Music

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April 19, 2010

Public, Private; Contemporary, Traditional: Intersecting Dichotomies and Contested Agency in Mainline Protestant Worship Music

Posted by folkpub under Belief, Music, North America
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Public, Private; Contemporary, Traditional: Intersecting Dichotomies and Contested Agency in Mainline Protestant Worship Music

Deborah Justice
Indiana University

Abstract:

The current ‘contemporary’/’traditional’ worship music controversy, although cloaked in the guise of novelty, illustrates how the historical  interplay between embracing and abandoning black-and-white oppositions is unfolding within post-millennial Western Christianity. Over the past forty years, mainline Protestant churches have used worship music to negotiate a culturally-relevant space for themselves within the contemporary reconfiguration of American religious practice. As such, many North American and Western European Christians have come to conceptualize their current religious practices through the ‘traditional’/'contemporary’ dichotomy. Praise-band-led ‘contemporary’ worship contrasts with organ-and-choir-based ‘traditional’ worship in visible and audible ways: musical style, text, instrumentation, dress, and physical space. This ‘contemporary’/’traditional’ binary’s pervasive themes resonate with previous dichotomous models applied to religious study, such as Weber’s routinized/charismatic, Benedict’s Apollonian/Dionysian, Sachs’ logogenic/pathogenic, and sociologist Mark Chaves’ intellectual/emotional. Yet, while current mainline Protestant organizational and expressive behavior resonates with these historical dichotomies, it also moves beyond explanation by any of these theories alone (as well as moving beyond the fundamentally group-defining “us” versus “them” opposition). This paper suggests the public/private opposition as an analytical tool to cut in a slightly different direction against the grain of the oft-dichotomized sphere of mainline Protestant religious musical practice. While no single dichotomy can explain current mainline Protestant practice – subjectively, emergently employing overlapping dichotomies to create and negotiate meaning – the public/private binary probes fundamental points of differentiation. (more…)

 

March 29, 2010

Lovesick Blues: Music and Nostalgia on Lower Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee

Posted by folkpub under Music, North America
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Lovesick Blues: Music and Nostalgia on Lower Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee

Timon Kaple
Indiana University

Abstract:

There are a handful of city blocks in Nashville, Tennessee, that constitute the area known as “Lower Broadway” on Broadway Avenue. Known as the city’s premier hotspot for live music, this area attracts a wide variety of patrons: regulars, locals, and tourists.  What brings them together is a mental concept of “Old Nashville,” rooted in feelings of nostalgia and romanticization for the city’s golden era, which I broadly define as the mid-1920s through mid-1960s.

The most important reason why I chose Lower Broadway as a research area, and the one that is most relevant to this study, is that it is a crossroads for listeners’ musical and bodily interpretations of authenticity in country music.  In other words, Lower Broadway is site where it is important for performers to look and sound like the real thing.  What is the real thing, and how does one perform this ideal authenticity?  Additionally, who is in search of this Nashville authenticity? (more…)

 

November 24, 2008

All Mixed Up: A Cultural Exploration of Mixed Tapes and CDs

Posted by folkpub under Music, North America
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All Mixed Up:
A Cultural Exploration of Mixed Tapes and CDs

Don Stacy
University of Oregon

Abstract
This article examines the mixed tape/CD phenomenon in the socio-historical context of lyrical play to show how it functions in our society as an important conduit for the free exchange of information and culture.  Mixes are viewed as a form of “Do It Yourself” (DIY) material culture to show how they serve as ideological playgrounds where the players encounter an infinite number of worldviews and develop the skills needed to construct and express their own worldviews and cultural models.  Interviews with mix-makers and numerous examples of mix cover artwork are used to explore the folkloric process of mix-making, focusing on individual content, style, and production techniques while discussing cultural aspects of mixes in relation to ever-changing technologies and the copyright debate. (more…)

 

November 5, 2008

Sydney Hutchinson. From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Cultural Performance, Dance, Immigrant Communities, Music, North America
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Sydney Hutchinson. From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 240 pages. $24.95 softcover.

Gustavo Ponce
Independent Scholar


Sydney Hutchinson’s From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture is a riveting and award-worthy study. This book is simply brilliant. Hutchinson takes on the quebradita/tecnobanda dance craze of the mid 1990s. This dance style was particularly popular among Latino youth in Los Angeles and Tucson and, by 2006, it evolved into pasito duranguense in Chicago. Hutchinson presents an insightful social and critical analysis of how mainstream American culture has repeatedly failed to incorporate these subaltern groups into its political, social, and economic apparatus. (more…)

 

November 5, 2008

Keila Diehl. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, India, Music
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Keila Diehl. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xi+312, illustrations, glossary, index. $25.00 paper.

Lori Goshert
Indiana University

In Echoes from Dharamsala, anthropologist Keila Diehl presents an engaging and complex picture of Tibetan refugee life in Dharamsala, India, the site of Tibet’s government-in-exile, through the music the community listens to and produces. Diehl begins the book with a colorful description of the first few days of her fieldwork, allowing readers to share her experiences and visualize themselves in India with her. The rest of the book is just as vivid in the way she describes her interactions with the Tibetan refugee community and her role as a participant-observer in Dharamsala’s music culture while playing keyboards for the Yak Band, a Tibetan rock group. (more…)

 

November 5, 2008

David Buchan and James Moreira, eds. The Glenbuchat Ballads

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Europe, Music
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David Buchan and James Moreira, eds. The Glenbuchat Ballads. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Pp. lxxiv + 274, multiple indices, glossary. $60.00 hardbound.

Sarah Lash
Indiana University

In the early decades of the 19th century, the Reverend Robert Scott compiled a collection of ballads in the small community of Glenbuchat, located in a relatively isolated valley in Northeastern Scotland. Unlike similar collections, this gathering of some 68 ballads was never anthologized into the Francis James Child collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Virtually unknown until 1949, it was donated to the Aberdeen University Library by one of Scott’s descendants. (more…)

 

February 22, 2008

Performing the ‘Traditional’ in the South Korean Musical World

Posted by folkpub under East Asia, Music
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Performing the ‘Traditional’ in the South Korean Musical World

 

Hilary Finchum-Sung
University of San Francisco
University of California at Berkeley

Abstract
This article examines contemporary, traditional music culture in South Korea through a close look at one South Korean musician, Yi Ji-young. Yi Ji-young, a kayagǔm (12-string zither) performer known for her work with composers of experimental music, has become, for many, a muse through which the emerging genre of new ‘traditional’ or ‘national’ music is finding its voice. Through interviews and a brief examination of her musical lineage, this article highlights the complexities of transforming a musical tradition. The artist’s activities are entwined with discourse regarding tradition in South Korea. While the discourse regarding ‘tradition’ provides an interpretive lens through which music performance can be viewed, the construction of a new traditional music incorporates an artist’s personal experiences, notions of aesthetic validity, and competence. A focus on factors such as these makes possible a more nuanced analysis of the musician’s role in, as well as an appreciation of the contingent nature of, the construction of a contemporary Korean music. (more…)

 

February 22, 2008

Liminal States: Life as an Indie Musician on Taiwan

Posted by folkpub under East Asia, Music
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Liminal States: Life as an Indie Musician on Taiwan

 

Mack Hagood
Indiana University

Abstract
In this paper, I examine the liminal states of Taiwanese guitarist/composer Huang Wan-ting, particularly as these states articulate with similar liminal states of “indie music” and the island of Taiwan. I use the term ‘liminal’ in a non-ritual sense to refer to a structural position on the interstices of recognized roles and identities. In addition, I propose a second type of liminality: a position of choice assumed by subjects for some advantage—in Wan-ting’s case, artistic. As an indie musician, Wan-ting attempts to maintain a position on the edge of the music mainstream, bringing new sounds into popular music. While she has tried to find a Taiwanese political identity through her song lyrics, Wan-ting does not consider herself to be a “Taiwanese musician” and creates music for a transnational indie audience. Wan-ting claims her music is more popular with foreigners than Taiwanese. Like an independent Taiwanese state, her career may need foreign recognition to exist. (more…)