Diverse Strains: Music and Religion in Dickens's Edwin Drood

Music in Dickens's final and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, shares in the lethargy affecting traditional English community. That life has become stagnant in Cloisterham, the ancient city in which the novel is set, is nowhere more evident than in the desultory choral worship offered in its cathedral. Yet the unevenness of Dickens's writing in Edwin Drood does not make for consistency, and discrepancies in plotting extend to the musical occupations of its protagonists. By considering Edwin Drood alongside the shifting fortunes of choral music in Victorian Britain, this article focuses on what such discrepancies reveal about Dickens's notion of the place of religion in social renewal. Habitual forms of life in Cloisterham, such as the choral service of its cathedral, are being overwhelmed by marginal presences, arriving from the imperial East, but they may also give voice to a future revival. Something of the changeability in Dickens's feeling for established religion can be glimpsed in this duality.     

Charity and Political Protest in French Popular Music

This article explores the cultural assumptions expressed in the self-proclaimed ‘alternative’ and ‘protest’ sector of French popular music, and how these become problematic when leading a charity concert. Liberté de circulation (1999) is a small-scale concert set up for the benefit of the Groupe d'Information et de Soutien des Travailleurs Immigrés (GISTI) in support of illegal immigrants, and its participants (artists and organisers) have a confused relationship with contestation and media exposure. While they convincingly wrap their pro-migration discourse in notions of solidarity and universality, they often confine themselves in artistic and production terms to a certain marginality, which fails the objective of raising funds and public awareness for the charity targeted. Drawing on a comparison between Liberté de Circulation and Les Enfoirés, a high-profile, televised charity show supporting the destitute, the article observes the problematic articulation of charity to political commitment and, in so doing, contributes to debate about the formation of cultural identities around the concept of ‘resistance’ in contemporary France. This discussion follows the pluridisciplinary method of popular music studies and includes an analysis of song lyrics, orchestration, artists' declarations in interviews and the media reception of charity concerts.     

Place and Innovation in Popular Music: The Bebop Revolution in Jazz

This paper explores the relationship between place and processes of innovation in popular music, focusing on the example of the bebop style of jazz. Bebop emerged during the 1940s both as a reaction against older jazz styles and as an expression of artistic innovation within a community of younger jazz musicians. The process of its creation and early development was situated in a set of "nested'' locales centered in New York City. This analysis examines the diverse nature of these locales and the distinctive ways in which they fostered interactions among bebop's creators and their various audiences. The analysis reveals that different locales played dissimilar roles during specific stages in bebop's emergence, as it evolved into an increasingly coherent form of cultural expression. Most importantly, certain jazz clubs in Harlem provided a setting for the early experimentation that culminated in the bebop style, but the style's subsequent formalization and popularization depended on its exposure in jazz clubs in midtown Manhattan, at first along 52nd Street and later on nearby sections of Broadway. These findings confirm the importance of place in understanding the dynamic nature of popular music and the processes of innovation integral to it.