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Metal music is here to stay, by all outward appearances, mainly, as I shall argue, by virtue of its expressive properties. Old calumnies excoriating metal for promoting immorality and the dark arts have collapsed under their own weight. Yet this article makes the harder case for representation as a value added to metal aesthetics. Metal goes so far as to assess ancient and modern foreign policy and to represent classical art forms. Philosophical aesthetics offers new insights into metal music, as shown via the article's discussion of debates involving Roger Scruton, Stephen Davies, and Peter Kivy, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Aesthetics; agency; games; phenomenal experience; C. Thi Nguyen EN Aesthetics agency games phenomenal experience C. Thi Nguyen 380 391 12 12/22/21 20211101 NES 211101 In his fascinating new book I Games: Agency as Art i , C. Thi Nguyen claims that games construct and frame forms of human agency in a way that gives rise to a genuine I aesthetics i of agency. Three extensions of Nguyen's view I'll argue that the aesthetics of agency can incorporate three elements Nguyen left out: emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances. Like Dewey, Nguyen begins with a refreshingly expansive understanding of those experiences that can have (or confer on their objects) genuine aesthetic value.[2] What Dewey left out, according to Nguyen, is the role of a I player i in a game. This is a tall order, but Nguyen does constrain his task: 'I don't mean to imply that aesthetic experiences are essential to art, nor to claim that games' sole purpose is to provide aesthetic experiences', he writes. [Extracted from the article]

What causes turnover on the Billboard charts? The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that taste is transmitted via an unbiased copying process, provides precise predictions regarding expected popularity distributions and turnover within a popularity-ranked list. Recent advances in this line make it possible to characterize the likelihood of music taste transmission mechanisms by investigating departures of observed turnover rates from neutral model predictions. Here, I bias the neutral model to investigate four alternative conceptions of individual music taste transmission (song quality, individual status, social network, and anticonformist) and use agent-based simulations to examine the impact on turnover. I then compare modeled with empirical turnover data from the Billboard Hot 100 over the period from 1958 to 2021 and find that observed turnover patterns are reproduced only in an anticonformist model simulating the systematic rejection of the most popular songs. This finding was unexpected and challenges the notion of a generalized "preference for the popular." Overall, this study contributes to ongoing debates regarding the mechanisms involved in the transmission of taste and the mechanics of fashion change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recording and radio industries have faced a reckoning over their lack of gender equity. While Generation Z is poised to become the dominant music audience, research on the wants and needs of young women listeners is lacking. This study used focus groups to investigate how Generation-Z women feel about today's music and audio media options. Specifically, their musical tastes are more eclectic, but they find little appeal in current popular music, and they see widespread disrespect for women in music. Participants also recognize that current trends of male-dominated radio presentation are likely to turn potential women listeners away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zeami Motokiyo was one of nō's most important theorists and practitioners, and mugen nō one of his most sophisticated innovations. Using the play Tōru as a model, this article explores how Zeami's nō utilised waka theory and Buddhist aesthetics that were current in his time. I will particularly focus on his use of utamakura, a poetic device of intertextual allusion via place names. In the second part of the article I will analyse Tōru's text and music through the lens of Kyoto School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru's theory of language. In positioning poetic spirits of place on stage, Zeami shows the power of language to manifest something like conventional reality. When watching mugen nō, the music and poetry combine to create a place wherein the audience shares the aesthetic-spiritual experience of the spirit of place manifesting in our communal mind. His staging of the opening up of the hollow expanse is the beauty of Zeami's art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can North African music, as a system of embodied knowledge, tell us about the trans-Saharan movements of people and practices? What could it mean to listen to such a history of continuity and rupture? This essay details the existence of two bodies of Hausa songs still performed today in Algeria within the Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl, a music and trance ritual tradition that originated, coalesced, and developed out of the trans-Saharan slave trade. These songs, categorised as the Hausawiyyn and Migzawiyyn suites, feature Hausa ritual objects, song texts, musical aesthetics, and spirit names from the Hausa bori (ceremony) pantheon among many other sub-Saharan echoes. However, dīwān communities rarely recognise these precise connections and simply consider them generically 'sub-Saharan' (sūdānī). Nevertheless, because the Hausa repertoires express the most purely sūdānī qualities of the entire ritual corpus, they serve as the primary example of both admirable 'black African' authenticity (and, therefore, ritual power) and risky alterity. Such viewpoints serve as a basis for crises about how practising Muslims should engage with the supposed 'pre-Islamic' origins of dīwān while preventing ancestors' histories from disappearing. Informed by recent (2013–2016) first-hand ethnographic fieldwork with dīwān communities as well as both primary and secondary historical sources, this essay is not only the first research to document these Hausa songs in Algeria but also highlights how and why these songs matter in Algerian history and to local communities today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses methodological issues of two recent experiments conducted by Christopher Bartel, and Elzė S. Mikalonytė and Vilius Dranseika, respectively, about the repeatability and individuation of musical works. I argue, first, that the reliability of their results about people's intuitions in our everyday musical practices can be questioned due to the use of descriptions instead of musical stimuli of the works and performances involved in the cases tested. This procedure is prone to place participants in an epistemic situation in which their mental capacities for their everyday judgments are not deployed and makes their judgments more vulnerable to the problem of "filling in". I provide empirical data of an experiment that implements musical stimuli, obtaining large effect sizes regarding the results obtained by Bartel, Mikalonytė and Dranseika. In addition, I argue that the results of three scenarios of the experiment conducted by Mikalonytė and Dranseika are suspicious of being influenced by presentation effects that favor the contextualist intuition that the composer is a relevant parameter in work-individuation. Formal and superficial aspects of the description of their cases would cause these effects. I supply empirical data of an experiment that neutralizes those effects, obtaining moderate and large effect sizes regarding the results of Mikalonytė and Dranseika. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the position of music in UK General Elections. It begins by looking at mainstream Party Election Broadcasts, and then discusses the fragmentation of this electoral and musical landscape through the technological and communicative affordances of digital media. Considering campaigners as "produsers", it examines how musical campaign content illustrates the shifting outputs of those operating within, and outside of, party political structures. These changes relate to broader questions of the extent, or limits, of digitalization's potential for democratizing political communication. Considering the musical aesthetics of election campaigns is a step toward examining the decision-making processes that underpins them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 20 years, the conservation literature around installation and performance artworks has increasingly relied on concepts and analogies from the philosophy of music to reformulate the concept of authenticity for artworks that recur in multiple instances. Within these frameworks, authenticity is often framed as a quality ascribed to a manifestation on the basis of its compliance with the artist's explicit directives or a precision of formal resemblance with past manifestations. This article resituates the concept of authenticity invoked in fine art conservation within a wider discourse in analytic philosophy on the type-token distinction and artworks as abstract entities that are instantiated in time and space. Given the intersubjective nature and situatedness of authenticity judgements pertaining to a work's manifestations, this article considers the limitations of authenticity frameworks predicated exclusively on score compliance and considers how a type-token ontology is more capacious. This article demonstrates how this distinction already underpins existing frameworks and discourses, how it aids in conceptualising the relationship between an artwork's potentially multiple versions or variants and their manifestations, and how it accommodates the ways perceptions of an artwork's identity are socially mediated through time and may differ across its viewership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late eighteenth century and the flowering of Romanticism, western classical or 'art' music has adopted aesthetics which aim to express 'the great and sublime in nature' (Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P. F. Collier and Son Company). However, though improvisation was a source of inspiration and motivation for creative expression, the rise of romantic aesthetics sacralised composers' creative processes and their works, ultimately producing the more restricted concept of Werktreue, or fidelity to the score (Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). In this article, I turn to the writing of Louis Althusser (1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press) to illustrate how implicit values and beliefs within the cultural institutions of classical music form an ideology which dominates the individual in a way described as 'hegemonic'. As a result, classically-trained musicians are excluded from improvisational practices, because: (i) they must act within a culture in which improvisation itself is misunderstood, misrepresented and suppressed, and (ii) the act of 'interpellation', in which ideology is interpreted by the individual, encourages musicians themselves to identify and seek fulfilment through non-creative, non-improvisatory practices. Lastly, I explore a way out from the determining tendency of ideology, explaining how the act of improvisation offers an alternative musical role which is genuinely creative and indeterminate; allowing the musician to become ideologically aware, and thus free to choose their own musical identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music streaming services, such as Spotify, have the potential to transform the social dynamics of music consumption in ways not previously encountered. These platforms facilitate anytime, anywhere access to vast catalogues of licensed music at little or no cost, making it possible for people from across class backgrounds to affordably access music spanning hierarchies of highbrow and lowbrow. Not only this, music streaming services are personalising the experience of consuming music. By drawing on music recommendation technologies that extract and predict similarities in music taste, individually and at scale, these platforms have the potential to reinforce class divisions in music taste at an unprecedented rate and scale. Yet, little is empirically known about if and how music streaming services are shaping the part that music taste and consumption play in the pursuit of class distinction. Drawing on 42 interviews with a combination of music streaming key informants and everyday users, this article demonstrates that music streaming services are creating opportunities to achieve distinction 'on' and 'off' platform. First, it highlights how technical command over these platforms and the practice of playlist curation represent opportunities to mobilise technical and music expertise in the pursuit of distinction. Second, it demonstrates that consuming music in physical formats, such as vinyl LPs, is a way for some to achieve distinction by challenging the speed at which music is made available by music streaming services. This article contributes to debates about the changing nature of the cultural assets underpinning class privilege in the platform age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores South African hip-hop artist, Yugen Blakrok. She received considerable attention with her appearance on Kendrick Lamar's soundtrack for the blockbuster feature Black Panther (2018), which brought Afrofuturism into the international mainstream. While Afrofuturism is a concept mainly developed in the African diaspora, as for instance with Sun Ra's MythScience, Yugen Blakrok's South African perspective yields a distinct approach to the aesthetic levels of the lyrical, sonic and visual. The article primarily focuses on Blakrok's lyrics, as they afford the most thorough basis for an analysis of the features that, despite Afrofuturism's inherent interplanetary consciousness, distinguish Blakrok's unique take on Afrofuturism, which will be exemplified with a close reading of the song "Opps" from the Black Panther soundtrack. Even though Yugen Blakrok creates a highly eclectic, holistic approach, "Opps" reveals its contextual embeddedness in the Afrofuturist discourse with its echoings of the Drexciyan myth. The article further delves into the otherworld of the artist's most recent album Anima Mysterium to highlight her aquatic tropes that build on the conceptual metaphor "space is an ocean" in her exploration of both the outer and the inner cosmos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Gaddis's JR (1975) is a novel comprised of sounds, published just as reforms on the 1st May 1975 deregulated the New York Stock Exchange. This article analyses this conjuncture of a specifically aural literary form with a nascent financialisation. It seeks to foreground how JR registers and imagines a limited form of resistance to finance capital's sonic logics, in which the diverse noises of human labour are reified into a managed soundscape. It provides a material context for JR's literary registration of financialisation that reveals the social functions of three financial processes: the wane of Fordist labour arrangements; the explosion of corporate pension fund capitalism; and the deregulation of the stock market rates, which popularised finance via new junk bond trading. The article concludes by considering Gaddis's aesthetic treatment of noise as a form of musical resistance to financial logics. It argues that Gaddis aesthetically critiques finance capital's mimetic logic, which symbolically buries the labour that guarantees capital its value and leaves only the fetish-sign. Challenging this process, Gaddis's novel presents the social potential for a musical aesthetics that, owing to its representational looseness, allows for finance capital's social relations to be heard despite broader economic discourses of silencing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between age cohorts and music taste. Drawing on quantitative data about the contemporary distribution of French music tastes, we note that a large majority of individuals are eclectic. Although social class remains a significant structuring variable, age appears as another critical factor in the distribution of individuals' taste for certain genres and artists. Deploying a regression analysis including a comparative "average partial effect" coefficient, we show the effect of age in the distribution of music taste. Specifically, we analyse data about how age cohorts express different levels of appreciation for music artists, which enables us to identify the relationship between individuals and music that has emerged and developed at a certain time. We argue that music taste is acquired in relation to two intertwined principles: individuals' age and the cultural times that mediate the presence of music genres and their encounters with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nani idi-nma n'ebere (2007) is a choral art music composition in the Igbo language for solo soprano and choir based on the last verse of Psalm 23. It displays a number of musical aesthetic features associated with the Nsukka Choral School (NCS), including percussive vocalisation and ostinato techniques. During the ostinato section, the chorus simulate indigenous Igbo musical instruments in polyrhythmic textures. The piece observes the tonal inflections inherent in Igbo traditional music, which are blended with Western harmonies typical of the First Viennese School. Together these characteristics create a hybrid piece of music that demonstrates the influence of these two different musical cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper on abigbo music of the Mbaise, Igbo argues that indigenous music could be processed beyond its value as a purveyor of historical facts to gain insights into the nature of experiences, trajectories, concerns, fears and projections of a society. The discourse is anchored on the Igbo philosophy of the convergence of the distant past and the distant future at the ever-evolving present, and encapsulated in the theory of cyclic integration presented here. According to this theory, abigbo music not only shows influences from the distant past in the present, but foresees the distant future through occurrences in the past. This is apparent in abigbo song texts, which reveal the perspectives of communities regarding their early encounters with missionaries and the enduring impact these groups had on the Igbo until the present day. A transcription of the abigbo song 'Ndi Amuma Ugha' ('False Prophets') is discussed to highlight some of the conclusions drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic dance music (EDM) is a genre where thousands of new songs are released every week. The list of EDM subgenres considered is long, but it also evolves according to trends and musical tastes. With this in view, we have retrieved two sets of over 2000 songs separated by more than a year. Songs belong to the top 100 list of an EDM website taxonomy of more than 20 subgenres that changed in the period considered. We test the effectiveness of automatic classification on these sets and delve into the results to determine, for example, which subgenres perform better and worse, how the performance of some subgenres change in the two sets, or how some subgenres are often confused with one another. We illustrate confusion among subgenres by a graph and interpret it as a taxonomic map of EDM. We also assess the deterioration of the performance of the classifier of the first set when used to classify the second one. Finally, we study how the new subgenres that appear in the second set relate to the old ones with the help of the classifier of the first set. As a result, this work illustrates the main challenges that EDM poses to automatic classification and provides insights into where are the limits of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how love arose as a political ethos in São Paulo, Brazil. The meaning and feeling of love emerged as middle-class artists sought to do what they love as work; activists demanded rights to the city through cultural intervention; and a hit song by an obscure rapper lamented that 'love doesn't exist in São Paulo'. Cultural activists tied love's affective resonance to the mayoral campaign of politician Fernando Haddad, who likewise framed his transit policy in loving terms. The article describes how middle-class musical aesthetics stemming from the idea of 'racial democracy', as well as artists' and activists' desire to 'do what you love' as work, eschewed the racialised class conflict that produced an unloving city, leading to a politically impotent articulation of love. The article advances a materialist approach to affect through social reproduction theory, suggesting that the concept of affect is useful only if it takes account of the social politics that shape affective resonance, particularly the central conflict between human life and the generation of capital. It argues that affects brought forth through cultural products like music only serve political change if overtly connected to a larger programme of structural transformation which incorporates class conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When access to geographical knowledge and the ability to make maps are taken as given, it no longer seems necessary to cling to the ideal of cartography as a process for designing maps to be immutable statements of fact. Hence, moving the professional ideals of map-making further along the trajectory from design towards art also raises important issues surrounding the rhetorical power of maps. Maps, and, by extension, 3D visualizations that resemble maps or satellite imagery, tend be judged aesthetically as pictures, but they also convey an impression of veracity that exceeds that of other graphics. His research explores the relationship between maps and society, particularly the intercultural aspects of topographic map design and the aesthetics of cartography. [Extracted from the article]

This article illustrates historically, how the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Malay musical practices operated in tandem with the cultural intimacies of vernacular Malay film narratives to express the complex interconnectivities of a fluidly linked and diverse region. The film music icon, P. Ramlee, employed a cosmopolitan approach to making music; merging Anglo-American jazz and Latin American rhythms with regional Malay and Javanese folk music, themes and cultural references. When screened, heard and reproduced in contemporary contexts, such films and music illicit nostalgia for an idealistic era during which the nation was in-the-making. A narrative of pity for P. Ramlee is affectively instrumentalised by the Malaysian state, local cultural producers and multinational corporations; recalling his image and works to appeal to the Malaysian public. An analysis of the film music in Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (1961) directed by P. Ramlee unravels the threads of cosmopolitan musical practices and culturally intimate expressions that challenge the rigid boundaries of the nation-state; expressing a unique inter-regional, multilinguistic and multiethnic collective identity. This paper argues for a conceptual approach that examines the cosmopolitan intimacies of cultural production; revealing the complex cultural, political, national and transnational constestations and connections of a postcolonial Malay world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, has compiled many of his previously published journal articles and chapters on Gilles Deleuze in this book. Thinking with Deleuze: by Ronald Bogue, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, xvii + 450 pp., $33.95/£25.99 (paper) The comprehensive nature of Bogue's analysis and application of Deleuze's ideas make the volume valuable to anyone who wants to learn more about Deleuze. [Extracted from the article]

While Langer's assertions about feeling and art have had a marked impact on music educators’ thinking and action, they have also earned substantial critique. The purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to examine Langer's and Deleuze's writings about the ontology of art and to posit a new concept, ‘becoming feeling,’ inspired by the meeting of their philosophies. Deleuze's assertions about forces, intensities, and becomings avoid the pitfalls of Langer's statements about music's symbolic nature, but his focus on ‘nonhuman becomings’ has the potential to neglect the emotional aspects of humanity that Langer finds central to musical experiences. I offer that artistic experiences foster ‘becoming-feeling,’ which involves sensing the world as though one were specific, continually-changing feelings. Examples of how musically educative experiences centred on ‘becoming-feeling’ might lead to more refined and ordered understandings as well as to more complex and confused ones are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, which came to occupy a central position in assembling the new structures and spaces of performance, pedagogy, recording and consumption of Hindustani music. I suggest that the passion for Hindustani music was strongly linked to the linguistic diversity of Bombay, and that it was thelingua musicawhich aided the development of the public domain and its cultural vernacular in the twentieth century. Through their musicophilia, the city’s inhabitants engaged in fashioning a subjectivity that emerged through that which they shared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented which discusess topics within the issue including musical aesthetics; asymmetrical position of tone colour between empirical data, the phenomenology of touch-in-sound; and musical affordances of timbre.

Using the work of the US DJ and producer Diplo as a case study, this article examines the development, internationalization, and sensationalization of Brazilian funk carioca. It argues that this trend has contributed to glamorized global perceptions of impoverished Latin American communities and perpetuated a troublesome history of Western producers using source material from the Other for novelty and financial gain. It concludes with a discussion of the emerging ideals and aesthetics of the “global remix,” as well as an examination of contemporary attitudes towards hybridity, authenticity, and ownership in the global popular music sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist within and across musical methods wherein sampling is part of the spectrum of activities. Thirdly, we discuss the ubiquity of digital technology within popular music production and the resultant closer relationship between sampling and other musical techniques moving onto, fourthly, how the sampling aesthetic has become integrated into musical practice in a manner insufficiently accounted for by its legal and industrial contexts. This ‘post-sampling’ reality places sampling and other musical techniques along a spectrum, in practical and ethical terms, and musicians would be better served by sampling being treated as part of the overall musical palette, allowing both scholars and the law to concentrate on ideologies of practiceacrossthe tools that musicians use rather than between different specific techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically specific 'heritage', and how the self-stylization is employed in asserting a linguistic-cultural 'identity'. This is done through an investigation of the aesthetics and politics of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three-week run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in South Africa and abroad and the documentary by a Cape Town film maker. Dylan Valley's [2011. Afrikaaps. Directed by Dylan Valley. Amsterdam: Plexus Films/The Glasshouse] film follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to KhoiSan and slaves in the Cape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this philosophical paper, I propose a theory of music education inspired by ancient Chinese philosophy. In particular, I draw on five classical Chinese philosophical texts: the Analects, the Mencius, the Zhuangzi, the Xunzi and the Yue Ji. Given that music education was an integral part of the social fabric in ancient China, it is potentially illuminating to uncover the theoretical underpinning of this enterprise, and to examine the implications of such a theory for contemporary music education. Based on the texts, I posit an ancient Chinese-inspired theory of music education that comprises four facets: society, teacher-model, effortful training and effortless action. I conclude this paper with implications for contemporary music education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of musical value has no doubt played a role in the small amount of literature on busking coming out of the discipline of musicology. The prescriptive and descriptive approaches to value in musicological thought, and the static image of the musical Work both models imply, are problematized when considered within the concept of the “reactive” as articulated in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche. An alternative concept of value based on principles of affect and becoming enfolds the fragmentary as well as the monumental and is necessary to grasp the value of busking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is popular music to Slovene listeners? How is it conceived of in terms of vocabulary, and what can be said of the political potential of its aesthetic instance? In the field of Slovene popular music and audience research, these issues have thus far remained un(der)explored. Nevertheless, they need to be addressed: if carefully contextualized, looking into the questions of what popular music signifies, and is connected with, for different Slovene audiences points to the cultural meaning-assigning power-play at work. Bearing this issue in mind, the text attempts to provide a contextually informed overview of how Slovene popular music audiences of different—inductively singled out—age groups conceive of the aesthetics of Slovenian popular music. The text analyzes 150 semi-structured interviews with popular music audiences in Slovenia, conducted in 2012 as part of the HERA POPID project. It employs a Bakhtinian conceptual framework and attempts to locate the aesthetic coordinates of popular music discourse in Slovenia, arguing that the aesthetic moment might offer a possibility of escaping stabilized connections between popular music, nation, identity, and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, derived from a chapter in the bookMusical Treasure-Trove of Uzbekistan, addresses the history, sources, theory, and practice of the Uzbek classical music calledmakom[maqâm]. The author argues that Uzbek classical music has an unbroken, complex, and philosophical legacy that has come down to us as a living tradition from numerous sources in the wider region of Central Asia. He illustrates his innovative interpretation with diverse music samples and elaborate analysis ofmakomterminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study deals with the content-related and thematic, as well as visual and semantic, contexts in which musical motifs, and words and notions with a musical meaning, are placed in the Orbis sensualium pictus textbook of John Amos Comenius. They can be found in several places in the textbook in both its textual and pictorial components. They are used for a broad demarcation of the fields in which music is presented as a philosophical and aesthetic, didactic, communication, ethical and theological phenomenon. In this way, music is presented to the children of the seventeenth century through the Orbis sensualium pictus not only in the form of its specific object or event, in its metaphorical or symbolical meaning but, first of all, as a phenomenon present in the various fields of spiritual and everyday life. The reader becomes acquainted with music in its various functions, with its form, practical utilisation, relation to other fields of art and science, its position within philosophical concepts, its ethical dimension, aesthetic values, spiritual as well as transcendental essence. The purpose of the present study is to explore the essence, present the origins, genesis, sources for inspiration and objectives of the textual as well as the pictorial form of the music syllabus in this pictorial textbook, most widely used in the European context, and, at the same time, to point out the juxtapositions, links, functions and contexts into which music is placed throughout its contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme heavy metal music is transgressive, but can it be understood as resistant in Adorno's sense of “serious music?” This article seeks to show how extreme heavy metal music approaches what Adorno valued in serious music and the interests of critical theory. I begin with the method of negative dialectics—a difficult and contradictory notion. The philosophy of negative dialectics is, I argue, crucial for the material studies informed by it. I consider next the idea of resistant music itself, distinguishing the negations of serious music from “positive” popular protest music. Finally, I provide an analysis of the negative dialectics of extreme heavy-metal music, considering the music and its culture in historical context. Overall, I offer a side-by-side “critical model,” in Adorno's sense, of negative dialectics and heavy metal music and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The composition of new string quartets in Spain from the end of the 1950s undertook a path of renewal that strove toward modernity through the use of serial and aleatory techniques or new conceptions of timbre. This was in spite of the relatively scarce experience for Spanish composers of international examples of the genre. This essay offers a brief insight into the aesthetic diversity to be found in string quartets composed in Spain from 1950 up to the present, and stresses their openness toward newer hybrid perspectives of intertextuality and narrativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A psychogeographic reading of the music theatre works of composers Bernhard Lang and Chico Mello can aid an understanding of the more subtle approaches to ‘quotation’, borrowing, and intertextuality in their works. These aspects are signalled by competing cultural geographies which also indicate the composers' differing experiences of place. This analysis will allow for a greater understanding of competing cultural geographies and concepts of ‘postminimalism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in the two composers' works and borrowing practices. It will also explore the link between the composers' biographies, quotation, and repetition, by introducing concepts of psychogeography, radicant aesthetics, and Nicholas Bourriaud's ‘journey form’ to an aesthetic approach to their forms. It will conclude by examining how the ‘journey form’ might itself be considered a cultural borrowing practice within a psychogeographic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including popular music adaptation, case studies of popular music as heritage, and the framing, preserving as well as commercializing the popular music through music industry.

In his 2001 Biko Memorial Lecture, Zakes Mda defines “raising-consciousness poetry” as a self-empowering poetry performed by young South African spoken word artists, young “conscientized” poets who (often) operate at the margins of the mainstream industries of culture. Mda calls these young artists the “children of Biko”, thus identifying the members of this fluid community as today's heirs and innovators of the Black Consciousness leader's unforgotten tradition. This paper critically analyses selected musical and poetic texts written by four representative young performing poets and songwriters of South Africa, and suggests that their works are re-invigorating the arts scene by infusing it with the ethos of self-empowerment that stands at the very core of Biko's philosophy of liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophy of music curriculum for the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) developed by the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) is conceived from the background of Western music. It impacts little on the learning of Nigerian music. Music is an essential, inseparable and a fundamental part of African cultures. The traditional systems of the Nigerian society consider music to be an indispensable part of education and some families were renowned with long traditions of music making. The mode of training notably involved a long period of apprenticeship with an imitation approach as a major method of the teaching-learning process. Against this background, this paper examines the content of the music curriculum for the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) in relation to its stated philosophy and objectives and that of the Nigerian cultural system. It further examines the possibility of replacing most of the repertoire of imposed Western musical tradition with Nigerian musical heritage, in order to make it more relevant to the student's social environment and for the economic advancement of its graduates and the society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Places are temporal milieus, and the tempo of a place is inherently rhythmical. In an urban place, the patterns of people's movements, encounters, and rest, recurrently negotiating with natural cycles and architectural patterns, merge into expressive bundles of rhythms which give a place its temporal distinctiveness. This paper investigates the aesthetics of place-temporality, focusing on its expression and representation; it explores its principal attributes, experience, and significance. And, building on an analogy with musical aesthetics, the paper brings forward a conceptual framework for the understanding and analysis of temporality in urban space, with a focus on place-rhythms and the triad of place-temporal performance, place-tonality, and sense of time. These are the principal aesthetic processes through which place-temporality expresses and represents itself in urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about the value of music, measured not in aesthetic terms, but rather as a matter of practical politics. The question of cultural value is, of course, familiar to those who study cultural policy. Typically, the political debate divides between (1) those who argue that music must take its chance in the market, where its value will be revealed in the price consumers are willing to pay; (2) those who see music as having social value, beyond that realised in the market, but seek to measure that value in terms recognised by economists (e.g. Contingent Valuation); and finally (3), those who reject the economistic route, and argue that music’s value is of a different order and kind. What can get overlooked in this debate, and why it can be so frustrating, is the politics that underlies it – the politics of power and policy-making, and the politics of principle. This article argues that we should focus more explicitly on the politics, seeing culture – in this case, music – as a political resource and the bearer of political values, and to see music policy as an articulation of political value as much as of cultural value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musical and rhythmic dimensions of the achemical endeavor, and of clinical work, are often in the shadows. Indian philosophy has often been criticized as being otherworldly and even world negating, including by Jung. India has a long history, with many diverse traditions of inquiry. Ideals of renunciation and unification with the Godhead, and perspectives of the world as Maya/illusion–in contrast to some greater Truth–exist, but these only represent an incomplete set of voices. Putting aside verbal traditions, as well as what hasn't been scribed, complex forces shape which texts cross the barriers of language, culture, and history and what sorts of understandings and fantasies emerge as we grapple with the Other. In the Shaivite Tantric traditions, the upward movement into the realm of spirit is only one arc of a larger rhythmic oscillation. The downward earthly embodiment in one's lived life is equally important. In the spirit of Jung, with his emphasis on bringing light into the shadows, we will explore these areas. After a brief review of Jung's interest in medieval European alchemy, we begin our dialogue with lesser-known perspectives from Indian alchemical and Tantric systems. Drawing from Indian philosophy and aesthetics, core archetypes of rhythm (Spanda) and emotion (Rasa) are introduced and developed. Psychological dimensions of Indian classical rhythm and performance are explored. We relate these to perspectives within psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, and then we conclude with clinical considerations, looking at musical and rhythmic, dimensions of the analytic exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous writers on music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries elaborated on the belief that each major or minor key was appropriate for the expression of a distinct affect or character, a sentiment with which Beethoven appears to have concurred. Just how this belief impressed itself on compositional practices is a more difficult question, as the choice of key in this era entailed several intertwining factors, both instrumental/acoustic and symbolic/traditional in nature. The key of E♭ major, one often mentioned in connection with Beethoven's “heroic” style, offers an illuminative example of this complex interplay of instrumental and symbolic associations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since Leonard Ratner's initial introduction of topoi in Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, topical analysis has slowly gained acceptance, due largely to the writings of such noted authors as Kofi Agawu, Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Jonathan Bellman, and Raymond Monelle. Ratner provided a succinct lexicon of common eighteenth-century topoi, and while various authors have added nineteenth-century topics to his list, to this point none have offered a specific lexicon of Romantic topics. Similar to their eighteenth-century cousins, Romantic topics feature simple dance types and styles, but expand to incorporate more complex musical dialects such as the Chivalric and Demonic styles—all illustrative of Romantic ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1957 launch of Sputnik and the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk shifted national education policy. Music educators promoted an “intrinsic value” of music philosophy following Sputnik and music advocacy through politics and public performances following A Nation at Risk. Examining the history of both the intrinsic value philosophy and advocacy reveals that music educators responded to Sputnik and A Nation at Risk by continuing to work within their existing language and practices rather than reacting to and transforming after either event. The political, social, and cultural contexts of these events may explain music educators’ responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The twentieth century was a time of dramatic change in the structure, language, and aesthetic purpose of music. Numerous factors came together that led the musical avant-garde toward new artistic paths such as atonality and aleatoricism (use of chance elements) in music, and a shift in the idea of what music should portray away from beauty toward truth, or from idealized to actualized. If the arts are a reflection of the philosophical and aesthetic spirit of the times, then an examination of prominent philosophical and aesthetic regimes of the time should reveal changes that facilitated the aesthetic and artistic innovations of the era. This article will examine the relationship between the philosophical and aesthetic writings of Henri Bergson and the affinities, and in some cases influences, they had on the development of two of the major musical innovations of the twentieth century. Specifically, Arnold Schoenberg's development of atonal compositional technique results partially from Bergson's focus on knowledge as a conveyor of truth, and John Cage's cultivation of aleatoricism as a compositional process arises out of Bergson's critique of nothingness as stated in Creative Evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In African-American literary thought, Henry Louis Gates's book, The signifying monkey (1988) was a breakthrough in so far as it argued for a vernacular theory for cultural expression in black communities. However, some critics missed Gates's point, and began to suggest that a singing culture is biologically inherent in black people; that the evolution of different musical styles are sui generis to black people only and that unless one is coming from this black culture, one has no access to understanding the rhetorical devices used by black singers. This emphasis on cultural absolutism (Gilroy 1993) denies acknowledgement of creative diversity amongst black artists from America. This article uses some selected songs from Immortal Technique, one of the finest singers to debunk the above assumptions and reveal how the command of musical techniques or rhetorical devices in music is a function of communal socialisation as well as individual creativity and innovation. The article explores the notion of how particular styles in popular culture can create new meanings and content in black popular culture in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hailed as a critical and popular success since its premiere in December 1944, Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra is most often discussed as the accessible masterpiece that helped launch a posthumous resurgence of the composer's earlier musical output. Yet the historical and aesthetic significance of this work in relation to American orchestral life—and Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra in particular—remains largely ignored. The Concerto for Orchestra can be viewed through the lens of what might be called “collective virtuosity”: a concept that describes the performance of a work whose challenging musical language requires a heightened level of artistic teamwork. Described through musical analysis and strengthened by archival research and management theory, this phenomenon reflects a multitude of historical and social developments that are particularly salient to the story surrounding Bartók's Concerto, thus serving as a useful analytic tool that reveals new insights concerning the work and its popular success in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The examination of two contexts of Ndau performance from southeastern Zimbabwe-ceremonial drumming for spirit possession and secular muchongoyo dance/drumming-is an excellent starting point for reopening discussion about the analytical value of aesthetics in ethnomusicology. Members of these communities evaluate performances according to specific ethical values and social expectations. The parameters, values, and expectations that shape Ndau responses to sacred and secular performances can be compared to the legacy of aesthetic discourses in ethnomusicology that emerge from Immanuel Kant. Ultimately, aesthetics seems a counterproductive tool for understanding how communities such as this evaluate local performance practices. Within Ndau communities, the good is coterminous with the beautiful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bulk of research on Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to date has focused primarily on either the historical or editorial; analysis of her music, however, is rare. Turning the lens on Hensel's songs for solo voice is a step toward rectifying this situation. What defines the Henselian Lied? What makes her songs distinctive and unmistakably her own? What, in short, was her Lied aesthetic? An examination of two of her songs from the late 1820s, 'Verlust' (1827) and 'Die fruhen Graber' (1828), uncovers three hallmarks of her approach to the Lied: an avoidance of tonic harmony, an emphasis on text painting, and the use of the piano accompaniment as commentary. The most striking of these hallmarks-the absence of the tonic-can be traced through several songs from the middle of her output, including her setting of Goethe's 'Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh' (1835). All three features are most evident in one of her last songs, 'Im Herbste' (1846). These songs reveal a composer with a great sensitivity to textual nuance, a penchant for harmonic experimentation, and a strong interpretive streak. Moreover, they suggest that far from being merely an exemplar of the 'Mendelssohnian style,' Hensel was an independent artist in her own right, with a creative voice that was adventuresome, deeply expressive, and, in its own way, as pathbreaking as any in the Romantic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]