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The Orbi Tradition: Blind Street Singers in Sicily
No full textIn Sicily, the street music was primarily entrusted to a class of professional singers and players called orbi (“blind”). In 1661 orbi gathered in Palermo at the brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception under the protection of the Jesuits, marking their first official appearance in the historical record. The testimonies of the activity of orbi between the 18th and 19th centuries offers a detailed account of both their repertoire – composed mainly of sacred songs, but also of storii (“narrative songs”), canzuni (“songs”), ditties and dance music – and their performative contecxts. For instance, they were called to perform at religious celebrations, weddings and convivial events, serenades, and performances of the Sicilian puppet theatre (Opera dei pupi). The blind players usually performed as a duo: a violinist and a player of citarruni (small three-stringed bass or adapted cello, in the twentieth century gradually replaced by the guitar). These street musicians – not all necessarily blind – were particularly active in the widespread dissemination of devotional poems of ecclesiastical origin in the Sicilian dialect.
This important musical tradition is widely documented for Palermo but was not as well studied in Messina and Catania, the main cities of Eastern Sicily. This article takes into account historic and contemporary evidence of orbi activities, with a special attention for devotional celebrations and puppet theatre performances
Editoriale
No full textDescrizione analitica del contenuto del fascicolo e dell'indirizzo della rivist
The "Rose Garden": Against Racism in Ethnomusicology
No full textIn 2004 Ethnologia Balkanica, Journal for Southeast European Anthropology, the international scientific journal of the International Association for Southeast European Anthropology, published an essay by the Romanian scholar Marin Marian-Bălaşa entitled “Romany Music and Gypsy Criminality.” Marian-Bălaşa’s argument are disconcerting on multiple levels, not to mention disrespectful: first, in relation to the expertise of ethnologists and ethnomusicologists who have dedicated their research to Gypsy culture, and second in relation to the Romany people, and Romanian Roma in particular, who he addresses in explicitly racist and discriminatory ways. Quite some time has passed since Marian-Bălaşa’s essay was published, and a few years since my comments were made public. In Romania as in Europe, however, the situation has certainly not improved in terms of the integration, civil rights protection and valorization of Romanian Romany culture. Quite the opposite: problems of alterity and the social and cultural marginalization of Roma minority and immigrant groups have become more serious and acute in Europe and throughout the world. These years have seen a radicalization of policies and cultures of exclusion throughout the Western world, with sweeping political and social changes driving people in Eastern Europe to migrate West while wars, oppression and misery have caused entire populations to seek refuge in Western Europe and North America – although many of these journeys have ended face to face with a border wall, or in accidental death along the path or in the Mediterranean sea. Today ethnomusicology has an important cultural and political role to play: that of giving voice to those who cannot speak out, of showing, on a tangible level, the importance of the cultural contribution of those who do not write or simply lack the means to be heard. Ethnomusicologists can play this role concretely through their everyday work of research, teaching and spreading knowledge
Una nuova rivista/A new journal
No full textL’etnomusicologia richiede una riconsiderazione della propria ragion d’essere, del proprio sguardo transculturale, dei propri metodi e tecniche. Le radici e i tratti peculiari della ricerca italiana possono rappresentare una prospettiva dalla quale affrontare nuove sfide e intraprendere nuovi percorsi. L’Italia infatti ha una tradizione consolidata di ricerche sul campo, di intersezione tra indagine storica ed indagine etnografica, di riflessione metodologica a partire da sguardi e approcci non colonialisti. E l’Italia appare oggi in prima linea nella riflessione critica e autocritica su compiti e prospettive di una ricerca transculturale sulle pratiche musicali contemporanee
One ceremony, two perspectives: Wedding and Music of a Diasporic Roma Communiy
No full textMy research investigate the cultural life of the Roma Community, mainly from Kosovo but also from Montenegronand Macedonia
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
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
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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