Growing up in a liberal Jewish family, Richard Taruskin was encouraged by both his parents to regularly engage in intellectual political debate and music making. His father Benjamin was a lawyer and amateur violinist and violist, while his mother Beatrice was a piano teacher and school librarian. Taruskin learned cello at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan and studied musicology at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1976 with a dissertation on opera and drama in Russia during the 1860s. He spent a year as an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory on a Fulbright scholarship in 1971, and soon thereafter began teaching at Columbia University.
While in New York, he led the Renaissance choir Capella Nova and was a member of the Aulos Ensemble, in which he played viola da gamba. Taruskin began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 and retired there in 2014. He has been honored many times for his work, including becoming the first recipient of the Noah Greenberg Award of the American Musicological Society (1978), recipient of the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1980), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1986), the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (1987), and the first musicologist to receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2017).
Read the full entry on Richard Taruskin in MGG Online.
Below is the the Kyoto Prize Commemorative Lecture given by Taruskin in 2017.
The video for the song Ha-he by the Kenyan experimental pop music group Just a Band features a character named Makmende Amerudi as its protagonist. Within a week of its release on YouTube, Ha-he received nearly 25,000 views and fans began creating their own original Makmende tales, videos, and artwork, leading global media outlets to label Makmende “Kenya’s first viral internet sensation”. Using a contemporary style of hand-held camerawork and shallow depth of field, the video’s graphics, characters, and storylines are reminiscent of 1970s blaxploitation films. As the mysterious tough-guy protagonist, Makmende appears more comfortable sneering than smiling, and like other blaxploitation characters, he sports an Afro hairstyle, open dress shirt exposing his chest, disco-style pants, and dark aviator sunglasses. Other male characters in the video are similarly dressed, while the only female (the damsel in distress) wears a natural short hairstyle, large hoop earrings, a headscarf, and tight pants, reminiscent of blaxploitation icon Pam Grier. Multiple camera angles in the video are reminiscent of the “bullet time” visual effect in The Matrix, and near the end of the video, Makmende ties a red necktie around his head, drawing parallels to Japanese samurai and cult vigilante Rambo.
As technological innovators, young, urban Kenyans seized the moment to reappropriate outdated stereotypes of weakness into aspirations of strength as they projected Kenya into a global online conversation. Through this meme, Makmende became more than a fictional superhero; he represented Kenya’s present and future. While some have considered Makmende as an example of a transnational cultural flow originating in the Global South, this meme, in its cultural and social context, can also be attributed to how and why Kenyans used Makmende to represent themselves. While many video memes are rooted in imitation and parody, the participatory playfulness surrounding Makmende created a “meme of aspiration” through which certain Kenyans collectively reimagined a hypermasculine hero who could lead the nation toward political and economic stability at home and cultural and technological prominence abroad.
Read more in “Makmende Amerudi: Kenya’s collective reimagining as a meme of aspiration” by Brian Ekdale and Melissa Tully (Critical studies in media communication 31.4 [2014], 283–298).
Watch Makmende in action in the video for Just a Band’s Ha-he below.
Formed in Long Island, New York, the U.S. hip hop group Public Enemy emerged from a DJ sound system called Spectrum City DJs, founded by Hank Shocklee in 1975. Although the sound system originally consisted only of Shocklee and his brother Keith, the group eventually added rapper Chuck D, DJ Mellow, who later became Terminator X, and Professor Griff, the security team leader for the Spectrum City DJs’ mobile parties and a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI).
In 1979, Chuck D and others from the group who attended Adelphi University in Long Island began hosting a hip hop show on the local college radio station WBAU where they regularly created their own DJ mixes. Later, a fellow student who called himself Flavor Flav joined the show as a host and soon thereafter joined the Spectrum City DJs crew as well. In 1984, Spectrum City played a demo on the radio for a song titled Public Enemy No.1, which inspired the group’s name. The band also adopted a political message inspired by the hip-hop activist and journalist Harry Allen, a fellow student at Adelphi. The concept emphasized the group’s African American roots and adopted some of the narratives of various past Black political movements.
Album cover for It takes a nation of millions to hold us back
In addition to the performance group known as Public Enemy, a separate production team called “The Bomb Squad” was formed around Hank and Keith Shocklee in the 1980s; they worked not only for Public Enemy but also for other hip hop musicians including Slick Rick and Ice Cube. Part of Public Enemy’s sonic aesthetic, crafted primarily by The Bomb Squad, has been the copious use of samples and noise. For instance, their album It takes a nation of millions to hold us back (1988) uses saxophone samples in many songs that act in tandem with the lyrics to counter the code-structuring messages found in popular music conventions. Public Enemy’s examples, in this context, are comparable to the use of dissonance in the music of jazz legends such as Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Public Enemy created noise with saxophone squeals, erratic drums, and countless scratches on a recording that influenced numerous hip hop artists and stands today as one of the most critically lauded albums in the genre. Their use of saxophone samples as a strategy of creating noise is representative of ideals contrary to conventional Western musical practices and as a bridge to African American musical practices and suppressed voices of the past.
Read the new entry on Public Enemy in MGG Online and “We wanted our coffee black: Public Enemy, improvisation, and noise” by Niel Scobie (Critical studies in improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 10.1 [2014] in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
The social organization of musicians in South India is often reflected in the Tyagaraja ārādhana, the annual death-anniversary celebration in honor of the revered composer Tyagaraja (1767–1847, pictured above). Thousands of musicians appear at this huge annual celebration, including men and women of different social communities and performance traditions. These musicians include performers in the Karṇāṭak art music tradition–ubiquitous in the contemporary concert halls of South India–as well as two closely related performance traditions sharing the Karṇāṭak musical language of raga and tala: the periya mēḷam instrumental tradition of Hindu temple ritual music and the music ensemble (formerly known as cinna mēḷam) that accompanies the South Indian classical dance form bharatanāṭyam.
After Tyagaraja’s passing in 1847, some of his disciples (śiṣya) would visit his gravesite at Tiruvaiyaru on the anniversary of his death each January. The commemorations were at first extremely simple; the disciples would pray, sing songs, and return home. As Tyagaraja’s lineage of students and students’ students multiplied, more musicians came to the site to offer their worship. About 60 years after Tyagaraja’s death, the commemoration became institutionalized, due to the efforts of two Brahmin brothers from the village of Tillaisthanam, adjacent to Tiruvaiyaru. These brothers, Narasimha Bhagavatar and Panju Ayyar, collected sufficient money and food to feed the Brahmins who would assemble for the rites. Narasimha Bhagavatar, a disciple’s disciple of Tyagaraja, also published a major edition of Tyagaraja’s kriti compositions and a biographical account of the composer in 1908.
The dynamic nature of the Tyagaraja ārādhana, which takes place over three days each January, in the town of Tiruvaiyaru, Tanjavur district, in Tamil Nadu, facilitates the study of two parameters at the heart of India’s changing social organization: gender and caste. Attention to these two central parameters illuminates other aspects of social organization such as the patronage, presentation, and transmission of music, and people’s attitudes about music, musicians, and music making. In locating caste and gender relations within the history of the Tyagaraja celebration, the roles played by two important transitional figures, namely Sri Malaikottai Govindasvami Pillai and Srimati (Smt.) Bangalore Nagaratnammal, illustrate the changes in the gender and caste organization of South Indian musicians in the 20th century.
Read on in The Garland encyclopedia of world music. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent (2013). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
Below is a video of the 172nd Tyagaraja ārādhana circa January 2019.
Electric mandolin and violin player and vocalist Nash The Slash (Jeff Plewman), whose name comes from the 1927 Laurel & Hardy movie Do detectives think?, is well known for his instrumental soundtrack work and reinvention of classic rock cover tunes while his image, that of a bandaged, walking, Invisible Man has made him instantly recognizable. During a performance in the late 1970’s to raise awareness of the threat from the Three Mile Island disaster, Nash walked on stage wearing bandages dipped in phosphorous paint and exclaimed: “Look, this is what happens to you!” Since that appearance, the bandages became his sartorial trademark. Although he was a guitarist for the late 1960’s Toronto band Breathless, Nash The Slash made his auspicious debut on 17 March 1975 sporting a top hat and tails (the bandages came later) at the Roxy Theatre to perform his soundtrack to Luis Buñuel’s silent film Un chien andalou (1929).
Nash The Slash would put out a half dozen releases between 1980 and 1984 as writer, producer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist as well as work doing engineering and production. His album Children of the night was produced by Steve Hillage and eventually became Nash’s biggest selling solo record with estimates at 100,000 copies worldwide. A fledgling engineer named Daniel Lanois later produced the single Dance after curfew from the And you thought you were normal album. Nash played violin on Gary Numan’s Dance album and was invited by Numan to tour the UK through 1980 and 1981. His long career included numerous appearances on various television shows in Canada and elsewhere, studio recordings, collaborations, and film soundtracks. In 1989, Nash The Slash landed a movie soundtrack deal with Toronto’s Sinister Cinema which hired him to add soundtrack scores to old silent films such as Lon Chaney’s 1925 Phantom of the opera and the 1919 German The cabinet of Dr. Caligari specifically for home video release. Nash The Slash would later perform the works live at special screenings in Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall.
Read the full entry on Nash The Slash in The Canadian pop music encyclopedia (2020). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
Below is the video for Nash The Slash’s 1982 classic Dance after curfew and his cover of The Rolling Stones’ 19th nervous breakdown.
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The corrido is a Mexican folk music that narrates a story or series of events in verse. The genre has developed in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States over the past 200 years. Similar to how the jarabe genre is closely linked historically to Mexican Independence (1810-1821), the corrido is linked with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). Unlike the former, the corrido is not typically danceable. It was one of the most popular song manifestations of the early 20th century, although its origin dates back to the Spanish colonial era. In the 18th century, the corrido was a popular type of country song found primarily in the states of Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. A significant difference between the corrido and other forms of Mexican narrative song is that corrido verses tend to feature many syllables with narration usually in the second or third person.
Toward the end of the 20th century, drug trafficking or illegal trafficking of narcotics, especially between Mexico and the U.S. southern border, became a popular theme of contemporary corrido songs with the term “narcocorrido” attributed to such songs. According to Rafael Acosta, a professor at the University of Kansas who has studied narcocorridos, the genre narrates the stories of “people who feel, many times justifiably, that they are neglected by state and economic apparatuses and look for possibilities of rebellion and socioeconomic advancement”. Acosta compares the stories in narcocorridos to films and songs about Italian gangsters of the early 20th century or outlaws trafficking moonshine in the era of 1920s prohibition.
Corrido musicians, however, have primarily sung about oppression, history, the daily life of peasants, and other socially relevant topics. For instance, listen below to the song El corrido de César Chávez written by Felipe Cantu and first performed in 1965 at the California state capitol in Sacramento, the endpoint of a three-week march led by Chávez and the United Farm Workers union from Delano to protest unfair practices against farmworkers.
Celebrate the civil rights and labor movement activist César Chávez on 31 March (César Chávez Day) by reading more about the history of the corrido genre in Diccionario enciclopédico de música en México. Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
While vocalizations have been elucidated in various songbird studies, non-vocal sounds have received less attention. In the blue-capped cordon-bleu (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus), both sexes perform courtship displays that are accompanied by singing and distinct body movements (i.e., dance). A previous study revealed that cordon-bleu courtship bobbing includes multiple rapid steps. This behavior is quite similar to human tap dancing, because it can function simultaneously as a visual and acoustic signal.
In many cases, the acoustic signal value of such steps (along with the high-speed step movements) produce non-vocal sounds that have amplitudes similar to vocal sounds. In this sense, step behavior strongly affects step sound amplitude. Additionally, the dancing step sounds were substantially louder than feet movement sounds in a non-courtship context, and the amplitude range overlapped with that of song notes. These observations support the notion that, in addition to song, cordon-bleus produce acoustic signals with their feet.
Read more in “Songbird tap dancing produces non-vocal sounds” by Nao Ota, Manfred Gahr, and Masayo Soma (Bioacoustics: The international journal of animal sound and its recording 26.2 [2017], 161–168). Find it in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
Below is the step-dancing performed by male and female Uraeginthus cyanocephalus (blue-capped cordon-bleu) captured on a research video by the authors.
In the post 1970 revolution era, women musicians in Iran, especially women vocalists, have represented a challenge to societal norms and have inspired new musical trends. Such trends, however, have largely been inconsistent with the gendered restrictions of the Iranian state’s cultural policies which limit the musical activities of women, especially singing in public. Iranian society has long been one where religion and politics have been integrated into everyday life. With Islam as the official state ideology, this integration has been felt even more deeply. There is, however, a significant gap between such cultural policies, dominant official discourse, and the changing spiritual, intellectual, and cultural needs of Iranian society.
In this context, the emergence of women solo singers performing in public is unprecedented in Iranian history and must be understood in terms of the political, social, and intellectual changes of the late 19th and early 20th century. These changes included different processes of modernization including greater communication politically with the international community, the opening of modern schools, the establishment of a printing press, the creation of a modern educated or intellectual class (munavar al-fekr), the emergence of a literary renaissance movement (Bazgasht-i adabi), and a change in the country’s constitution. The Iranian public, especially the urban educated class, at the turn of the 20th century longed for changes in gender norms and for the participation of women in social and cultural spheres, including in the public performance of music. The early period of the Constitutional Revolution marked the beginning of Iranian classical music concerts performed in public. It was not until 1924, however, when the singer Qamar al-Moluk Vazirizade (better known as Qamar) gave her first concert at Tehran Grand Hotel, that an Iranian woman would perform before an audience of men in public.
Qamar was born in the small city of Qazvin but later moved to Tehran where she adopted her family name in honor of Ali-Naqi Vaziri, an Iranian musician who improved the social status of musicians and expanded the role of women in music. Qamar lost her father a month before she was born, and her mother died when she was only 18 months old. She was raised by her grandmother, Khair al- Nesa’, a reciter of the Qur’an and a religious professional narrator for women-only audiences (rouzeh-khani). Khair al Nesa’, who was known for her strong reciting voice, quickly took notice of Qamar’s interest in singing and encouraged her to join the performances–making them more captivating and helping Qamar to cultivate her singing voice. Qamar later recounted, “Those singing experiences in my childhood gave me the courage to sing in public”. Similar to the renowned Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, Qamar’s professional career as a singer was influenced by and connected to her religious background.
From 1927 to 1937, Qamar’s career flourished, and she became one of the first Iranian singers to record for the gramophone market. Some of her songs reflected the social conditions and hardships faced by Iranian people after World War I. Furthermore, her recordings were even performed in public spaces such as theaters. Qamar is generally known to have played a significant role in the development of Persian classical music as a genre and expanded its popularity in aristocratic circles to wider society in the early 20th century.
Learn more in “Voicing their presence: Postrevolution Iranian female vocalists in context” by Malihe Maghazei [Popular communication XV/3 (2017), 233–247]. Find it in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature.
Listen to a recording by Qamar al-Moluk Vazirizade below.
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From 1972 to 1974, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho studied at the University of Industrial Art and Design in Helsinki. Although she had played violin since childhood, she initially did not pursue her interests in music and composition because she saw no professional prospects in music as a woman. By 1976, however, Saariaho had enrolled at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki where she studied with Paavo Heininen until 1981. After completing a degree in composition, she continued her studies at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg (Freiburg University of Music), where she studied with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber before moving to Paris in 1982.
Saariahobegan her career with short compositions using serial techniques. Generally, her music was considered rather avant-garde for Finland in the 1980s, a period when she was began composing with computers and other digital technology. After moving to Paris, Saariaho further developed her techniques for computer-assisted composition in the music studios of IRCAM (Institut de recherche musicale et coordination acoustic et musique) and GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales). Throughout the 1980s, her compositions (particularly her electroacoustic compositions) increasingly gained international recognition, and some were performed in Europe, Japan, and the United States.
Besides her training in serial composition techniques, Saariaho’s musical thinking was deeply influenced by the performing arts and above all, by the color theory of Goethe and Wassily Kandinsky. They inspired her to experiment with the transition between vowels and consonants and to generate transition processes between sound and the human voice. In a 2014 interview, she discussed her use of the human voice as an instrument and a vehicle for text, including poetry and literature. According to Saariaho,
“I have such an affinity for the human voice–and a personal predilection for texts! In a sense, it’s the richest form of expression because the instrument is inside a human being and there are many things that cannot be falsified when using your voice. Whether or not a work for voice originates from a text, it’s necessarily a different mode of communication than instrumental music. Of course, using a text adds another layer of richness and meaning. I really love using voice, but it was difficult for me to write for it at first, probably because the historical context was difficult. I’ve always loved Berio, for instance, and what he did with voice, but I don’t like music that imitates Berio–and at some point, it felt as though you could only write for voice in that way, you had to write that way. So, it took time for me to find a certain freedom and my own way of writing for voice–and to accept it.”
Read the full entry on Kaija Saariaho in MGG Online.
Below is Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1984), a piece commissioned by the Finnish Broadcasting Company that sees her experimenting with electroacoustic music by manipulating pre-recorded sounds on a tape to create eerie textures.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sly and the Family Stone were pioneers of funk music. Different from other funk acts of that era, Sly and the Family Stone’s funk variant fused psychedelic rock stylings with classic soul, and in that sense, their style differed considerably from the bass-heavy grooves of mainstream funk. The band’s success on the pop charts as well as with urban Black youth made the group especially influential, especially evident in the music of crossover giants such as George Clinton, Rick James, and Prince.
As the band’s creative force, Texas-native Sylvester Stewart (better known as Sly Stone) developed an impressive music business resumé in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, excelling as a radio disc jockey, songwriter, and record producer for the likes of he Beau Brummels, Bobby Freeman, and the Mojo Men. His first attempt at heading a group, the Stoners, failed in 1966; however, Sly and the Family Stone, which included his brother, guitarist Freddie Stone and sister Rosie Stone, who sang and played keyboards and harmonica, and a cousin, bassist Larry Graham drew sufficient attention locally in 1967 to garner a contract from Epic Records.
Sly and the Family Stone played a crucial role in introducing Black church aesthetics to mainstream popular music audiences in the late 1960s. Sly introduced secular audiences to what James Cleveland called “the Sanctified Church” through his personal experiences in the Black Pentecostal church. In the foreground of Sly’s work was the recording Stand! (1969), particularly the single I want to take you higher. Furthermore, the band’s integrated gender and racial demographic along with an overall message that all people need to work together in harmony represent the epitome of post-Civil Rights culture. In a 2023 interview, Sly spoke about his work and the transformative power of music. According to him, “I know music can always make a difference. I knew it back when I was [a radio DJ]. People would call into the station and say that they wanted me to play this song or that song and I could tell how much it meant to them. That was what we wanted to do with the music that we made. That’s what we did.”
Sly Stone turns 81 on 15 March 2024.
Read the full entry on Sly and the Family Stone in the Encyclopedia of recorded sound (2005; find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias), and in “Sly Stone and the sanctified church” by Mark Anthony Neal, an essay included in The funk era and beyond: New perspectives on Black popular culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; find it in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature).
Below, Sly and the Family Stone perform If you want me to stay on the television show Soul train circa 1970.
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The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
