{"title":"Solitary Listening, Copyright, and Reification during the Interwar Years: A Discourse Theoretic Approach","authors":"ULRIK VOLGSTEN","doi":"10.1017/s1478572224000082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572224000082","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:disp-quote> An utterly remarkable device [the phonograph] … and no one can as yet envision all the remarkable that may follow from this invention. <jats:attrib>Ann Charlotte Leffler (1878)<jats:sup>1</jats:sup></jats:attrib> </jats:disp-quote>","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142199728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neoliberal Reason, Contemporary Music, and Proximal Critique","authors":"SAMUEL J. WILSON","doi":"10.1017/s1478572224000070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572224000070","url":null,"abstract":"Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason, a provocation here considered with respect to neoliberalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism, which in Wendy Brown's summary takes neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’, I consider what this means for immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music's formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (although nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music's relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno's conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"151 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142199730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Panama Songs: Colonial Structures in US Popular Music between 1900 and 1920","authors":"GREGOR HERZFELD","doi":"10.1017/s1478572224000057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572224000057","url":null,"abstract":"The Panama Canal was officially opened on 15 August 1914. At this point, the United States had been the builder of a difficult and controversial project for ten years and was to be the operator of the most important link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. To do this, it first helped Panama to independence, immediately annexing the canal zone. Thus, the construction of the canal is a classic lesson in colonial, (inter-)national politics and its interdependencies in the early twentieth century. At the same time, Panama was a fairly widespread topic of US popular music. This article investigates the effects of politics on cultural life, using the example of popular music referring to Panama. Applying a postcolonial approach, it will study the musical ways in which the United States constructed its pseudo-colony Panama as an Other in order to exercise power there and continue to form its own national identity.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"300 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140842397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The British (and International?) Music Society: Australian Identity and Musical Internationalism in Interwar Sydney","authors":"SARAH KIRBY","doi":"10.1017/s1478572224000069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572224000069","url":null,"abstract":"In the aftermath of the First World War, Henri Verbrugghen founded the first Australian branch of the British Music Society. The BMS – a product of post-First World War cultural renewal – was established in London to ‘champion the cause of British composers at home and abroad’. In Sydney, these aspirations extended to promoting music from Australia, and through affiliation with the International Society for Contemporary Music, music of the rest of the world. This article explores the activities of the Sydney BMS, situating these within contemporary discourses of nationalism and internationalism in the construction of interwar Australian cultural identity. It argues that the sometimes conflicting aims of the society reflect a wider political and social ambivalence about Australia's place in the international landscape. While its primary goal was to champion local composers, this was held in uneasy balance with a desire to promote British music ‘proper’.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140833141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whiteness and the Problem of Colourblind Listening: Revisiting Leonard Feather's 1951 Blindfold Test with Roy Eldridge","authors":"MIKKEL VAD","doi":"10.1017/s1478572224000033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572224000033","url":null,"abstract":"‘I couldn't tell who was colored and who was white’, admitted the African American trumpet player Roy Eldridge after being submitted to a so-called blindfold test by the white critic Leonard Feather in 1951. Feather was happy that the blindfold test duped a prominent Black musician, because it proved his point about the fundamental colourblindness of music and listening. Through close reading of the source material, this article provides the full context for this infamous case and shows how the blindfold test was a product of transnational discourses of colourblindness, primitivism, ‘reverse racism’, and technological mediation. Building on current research in racialized practices of listening in musicology and sound studies, and mobilizing interventions from critical race studies, the article contends that acousmatic techniques of listening often promote a colourblind ideology invested in whiteness, which remains hegemonic in music culture.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140036136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mediation of Genre, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary (Popular) Music Streaming","authors":"VERONIKA MUCHITSCH, ANN WERNER","doi":"10.1017/s1478572223000270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572223000270","url":null,"abstract":"Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139773236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Valentin Kruchinin and the Queen of Mars: Early Musical Traces of Soviet Sci-Fi","authors":"HANNAH C. J. McLAUGHLIN","doi":"10.1017/s1478572223000269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572223000269","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film <span>Aelita: Queen of Mars</span> in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for <span>Aelita</span> remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings <span>Aelita</span>'s cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.</p>","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139517831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Musical Text: Theorizing Openness after Structuralism","authors":"SAM RIDOUT","doi":"10.1017/s1478572223000245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572223000245","url":null,"abstract":"This article attends to the conjuncture in the early 1970s of post-Cagean musical practice and poststructuralist theory associated with the journal <jats:italic>Musique en jeu</jats:italic> and the music department of the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. Reading the theoretical writing of figures including Daniel Charles and Ivanka Stoïanova alongside the music of Costin Miereanu, the article elaborates the account of the open work that emerges there, before turning to an LP by Miereanu, <jats:italic>Luna cinese</jats:italic> (1975), which grapples with the aporetic figure of the open record and in so doing takes the ‘openness’ of post-Cagean experimentalism in new directions. In conclusion, I begin to theorize what Miereanu's open record suggests about the listening that records call for and the fixity of records in general.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138632268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue on Global Musical Modernisms","authors":"GAVIN S. K. LEE, CHRISTOPHER J. MILLER","doi":"10.1017/s1478572223000142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572223000142","url":null,"abstract":"Global Musical Modernisms – the formulation heralds expansion into new arenas of music research. 1 For while certain pairings of the component terms are familiar enough, the concatenation of all three is novel. In music studies, the most notable trend is the flurry of activity around global music history, with study groups in two societies historically focused on Western musics, and one focused on ethnomusicology. 2 Global music history derives strength and in turn strengthens movement towards disciplinary convergence, or at least greater interaction – an important precondition for the study of global musical modernisms. 3 There has also been renewed interest in musical modernism, though not so much, at least at first glance, in the direction of the global, and with less interdisciplinary synergy. By contrast, the global figures very prominently in what has been termed the ‘new modernist studies’, a field that coalesced in the late 1990s. 4 As one indication, its global turn had gathered enough momentum for Oxford University Press to publish a handbook on ‘Global Modernisms’ in 2013, just three years after its handbook on ‘Modernisms’. 5 Despite aspirations to coverage of modernism in all its forms, the field is populated predominantly by literary scholars, with minimal attention to music.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134935721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Beethoven Black: The New Negro Movement, Black Internationalism, and the Rewriting of Music History","authors":"KIRA THURMAN","doi":"10.1017/s1478572223000166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572223000166","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds.","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134934024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}