by Fernando Ortiz ([1947] 1995) to describe the cultural evolution of Cuba in the mid-twentieth century, transculturation is understood by Lorenz as the phenomenon of two mutually influential musical cultures; it “entails the circulation of ideas in both directions, resulting in an interdependent network of mutual influences” (Lorenz 2000a, 93). This article explores the role of transculturation in Lorenz’s work, putting it in the context of his relocation from Venezuela to the United States in the 1980s, as well as his own writings on the subject. Even though Ricardo Lorenz has an outstanding career as a contemporary composer, his works and artistic persona still remain under-explored in musicology. This article seeks to establish groundwork for further scholarly study of Ricardo Lorenz’s music; at the same time, it aims to demonstrate the contributions of Latin American/Latino composers to Western art music, which they have accomplished by bringing forth a subtle universe of sounds shaped by its cultural history. 1","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"103 1","pages":"97-120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48306216","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":"Reflections on Teaching Music 17: Hip Hop","authors":"Asher Tobin Chodos","doi":"10.7916/CM.V0I104.5393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/CM.V0I104.5393","url":null,"abstract":"In 2019, my last year of graduate school, I taught the department’s undergraduate history of Hip Hop. This essay reflects on some of the many issues this course raises.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"104 1","pages":"77-84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48895222","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":"Iverson, Jennifer. 2018. Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold-War Musical Avant Garde. New York: Oxford University Press","authors":"T. Gordon","doi":"10.7916/CM.V0I104.5397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/CM.V0I104.5397","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"104 1","pages":"179-186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43290096","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":"A Reappraisal of the Relationship Between Benjamin Britten and Walter Greatorex","authors":"J. Coyle","doi":"10.7916/CM.V0I105.5402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/CM.V0I105.5402","url":null,"abstract":"Walter Greatorex was Music Master at Gresham’s School from 1911 to 1936. Benjamin Britten was his pupil from 1928-1930 (aged 14-16). The received view is that Britten despised him as incompetent, unimaginative and reactionary. This view is based on Britten’s letters home from Gresham’s and an often repeated passage from Imogen Holst’s 1966 biography of Britten. This paper views these pieces of evidence in their wider context, and draws on new primary sources from Gresham’s School archives to question this opinion. It seeks to demonstrate that Greatorex was a musician and teacher of considerable gifts. Further, his commitment to including all members of the school community in music making might be seen as subliminally influential on Britten’s view of his own place in society and on his poly-technical works such as St Nicolas (1948), The Little Sweep (1949) and Noye’s Fludde (1958).","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"105 1","pages":"42-55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71363538","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":"Through the Fabric of My Own: Louise Alenius and Embodied Interrelationality","authors":"A. Buffington","doi":"10.7916/CM.V0I103.5382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/CM.V0I103.5382","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2014, Danish composer Louise Alenius has engaged in a series of performances characterized by extraordinary circumstances entitled Poroset. Eminently site-specific, Poroset has been mounted within the disheveled attic spaces and compact dressing rooms of the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen. Alenius, the sole recurring participant in each performance, meticulously structures these performances utilizing three striking parameters. Each performance (exhibiting different combinations of singing, dancing, acting, and speaking) lasts just fifteen minutes, and is staged within a location of the Royal Danish Theater disclosed to the audience member only just prior to the performance’s commencement. Most crucially, each performance is presented for a single audience member at a time, a setting provoking intense intimacy and vulnerability between its audience member and performers. \u0000 \u0000With information obtained through interviews with Alenius herself, I engage Poroset with phenomenological models formulated by Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to assess and illuminate the intersubjectivity that emerges between the performers and audience member within these esoteric encounters. By conducting such an investigation, I strive to accentuate the experiential significance of this contemporary composer’s oeuvre, one boldly traversing the boundaries between music, theater, and performance art to achieve a timely holistic aspiration: the delicate formation of trust between strangers.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"103 1","pages":"45-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43996776","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":"Academic Labor and Music Curricula","authors":"Lucie Vágnerová, Andrés Jacobo García Molina","doi":"10.7916/CM.V0I102.5366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/CM.V0I102.5366","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we parse recent initiatives rethinking music curricula—in particular, those critiquing the enduring centrality of the Western art music canon—in connection to questions of academic labor and service. Many of our interlocutors ask us: “Why are conservative curricula a problem now?” The short answer is that canon-driven music curricula have always been problematic, as reflected by historical initiatives for curricular reform. However, even if the present moment in US music departments is far from unique, it does stand out in particular institutional and disciplinary ways that offer new insights into how curricular design operates and resists change. Specifically, we argue that when it comes to matters of curricular design, students of music would merit from departments thinking differently about structures of labor and academic seniority. \u0000As we discuss, contingent faculty have recently become the majority of teaching staff in higher education. Even though this labor force has a much higher representation of minority and women scholars than tenured faculty, their control over curricula is minimal. While many of these scholars channel their desire for change into public-oriented initiatives and other forms of curriculum-adjacent academic service, this work is less valued than research and teaching, and thus contributes to a self-sustaining cycle of exclusion. Intimately entwined with the histories of music disciplines, the canon remains obstinate. In response to calls for reform, it is typically only adjusted by placing similar texts and objects in play (Natvig 2002, xi) or by mobilizing the language of “diversity” to justify and nominally amend a canon-driven curriculum. From our own positions as contingent faculty, we thus argue that the relative invisibility of academic service is a curricular issue in its own \u0000Aside from this shifting, increasingly vocal, but still largely disempowered labor force, the current political moment also animates the long and tense relationship between the humanities and social movements. Since at least the presidential campaigns of 2016 that polarized the country on the issue of immigration, if not the Black Lives Matter movement (2013–) that shone a light on the deadly repercussions of systemic racism, there has been increased pressure on academia to recognize its complicity in imperial, colonial, racist, sexist, and classist social formations, as current social movements influence initiatives variously calling for critical teaching, diversity, and decolonization. We propose that music departments recognize the performative properties of curricula, and we suggest entry points to redressing the influence of coloniality and empire that undergird the institutionalization of music.","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"102 1","pages":"93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45278616","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":"Steingo, Gavin. 2016. Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press","authors":"E. H. Clark","doi":"10.7916/D8-W36Q-F317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8-W36Q-F317","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"102 1","pages":"253-261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47083471","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":"Licia’s Lectures on Nothing","authors":"Fred Moten","doi":"10.7916/D8-GJHT-BB46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8-GJHT-BB46","url":null,"abstract":"Considering its lugubrious content, it seems odd, more than forty years later, that the music industry and listening public frantically celebrated “nothingness” in this very melodramatic way. The muscular symphonic orchestra rushed to keep pace with the singer who had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere and literally came out of the nowhere that was Puerto Rico to Latin America, the United States, and the world. Licia Fiol-Matta, The Great Woman Singer, 1","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"102 1","pages":"229-233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43867949","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":"Black Noise, White Ears: Resilience, Rap, and the Killing of Jordan Davis","authors":"William Cheng","doi":"10.7916/CM.V0I102.5367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/CM.V0I102.5367","url":null,"abstract":"I am a black woman over six feet tall. My laugh sounds like an exploding mouse. I squeak loudly and speak quickly when I get excited. I like knock in my trunk and bass in my music. . . . I am especially attuned to how my sonic footprint plays into how I live and if I should die. As a black woman, the bulk of my threat is associated with my loudness. – Regina Bradley (2015), on the “sonic disrespectability” of Sandra Bland","PeriodicalId":34202,"journal":{"name":"Current Musicology","volume":"102 1","pages":"115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43247789","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}