1,721,050 research outputs found
Getting Out of a Jam: Collective Improvisation in Popular Music
No full textCollective improvisation in popular music, ranging from modal jazz to jam-bands, often evinces a level of design and cooperation that seems impossible within an improvisatory context. Ensemble members improvise freely and yet coordinate their decisions by relying on cueing systems—audible routines that bridge the gap between individual and group agency. In this dissertation, I offer a theory of cueing systems and discuss the aesthetic and functional significance of them in Western popular music.
First, I argue that cueing systems consist of two basic components: a metric event and a salient pitch-based event. Coordinating these two cues opens a line of communication that enables players to share and act upon their intentions, such as to change keys or resume a composition. Second, I show how cueing systems can enhance our understanding of musical form in improvisation. Cueing systems enable the sudden and dramatic transitions that often characterize formal subsections. Thus, in collective improvisation, they function as formal seams. Building on this observation, I outline a theory of form for collective improvisation and provide two case studies. Third, collective improvisation challenges many traditional assumptions about musical ontology. Cueing systems, for example, can enable ensembles to transition seamlessly between compositions, destabilizing the nominal and ontological integrity of individual works. I suggest that the collective intention required to execute a cueing system can help resolve these challenges.
Interestingly, artist interviews reveal a very different perspective on collective improvisation. Musicians often report that the process is accidental and inherently mystical. There exists a striking asymmetry between musicians’ accounts of the music and the processes observably at work in the music. Thus, finally, I discuss this divergence between analysis and artist interviews, and its significance in the unusual case of collective improvisation
Links to Fantasy: The Music of The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and the Construction of the Video Game Experience
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Why 1976? Explaining the rise and fall of protest music
No full textThe popular media myth is that the protest song and the protest singer are in decline. It is unclear how
anyone would know; there is no standard measure for the presence or absence of protest songs.
Nonetheless, the myth raises an interesting question about how we might explain the rise and fall of
protest music. Is it a matter of context, of exogenous changes in the state of the world? Or is it
determined by internal processes, endogenous shifts in genres, or the music business more broadly?
Taking our lead (and our title) from Richard Peterson’s article, “Why 1955?,” this chapter examines
the case of punk in the UK from 1976 to 1978. It reveals that internal political and musical factors are
just as important as the broader social and political trends (rising unemployment, industrial decline,
new right policies) to understanding punk’s moment of protest
Dissonant Voices in China’s Harmonious Society: From Cassettes to WeChat, Nation to Anashid
No full textThis chapter takes a medium-term view of developments in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region over a period of twenty years, during which the indigenous Turkic Muslim Uyghurs were collectively transformed in official discourse from “ethnic separatists” to “religious extremists.” It considers the factors that impelled a shift in the voicing of dissent from the “new folk” songs of the 1990s to radical anashid in the 2010s, in the period leading up to the securitization and mass incarceration of Uyghurs in 2017. It focuses on the roles played by different forms of technology in the circulation and reception of these sounds and how they affect the relationship between the sounds of dissent, the territories they contest, and the communities they hail
On the Construction and Aestheticization of Authenticity in the Early Romantic German Volkslied
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
"Unmistakable": How Jazz Listeners Identify Style
No full textAlmost exclusively, studies on musical improvisation focus on what the performer does—the process through which improvisation "happens." But how performers improvise is only one component of how improvisation reconfigures musical experience. Improvised music is not only created by performers. It is heard by listeners; they parse the musical texture and group certain passages together while comparing their own present and past musical experiences. In the context of an uncertain and transitory musical landscape, a listener makes choices—conscious or unconscious—in order to navigate through what he or she hears. For jazz improvisation, this navigation relies on signposts of style. Jazz listeners routinely gain an intimate knowledge of certain performers' styles (as reflected in cultural touchstones such as the long-running "Blindfold Test" column in Down Beat magazine). This familiarity extends to new, previously unheard improvisations, so that even within an unknown recording, a listener might recognize a familiar musical voice.
How does a listener recognize a performer, even in an unfamiliar recording? This project addresses this question, first by probing the diverse ways in which listeners talk about stylistic identification, and then by developing models of listening and exploring these models' ramifications. Using an explicitly intertextual lens, the study compares similar-sounding moments (typically conceived in melodic parameters) from different recordings to explore the kinds of criteria that tie together disparate musical strands into a single improvisational formula, or "lick."
Starting with the Down Beat blindfold tests, the first two chapters explore the range of interpretive approaches that listeners use for stylistic recognition. Although individual listeners’ responses are diverse, particular ways of listening recur across jazz cultures; these prevalent listening approaches correlate with jazz’s musical characteristics as well as its social and economic context. Chapters 3 and 4, drawing upon theories of categorization, suggest how a listener’s initial exposure to a performer’s style impacts the way subsequent music is heard and interpreted. The final chapter integrates these individualized listener processes into a shared culture of jazz listening, emphasizing how listeners use skills of stylistic recognition to parse influences and interpret musical meaning
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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