Performing Guangzhou and Guangzhou Ren: analysing popular music in Guangzhou

The main purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which popular music in Guangzhou is implicated in the performance of places and identities, and how it is located in Guangzhou. Drawing on the qualitative methods of participant observation and interviews, this research analyses the popular music and musical performances in Guangzhou through three spatial dimensions: the place of Guangzhou, the performance venues and the human bodies. The findings of this research suggest that popular music in Guangzhou sets up the emotional communications and engenders different spaces for the participants to negotiate their embodied identities; popular music and musical performances make the connections between three spatial scales—the place of Guangzhou, the performance venues, and the human body—through its capacity of social mediation and the musical performances articulate the power relations between local residents, the local and national authorities, and the global. This research can be read as a contribution towards the wider literatures on musical performance and the exploration of doing/making place and place-based identity through popular music.     

From Coombs to Crean: popular music and cultural policy in Australia

The many bodies administering Australian arts activity were incorporated within the Australia Council, established in 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government to oversee Commonwealth arts policy under the direction of H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs. This article takes the establishment of the Australia Council as a starting point in tracing changing attitudes towards the practices and funding of popular music in Australia and accompanying policy discourses. This includes consideration of how funding models reinforce understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, the ‘cultural’/‘creative’ industries debates, and their effects upon local popular music policy. This article discusses the history of local music content debates as a central instrument of popular music policy and examines the implications for cultural nationalism in light of a recent series of media and cultural reports into industries and funding bodies. In documenting a broad shift from cultural to industrial policy narratives, the article examines a central question: What does the ‘national’ now mean in contemporary music and the rapid evolution of digital media technologies?     

Having an impact? Academics,the music industries and the problem of knowledge

This article reflects upon recent interest in knowledge transfer from higher education to the creative industries, using the UK music industries as a case study. It suggests that traditional academic values of impartiality and concern with research methodology can come in to conflict with instrumentalist agendas that see research as valuable only insofar as it fits with pre‐existing worldviews and policy ends. In this setting, knowledge resistance is often more significant than knowledge transfer and may be expected to frustrate any attempts to have an ‘impact’.     

Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.     

Structural Features of the Stone-Built T'ing-Pagoda

This article examines representations of Music Master Kuang in early Chinese historical and philosophical texts. Music Master Kuang was entirely blind, at a time when people with disabilities suffered serious discrimination. However, in spite of his handicap, he was able not merely to become a fine musician, but also served as a key advisor to two rulers of Jin, Lord Dao (r. 573–558 BCE) and his son, Lord Ping (r. 557–532 BCE), and in some texts is said to have acted as their prime minister. In achieving this transition, he is unique among Music Masters of the period. This article classifies the stories told about him into two main thematic groups, as a musician and as a statesman, to show the way in which music was related to statecraft through the persona of an individual who was both a highly respected government minister and a noted performer on the qin.     

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS: LEARNED CORRESPONDENCE, 1680–1720

This paper investigates the inter-twining histories of two highly successful broadside ballads during the seventeenth century. Neither has been systematically studied before. A set of cultural relationships is opened for consideration by these songs: first, between the two ballads, which are different in several ways but set to the same tune; second, between the selected songs and other ballads on comparable themes; and third, between different editions of the two featured songs. In discussing each of these relationships, attention is paid not only to the texts but to the pictures and the tunes that helped to bring balladry to life for early-modern consumers. It is argued that balladry should be studied as an interconnected web and that individual publications drew significance from the manner in which they associated themselves – through shared pictures, tunes and narratives – with other examples of the genre.     

‘The Heavens are Telling’: Memetic– Calvinian Readings of a Haydn Chord Progression

Abstract

The climax of the chorus ‘The Heavens are Telling’ from Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) employs a harmonic progression that Beethoven later adapted to conclude the first movement of his Symphony no. 2. An earlier (pre-Haydn) version of the progression might be found in a keyboard rondo by C. P. E. Bach. This harmonic unit is regarded as consisting of a sequence of musemes (musical memes): each is a replicated pattern serving as the cultural analogue to the gene. The neural encoding of such patterns is considered in terms of William Calvin’s hexagonal cloning theory, in order to adduce ‘memotypic’ (meme-encoding) evidence to support the ‘phemotypic’ (meme-product) evidence gleaned from musical score-analysis.     

试论小学音乐教育中“以人为本”的运用

本文通过对小学新课标音乐部分教育的理解，即，新课标倡导的“以人为本”的教育思想，就是指在关注学生知识、技能的同时，通过音乐熏陶更加关注他们的生活态度．对人和事物的情感意识和价值取向，以及宽容乐观的个性和健全的人格。通过音乐本身具有的独特的育人功能。剖析歌曲意境，创设情感氛围，体验轻松模式，提高学生的音乐鉴赏素质，培养学生健康的审美情趣和高尚情操。     

Nerven‐Saiten‐Stimmung. Zum Wandel einer Denkfigur zwischen Musik und Wissenschaft 1750–1850

‘Stimmung’. The Career of a Concept in Music and Science between 1750 and 1850. The German word ‘Stimmung’ originally refers to the musical praxis of tuning instruments. Whereas the English concepts of ‘tonus’ and ‘atunement’ used to describe the physical status of the body developed independently from the psychological ‘mood’, ‘Stimmung’ was used metaphorically in both physiology and psychology in the discussed period. This leads to various interrelations between the areas of knowledge involved. The paper investigates these on a synchronic and diachronic level. By concentrating a) on the analogy between musical strings and nerve fibres within the framework of a mechanistic conception of the body and b) on the metaphoric use of ‘Stimmung’ as a psychological concept describing the general mood of an individual, it becomes evident that the different metaphorical adaptations do not only have consequences within the specific area of knowledge, but also lead to distinct interpretations of musical effect. The second half of the paper concentrates on the diachronic development of ‘Stimmung’ in physiology and analyses the shifts within the semantic field of the metaphor occurring during the transformation from a mechanical to an organic conception of the body. On a theoretical level the emphasis lies on the conceptual potential of vague metaphors and the function of marginal metaphors in periods of theory change. In this context the results question Thomas Kuhns theory of an abrupt, gestaltlike change of theory by emphasizing the importance of continuous shifts within the semantic fields of vague metaphors.     

古诗、乐府考辨

诗、乐同源,合而不同;诗与乐府,并存不悖。汉乐府曲辞分为二途,一者采诗被乐,率多闾巷风谣;一者文人之辞,其中郊庙之辞,大半《诗》颂四言,故称诗而已矣。而文人五言虽杂乐府之中,然与民谣殊类,又异郊庙之辞,后世遂称古诗,姑且以为分别;魏晋以下文士所拟,大率其辞之流,于是概称古诗,且与乐府对举,以专后者之名,竟以汉世为宗。究之古诗、乐府,初则其义相即,并无截然分界,唯以后人所见,方有判然之别,而其对举互异,要归民间采诗与文人所作,二者分途,卒成两体。