The ancient city of Hann. Münden was
home to one Johann
Andreas Eisenbarth, who was a surgeon of some repute despite never having any
formal medical training.
In 1980, a musical clock was installed in the upper story of
the Rathaus in
Hann that honors the legendary doctor. At a few minutes past noon, an automatic
carillon plays the tune of the drinking song Ich
bin der Doktor Eisenbarth. Automata depict the doctor extracting a
huge, bloody tooth from the mouth of a terrified, gesticulating patient.
This according to “Dr Eisenbarth’s automated musical clock in
Hann. Münden” by Mark Singleton and Sven Heinmann (The music box: An
international journal of mechanical music XXVIII/5 [spring 2018] pp. 185–87).
Creative Improvised Music picks up where Fire
music left off, focusing on the literature on American free jazz and
European free improvisation published since the early 1990s, as well as older
works and archival material not included in its predecessor. Users will find
information on the music’s pioneers as well as hundreds of other
improviser-composers, ensembles, and collectives that have emerged in recent
years.
The volume includes a detailed subject index that offers a
key to all of the book’s sections and a way to quickly pinpoint citations by
topic, geographical location, personal name, and instrument.
Above and below, the Mary Halvorson Octet; Halvorson is one of the more recent musicians covered in the book.
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In 2018 Sage launched Music & Science, a peer-reviewed open access online journal dedicated to the idea that the sciences can help us to make sense of music and its significance in our lives.
The journal’s goal is to be truly interdisciplinary: to give researchers from the many different scientific traditions that have been applied to music the opportunity to communicate with—and to learn from—each other, while encouraging dialogue with music scholars whose work is situated in artistic, performative or humanistic domains. In short, it aims to publish research from any discipline or perspective that can illuminate—or that can be illuminated by—scientific approaches to understanding music.
The Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega is part of the Argentine government’s Secretaría de la Cultura. The journal encourages the participation of music researchers as well as composers, performers, and conductors, fostering collaboration between public and private initiatives.
Above and below, Diario de un proceso by Juan Ortiz de Zárate, which is loosely based on Kafka’s Der Process (The trial); the work is discussed in the journal’s inaugural issue.
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During the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Papua New Guinea gained political independence from a colonial hold that had lasted almost a century. It was an exciting time for a diverse group of pioneering musicians who formed a band they named Sanguma.
These Melanesian artists heard an imagined future and performed it during a socially and politically critical time for the region. They were united under one goal: to create a sound that represented the birth of a new, sovereign, and distinctly Melanesian nation; and to express their values, identities, and cosmology through their music and performance.
Sanguma’s experimental music sounded the complex expectations and pressures of their modern nation and helped to steer its postcolonial journey through music. Drawing from rock, jazz, and nascent world music influences, Sanguma reached audiences far from their home nation, introducing the world to modern music, Melanesia-style, with its fusion of old and new, local and global.
Their performances ranged from ensembles of Melanesian log drums (garamuts) to extended songs and improvisations involving electric guitars, synthesizers, saxophone, trumpet, bamboo percussion, panpipes, and kuakumba flutes. The band sang in a variety of local vernacular languages, as well as in Tok Pisin and English. To further emphasize their ancestral style, the musicians wore decorative headdresses and body decorations from all around the nation.
This according to Hearing the future: The music and magic of the Sanguma band by Denis Crowdy (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016).
I sang a florid Negro cry. Eubie Blake leaped halfway from his seat and yelled “Oh, professor, professor, you hit me, you hit me!”
He placed both hands over his heart and continued with great emotion: “You make me think of my dear mother. She always sang like that. I can hear her now. Thaťs the stuff I was raised on.” He sat down quietly, except for a deep sigh that had no audible competition from anyone.
Blake was a living testimony to the influences that had made him musically unique even without formal training (which he did not acquire until he was old and famous and did not really need it). He knew all along that it was the cry that had guided him.
Quoted from “Cries in speech and song” by Willis Laurence James (Black sacred music IX/1–2 [1995] pp. 16–34).
Above, an undated photograph of Blake from the Maryland Historical Society; below, James demonstrates two florid cries.
Audio recordings of Balinese kecak performances are de- and re-contextualized in two landmark films: Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood simple (1984).
Kecak’s use in these soundtracks is a case of schizophonic transmogrification: the rematerialization and thorough reinvention of people and places whose voices and sounds, as inscribed on sound recordings, have been separated from their original sources of identity and meaning and resituated in entirely alien contexts—real or imaginary or somewhere in between.
This according to “The abduction of the signifying monkey chant: Schizophonic transmogrifications of Balinese kecak in Fellini’s Satyricon and the Coen Brothers’ Blood simple” by Michael Bakan (Ethnomusicology forum XVIII/1 [June 2009] pp. 83–106).
Above, a performance of kecak in Bali. Below, the Minotaur scene from Satyricon; further below, the failed abduction scene from Blood simple.
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Every year from Christmas to Epiphany, the communities descended from the African slaves who mined gold for the Spaniards celebrate the Adoraciones al Niño-Diós in the Andean valleys of Cauca in southwestern Colombia.
The celebrants sing and dance until dawn in front of a creche set up in one of the village houses. A group of six musicians, unusual because it includes violins, accompanies the women who are the singers and the leaders of the ritual.
The tradition is documented on the CD Colombie: Adoration à l’enfant-Dieu (Département du Cauca) (VDE-Gallo 1349 [2011]). Below, a brief documentary on Auroras al Amanecer, the group featured in the recordings.
The Board of Directors of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) joins other music organizations and societies in their condemnation of the Trump administration’s Executive Order of 27 January 2017 suspending entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocking entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen).
For fifty years, RILM’s mission has been to facilitate and disseminate music research produced and published in any country of the world. This goal has been fulfilled through a close collaboration between RILM’s International Center in New York City, RILM’s national committees, and scholars doing musicological research anywhere in the world. RILM’s Board of Directors and the staff at the International Center greatly value such international collaboration and consider it essential for an accurate representation of global music scholarship.
RILM’s goal is to represent music scholarship in its bibliographic databases as inclusively as possible. We value diversity and support free inquiry in music of all cultures and religions. The ban directly jeopardizes our collaboration with scholars from Muslim countries and might impact RILM’s collaboration with scholars anywhere in the world. As free thinking cannot be suppressed by imposing arbitrary limitations on movement, we are inviting members of the scholarly community around the world to contribute to RILM’s bibliographic database with additional entries for articles concerning music and Islam. Although this effort cannot relieve the hardship experienced by the good people affected by the ban, it can demonstrate the achievements of their communities and represent their music culture through writings by scholars worldwide. The bibliographic records can be submitted at http://rilm.org/submissions/.
Тhe Board of Directors
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
February 8th, 2017
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Émile Waldteufel (1837–1915) served as pianist to Empress Eugénie and was renowned as a composer of elegant polkas, waltzes, and other occasional pieces. His Pluie d’or valse (Golden shower waltz, op. 160) is one of several of his works that won acclaim beyond the court of Napoleon III.
Further information on Waldteufel and his family can be found in Skaters’ waltz: The story of the Waldteufels by Andrew Lamb (Croydon: Fullers Wood Press, 1995).
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 →
