Jazz and the Great Samba Debate,and Vice Versa

This paper will argue that jazz emerges as samba’s kindred foil in Brazilian popular music discourse of the 1940s and 1950s. Eager to underscore “blood” ties between idealized samba do morro and early blues and jazz, contributors to journals such as Diretrizes and Revista da Música Popular nonetheless tended to equate postwar bebop and big band with the menacing venality of the US music industry and the “vulgar” fandom to which it was associated. It was amidst such critical ambivalence toward jazz that bossa nova arrived on the scene, acutely vulnerable to accusations not just of appropriation but also servile imitation and therefore second-hand “decadence.”     

Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Abstract

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.     

Musical memory,heritage and local identity: remembering the popular music past in a European Capital of Culture

This paper explores the relationship between rock music, collective memory and local identity, by focusing on events connected to Liverpool's status as European Capital of Culture 2008. The first part of the paper describes these events and how memories of local rock music were attached to heritage and local identity and mobilised to validate Liverpool as a capital of culture, whilst in turn the city's Capital of Culture status served to validate particular ways of remembering the local musical past. The second part of the paper considers the broader significance of these events by relating them to three pan-European trends in cultural policy: the development of the cultural and heritage industries; the protection and promotion of local culture and identity; and the fostering of cultural diversity and integration. It highlights the general significance of the popular music past for cultural policy in Europe, but also the politics of popular music memory and how it involves a complex and dynamic process of negotiation that relates to cultural policy in particular ways. The paper concludes by arguing that popular music offers a specific and productive focus for research on cultural policy, heritage and local identity in Europe.     

Producing African-descent: afro-peruvian music,intangible heritage,authenticity and bureaucracy in a Latin American music compilation

ABSTRACT

Policy and actions for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are laced with politics of representation and meaning-making of expressive culture within and outside communities. This article explores how ICH experts, practitioners, activists, and other actors negotiate and re-construct ideas of racial identity and authenticity in one such initiative. Sponsored by CRESPIAL in 2012, the album Cantos y Música Afrodescendientes de América Latina is a compilation of music of Afro-descendant communities in Latin America. Conceived as a project for safeguarding the musical ICH of these communities, it involved participation from thirteen Latin American governments. This paper, centered on the Peruvian participation in this project, studies the bureaucratic intricacies of this project, exploring how ideas on racial identity and authenticity overlap with political agendas and administrative requirements in order to produce a unified representation of ‘Afro-Latin American’ music. My analysis highlights 1) the local knowledge systems that inform the ideas of racial identity and authenticity advanced by the project’s actors; 2) their adopted strategies within Peru’s bureaucratic network of heritage management; and 3) the positionality, capacity and agency of each actor for achieving their particular goals in this collaborative project.     

Remembering the 1960s: popular music and memory in Europe

Following the increasing attention paid to popular music in heritage discourses, this article explores how the popular music culture from the 1960s is remembered in Europe. I discuss the role of heritage organizations, media and the cultural policy of the EU in the construction of a popular music heritage of this period. Furthermore, I examine the ways in which attachments to local, national and European identities are negotiated. To this end, I draw upon interviews with representatives of museums, websites and archives. The article reveals a recurring tension between transnational and local experiences of the 1960s. It is found that media and heritage institutions like museums and archives predominantly have a national and local orientation, although narratives with a European vantage point are now emerging on the internet.     

Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Research that involves both neuroscience and art often attempts to explain the aesthetic experience of ‘beauty’ in visual art, and to define the function of art in neural terms; less has been written concerning the neural correlates of poetry reading. It is suggested that there are existing areas of study in neuroscience that may help elucidate how we enjoy literature beyond pure neuroaesthetics, such as research in creative problem-solving, knowledge-based pleasure, and music. This essay endeavours to bring together insights from both neuroscience and literature to shed light on how and why we take pleasure in interpreting T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is proposed that the pleasures of reading ‘Prufrock’ are ultimately associated with the ways in which the reader's expectations are confirmed or challenged. While the conclusions of this paper are intentionally constrained to a single poem, they are potentially generalisable.     

The Story of Koula: music and nationhood in Greece

The Story of Koula, one of the Marshall Plan films, was made in Greece in 1951. It neatly exemplifies the capacity of Europe to ‘talk back’ to the USA within the framework of cultural aid programmes. And as such it can introduce a little‐explored topic: the politics of the avant‐garde in Greece in the post‐Civil War years and in particular the role of US cultural aid. This post‐war perspective throws light on the better‐known National School associated above all with Manolis Kalomiris, who dominated Greek music and musical life in the interwar period. The second part of this paper scrutinises the agenda and achievements of the Kalomiris circle, and that in turn enables useful generalisations about romantic nationalism in music. The third part of the paper reflects on the pre‐World War I achievements of Heptanesian traditions, again caught between singularities and dependencies.     

Tackling gender inequalities in music: a comparative study of policy responses in the UK and Sweden

Cross-disciplinary research has highlighted the persistence of gender inequalities across music scenes. However, the way in which cultural policy shapes responses to gender inequalities in music has been relatively underexplored. This article draws on research from Swedish and UK contexts, supporting analysis with reference to 9 key-stakeholder interviews from both. Comparing perspectives from ‘more’ and ‘less’ gender-equal contexts, with sufficiently different cultural policy traditions, the article explores how responses to gender inequalities in music are influenced by ‘cultural democratic’ and ‘arm’s length’ approaches. It demonstrates that, as a result of these traditions, there is a comparatively more interventionist approach in Sweden at a national level, whereas the lack of central government response in the UK has encouraged more market-oriented solutions. It suggests that this ‘arm’s length’ approach necessitates different grassroots organisational strategies in order to affect change but notes that these, alongside austerity agendas, are insufficient in the long term.     

A cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities

ABSTRACT

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a ‘cultural justice approach’ can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK – we analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.     

Networks and place in Montreal's independent music industry

The significance of networks for independent music producers has been well established in the urban‐economic geography literature and the literature centred on cultural industries. In this article, we seek to build on this literature by considering how place‐based attributes mediate network development; that is to say, how the unique characteristics of place (such as historical and cultural attributes) determine networking outcomes among spatially proximate actors. Specifically, we consider the importance of place through an examination of Montreal's independent music industry. Drawing on 46 semi‐structured interviews with key actors in the industry, we illustrate how Montreal's bilingual identity contributes to network dynamics within the industry.     

National stereotypes and music

Music became a marker of national identity in nineteenth‐century Europe. Western art music consists of tonal systems that are universally intelligible, but certain rhythms and musical idioms have been associated with national styles. How, when, and why does a musical phrase or piece become national? What political and cultural circumstances contributed to the development of national styles and facilitated the emergence of resonant topographies? What was the relationship between music as cultural practice and nineteenth‐century national thought as discursive space? These questions are addressed with a particular focus on verbunkos, which came to be characteristic of Hungarian national style, and on the Rákóczy March which became famous thanks to Berlioz's Faust. This essay traces the complex process of cultural transfer through which these martial tunes of mixed ethnic origins have become emblematic of Hungarian music.     

Staging Japan: The Takarazuka Revue and Cultural Nationalism in the 1950s–60s

In the 1950s and 1960s, the modern Japanese state employed overseas cultural promotion as a way to maximise its interests and image not only in international contexts but also at home. By juxtaposing the Takarazuka Revue’s performances in the United States and Japan during the postwar period, this paper argues that the overseas promotion of this Japanese theatre troupe both depended upon and reinforced the Japanese populace’s nationalistic pride in its culture. The paper also addresses the ways in which the Japanese government used Takarazuka’s theatrical presentations as a means of pursuing its domestic and diplomatic agendas: improving Japan’s international position by proposing shared aspects of popular culture with the US and increasing its sense of nationalism by propagating cultural pride. In doing so, the paper explicates the ways in which Japanese popular cultural considerations interfaced with political concerns in the shaping of postwar Japan’s national identity.     

Geography,political economy and the ‘personality of Britain’

SUMMARY: This paper engages with the historical archaeology of the British Isles (With one or two exceptions, I follow the usage of Kearney 2006 in preferring the term ‘British Isles’ to ‘Atlantic archipelago’, preferring the more ideologically loaded, but familiar, term over the arguably more neutral but obscure term.) as a whole. It advocates an approach that foregrounds geography and political economy, via quite simple and traditional ways of mapping variation, for example the work of Cyril Fox. It seeks to play to archaeology’s strengths: rather than seeking abstract origins, it examines how practices later labelled as ‘colonial’ emerged from an intersection of concrete material practices.     

Alternative Radio: exhibiting radio and music heritage after the Christchurch earthquakes

This article examines the representation of Christchurch, New Zealand, student radio station RDU in the exhibition Alternative Radio at the Canterbury Museum in 2016. With the intention of ‘making visible what is invisible’ about radio broadcasting, the exhibition articulated RDU as a point of interconnection between the technical elements of broadcasting, the social and musical culture of station staff and volunteers, and the broader local and national music scenes. This paper is grounded in observations of the exhibitions and associated public programmes, and interviews with the key participants in the exhibition including the museum’s exhibition manager and staff from RDU, who acted as independent practitioners in collaboration with the museum. Alternative Radio also addressed the aftermath of the major earthquake of 22 February 2011, when RDU moved into a customised horse truck after losing its broadcast studio. The exhibition came about because of the cultural resonance of the post-quake story, but also emphasised the long history of the station before that event, and located this small student radio station in the broader heritage discourse of the Canterbury museum, activating the historical, cultural, and personal memories of the station’s participants and audiences.     

Children's interdependent mobility: compositions,collaborations and compromises

This paper discusses findings from Australian research that used a qualitative and participatory methods approach to understand how children develop and negotiate their everyday mobility. Children's mobility negotiations are discussed in reference to interactions with parents, peers and places; journeys in relation to their multi-modality, compositionality and temporality; and mobility formations in terms of ‘companionship’ – travel companions, companion devices and ambient companions. Children's mobility is characterised by interdependencies that both enable and configure this mobility. Three themes – compositions, collaborations and compromises – are used to detail and describe some of the ways these interdependencies take shape and unfold.     

Romanticism,music, nationalism

In manifold ways, the stylistic and performative features and evolving genre conventions of nineteenth‐century ‘classical’ music reflect the increasing grip of nationalism on cultural attitudes in Europe. Conversely, music could become an important medium for the expression and dissemination of nationalist ideals. A cross‐national, European‐wide survey of this interpenetration between musical and ideological developments is applied towards a tentative typological outline of ‘musical nationalism’.     

A Decadence Baedeker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.     

Cultural policy and revolutionary music during China’s Cultural Revolution: the case of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra

This paper examines the relation between the cultural policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the music of model plays (yangbanxi 样板戏), especially music produced by Western symphony orchestras, during the ten-year Cultural Revolution in China. It takes the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO) as the focal point of this historical episode. Model plays of the Cultural Revolution promoted communist and revolutionary themes. All aspects of their performance were examined for conformity to Maoist thought. This paper explores how the CCP’s ideology and its cultural policy were embodied in revolutionary music, using one of the model plays, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, as an analytical case study. Most of the historical materials cited in this research are held by the SSO Archive. The SSO played a crucial role in creating and performing the music for Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The academic value of its archive has long been overlooked. This paper provides a new perspective on the Cultural Revolution, one viewed through policies of a Western symphony orchestra, and it suggests that scholars apply the term ‘cultural policy’ more deliberately in future studies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.