Airports fall into what Marc Augé has defined as a "non-place." Augé's term refers to anthropological spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places". Other "non-places" include highways, hotel tooms, supermarkets, train stations, and bus terminals. Despite an airport falling into the catagory of "non-place," garnering the space little significance, many airports pipe recorded music throughout their terminals. What does this music say about the space it occupies? What aspect or aspects of culture are being transmitted through these musics? As I begin a possible long term study of music in airports, I ask how ethnomusicology should address these musics. What music can be found in these spaces? How does it help one understand the culture of that particular space?

Famously, Brain Eno sought to address this issue with his 1978 release Music for Airports. The album is constructed of four layered tape loops of differing lengths. The four compositions captured musicians performing and perparing to perform acoustic piano and vocal music with room microphones allowing for a heavy amount of room ambience. Electronics and synthesizers were added in the postproduction phase. It was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term he used to differentiate his experimental and minimalistic approach to composition. It was one of the first recordings to be explicitlly labeled "ambient music."

Music for Airports  was meant to be continuously looped as a sound installation. Eno thought his recording could diffuse some of the tense atmosphere he felt in airport terminals. Eno thought the music should be as ignorable as it is interesting. Instead of instilling the sense of false glee typical of most background musics, Eno's Music for Airports was intended to calm a listener's mind and reduce the general anxiety of the airport terminal setting. Music for Airports was installed at the Marine Air Terminal of New York's LaGuardia Airport for a brief period during the 1980s.

Following Eno's general fascination with the music in airports, I sought to document the music I heard in airports as I traveled from Los Angeles, California to Denpasar, Bali in the summer of 2015. My itinerary took me through airport terminals in Los Angeles (LAX), Tokyo (NRT), and Singapore (SIN). I focused my audio recording device directly at the speakers to compete with the other ambiences of the terminals and took a photo of a nearby scene from where the audio recording was taken.

References

Auge, Marc. 1995. "Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity." London: Verso Press.

Weisbard, Eric and Craig Marks, 1995. Spin Alternative Record Guide. New York: Vintage Books.

Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i. By Franklin Odo. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xxviii, 242 pp. ISBN9780199813032, Hardback: $49.50.]. 

Reviewed by Jennifer Milioto Matsue / Union College

In Voices from the Canefields, Franklin Odo provides an extensive study of folksong amongst Japanese immigrant workers on Hawaiian sugar plantations. These holehole bushi are songs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; “holehole” is a native Hawaiian term referring to the stripping of leaves from sugar cane plants and “bushi” is a general term in Japanese for song, thus hinting at the complexity of immigrant identity contained within. Odo has compiled what he feels are all the holehole bushi available at the end of the twentieth century, translating some 200 songs (xxiv). Holehole bushi are short songs comprising four lines with 7, 7, 7 and 5 syllables – a common form in Japanese folksong (min’yō) that allows lyrics easily to be interchanged. And it is the lyrics of the songs themselves that motivate the thematic content and organization of the book as a whole. Odo thus offers an intriguing look at the life of Japanese issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) and nisei (second generation Japanese immigrants) and their descendants in historical and cultural context, in turn illuminating our understanding of Asian-American identities through musical practice. In doing so, Odo “relies on family histories, oral histories, and accounts from the prolific Japanese-language press” (xxvii) to create a text valuable to those interested not only in Japanese folksong, Asian-American experiences, and Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i, but also broader questions of “comparative migration history, women’s history, labor history, and ethnic/racial movements within national and international contexts” (xxvii).

The chapters are organized around the themes raised in the numerous holehole bushi, through which the daily life and most pressing concerns of the issei emerge. Chapter One necessarily looks at songs that address the motivation of the movement of people from Japan to Hawai’i at the end of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, as Japan’s presence as a global imperial power increased at the same time as the United States expanded its governance with the annexation of Hawai’i in 1898. Although Japan was rising as a military power within Asia, and despite Japanese Americans remaining the largest immigrant population on Hawai’i until after WWII, these songs reveal that issei lamented their position as lesser than the haole (the white ruling group) and felt abandoned by their homeland.

Not surprisingly, many of the holehole bushi therefore explore the difficulty of work and deplorable conditions on the plantations. The different types of labor are detailed in Chapter Two, which reveals that even within this world there were hierarchies, with the less arduous tasks, such as stripping dry leaves, falling to women. As in many similar agricultural settings, the singing of holehole bushi was encouraged by the overseers (luna), individuals who were often extremely cruel. Restrictions were placed on “talking since conversation interrupted focus on the work; however, as with other slave or indentured regimens, whether dealing with sugar, cotton, or tobacco, communal or call-and-response singing like holehole bushi, was not only tolerated but encouraged since workers toiled in rhythm” (25). Nonetheless, songs expressed honest feelings of the workers, emphasizing a sense of “just getting by,” concerns on the adverse effects of this life on children, and even the struggle to decide whether to go home or extend contracts and stay in Hawai’i. Ultimately these songs highlight the “movement” of plantation workers, from job to job, island to island, or even back to Japan, and in some cases between romantic partners.

The difficult conditions led to overwhelming feelings of despair as well as moments of insolence, the central themes of the songs in Chapter Three. Here again Odo likens these songs and the horrific circumstances of the singers to those of American slaves (40) but adds “the very creation and singing of holehole bushi in tedious teahouses, accompanied by musicians and lubricated by quantities of sake, was also an expression of defiance – the refusal to submit meekly to persistent disrespect and degradation” (40). Corrupt government did little to assist struggling plantation workers who predominantly suffered in silence – referring to themselves as rejected or abandoned subjects (kimin) as opposed to proper immigrants (imin). Officials, for example, turned a blind eye to gangs, prostitution and gambling, a particularly popular pastime in Japan (43), with holehole bushi providing an important means of expressing dissatisfaction with both the local and Japanese government.

In Chapter Four Odo stresses the role of holehole bushi for capturing the real importance of more intimate topics, especially love and lust, in plantation life for the Japanese. Songs, for example, highlight the nature of “picture brides,” (shashin kekkon); the practice of arranging marriages with women back in Japan, who often arrived in Hawai’i with false expectations of “paradise,” improved living conditions, and ideal romantic partners only to be disappointed (70). The “picture bride” resulted from government prohibitions against continued immigration of Asian laborers, but which still “allowed immediate family members to be summoned to join male workers” (70). As a result, from 1900 to 1920 approximately 20,000 women entered Hawai’i as picture brides, in some cases under false pretenses with no intention of honoring marriages, or as prostitutes, either by choice or coercion (71). Many of these marriages were to fail, either from men essentially “stealing” another’s wife, selling their wives, or women deserting once reality set in. The holehole bushi often express a bawdy and explicit sexuality, an aspect of identity that may taint the “ideal” immigrant image and therefore, according to Odo, has not been adequately represented in other narratives of these people. Odo argues “[i]t may be useful, then, to reintroduce the notion of Japanese immigrant sexuality to the general public as well as the Japanese American community and its leaders, who may be tempted to marginalize or eliminate the subject from the narrative” (82).

Holehole bushi encapsulate the ways in which “Japanese immigrants on Hawaii’s sugar plantations critically examined their experiences and fates, [the theme of Chapter Five], beginning as soon as they left Japan, continuing during their working years, and extending well into retirement. Many lyrics reflect unfortunate decisions or the sorrows of misfortune. Other songs celebrate profound relief at the end of a lifetime of struggle” (83). Many Japanese came to Hawai’i with aspirations to make money and return back to Japan, a plan that often did not materialize. The reality of plantation life quickly erased the rosy image and many holehole bushi reflect on harsh conditions (as covered above). Yet the author notes the number and variety of holehole bushi that imply “that there was some degree of satisfaction even given such harsh conditions” (87). Not surprisingly songs also reflected on the rapid passage of time, and the growth of families, all the while revealing the constant negotiation of immigrant identity; lost between Japan and Hawai’i, but nevertheless a community grounded in both cultures. Ultimately these holehole bushi echo the individual and collective memories of these people (93).

Recognizing the importance of these songs for capturing these immigrant’s experiences, in 1960, to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the arrival of the first Japanese contract workers in Hawai’i in 1885, the Hawaii Times published a selection of holehole bushi collected from the issei and nisei, which motivate Chapter Six. Much had improved for the Japanese immigrants by the 1960s, following a particularly tumultuous period of complex and rapid changes that began in WWII. The holehole bushi from this collection, with their emphasis on early immigrant experience, reflect the same themes Odo notes elsewhere, although several new ideas emerge that result from the increasing historical distance from the late nineteenth century. Such songs, for example, comment on being released from the rigor of planation life, or the sadness over the loss of others not so lucky (some of the most compelling lyrics in the volume; see 122), while others celebrate the grand accomplishments of the community, in turn also essentially eradicating the much earlier lewd lyrics and feeding the creation of a “model minority” identity Odo critiques elsewhere (104).

It was assumed the holehole bushi would perish with the passing of the last of the Japanese issei but they actually experienced resurgence as a result of both this 1960s publication, and the work of Harry Minoru Urata (1917-2009). Odo celebrates Urata’s creative initiative in Chapter Seven and a separate Acknowledgement at the end of the main text, in which he explores Urata’s motivation for collecting and teaching the holehole bushi as a means of illuminating the life of Japanese immigrants. Following his own internment in a detention center during WWII, Urata collected and preserved the holehole bushi of the aging issei. He began this massive undertaking in the 1960s, traveling around the Hawaiian Islands taping 30 interviews and completing numerous transcriptions, even producing a phonograph record of these songs in Japan, and in the 1970s and 1980s transmitting the holehole bushi to hundreds of students. In the 1980s Urata passed his “notes, interviews, recordings, transcriptions, and other ephemera” to Odo, the contents of which forms the basis of this book (x); an impressive collection that now belongs to the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (x). Odo attributes the revival of the holehole bushi to these efforts of Urata, further fostered by the use of these songs in the film Picture Bride (1995), but ultimately because of song’s ability to bring the conditions of the issei into visceral focus (130).

To be sure, in the Conclusion, Odo once again stresses that through holehole bushi, we gain a more accurate picture of the life of these immigrants. And “[t]racing their genealogy to the present gives us a sense of the remarkable durability and power of ethnic heritage in America. For a century now, the holehole bushi have defied the odds in retaining life and vibrancy. They have been the folk songs that refused to die” (142) in part a result of the strong community of Japanese Americans who keep them alive through active singing (xx). For Odo, “they provide a glimpse of lives too often ignored, marginalized, or simply taken for granted. They are valuable precisely because they encourage us to imagine the thoughts, desires, fears, and rage that seem inevitably to drift into anonymity” (63). Though folksong in other cultural contexts may serve a similar function, holehole bushi of course speak to the specific transitory and transnational identity of Japanese Americans in Hawai’i, captured in the blend of Japanese dialect and native Hawaiian in lyrics, as well as themes (as covered above).

Through these songs, one gains a sense that Japanese immigrants never felt that they belonged; Japanese were no longer connected with the homeland but neither were they fully integrated into Hawaiian culture. Odo argues that the following lyric captures this sense of displacement exceptionally well (xvii and included elsewhere in the text):

Go on to America

Return to Japan?

This is my dilemma

Here in Hawai’i

The struggle to identify one’s place in the new immigrant context may have been even greater for women. The holehole bushi in fact collectively present not only the immigrant experience, but women’s perspective in particular, as many of the songs were sung by women, whether in the field or by geisha in the teahouses, or deal with issues of special relevance to women’s lives, as highlighted in the following song (50 and included elsewhere in the text):

A sudden downpour

Drenches the laundry

Baby on my back sobs –

And the rice just burned

The songs present Japanese immigrant women removed from then emerging national expectations of appropriate female behavior back in Japan (captured in the discourse ryōsai kenbo or “good wife and wise mother”). According to Odo, “this was a moment in history when immigrant women could pay no heed to official Japanese “lessons” of obedience, humility, and chastity. Japanese immigrant women, thousands of miles from the homeland and living in different countries, were at a relatively safe distance from the growing power of national patriarchy in Japan” (xxiii). And contrary to stereotypical imagery, many of these songs “reveal issei women who were themselves raw and rough” (13). It is because of this disagreement between desired image and reality that Odo argues “[t]hese images of the issei women will not be universally welcomed by Japanese Americans (or their friends) in light of the general narrative or stereotype of the issei woman as long-suffering upholder of grand Japanese values” (13). Odo thus further argues for the importance of holehole bushi for accurately representing all aspects of Japanese immigrant life rather than a sanitized version.

Odo, through including so many evocative lyrics, ultimately makes a strong case for the importance of folksong in expressing immigrant identities. The same or similar lyrics, however, are included in multiple locations, even an Appendix, which on the one hand reveals the diverse experiences and multiple themes that a single song simultaneously may speak to, but also leads to a sense of repetition. Sometimes the text is similarly hard to follow as Odo moves circularly around points, continually returning to the arduousness of this life for the issei. Odo regularly draws attention to other folksong traditions, especially Anglo-American to contextualize the unique character of holeholebushi, but in some cases the comparisons seem too far removed from the point at hand and not as thoroughly drawn out as could be (see for example the discussion on 76). And though Odo explains that he purposefully avoids “overt reference to theoretical issues,” while noting a few broader implications in the Conclusion, the chapters may have been stronger if he had mused a bit more throughout, bringing larger academic issues to play.

The strength of the book clearly resides in the numerous lyrics, but the lack of any transcriptions of melodies leaves an important musical element out of the picture. The lyrics are important, but these are songs and not just poetry, and therefore the melodies to which they are sung seem deserving of some attention. Odo notes, for example, that Urata compiled a representative holehole bushi melody, but this too is not included and it is rather confusing as to just what was involved in this process, despite the fact that “[t]oday Urata’s standardized holehole bushi has become the basic version popularly available” (147). Odo introduces a website in the opening that does feature several performances (xv; http://clear.uhwo.hawaii.edu/CanefieldSongs), but what are the musical characteristics central to this folksong form?  How much variance is possible? And does the musical vehicle affect the inherent meaning of the text? Perhaps these are questions that another researcher can explore now that Odo has laid the foundation. Despite these shortcomings, Odo successfully argues the importance of holehole bushi and indeed hopes to inspire further such studies on folksongs as depositories of immigrant identity (xxviii).

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you Crossing Borders, a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions and feedback from scholars working on music from all disciplines.

Michael Austin is Assistant Professor of Media, Journalism, and Film and Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program in the School of Communications at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is affiliated with the MFA Film program and Ph.D. program in Communication, Culture, and Media Studies, and he teaches courses in audio engineering, music production, and sound design for film and TV. Michael also serves as co-chair of the Sound Studies Interest Group for the Society for Ethnomusicology and he is currently working on two book projects: Music Video Games: Maestros, Musicians, and Multiplayers (Bloomsbury Academic Press) and Audiovisual Alterity: Representing Others in Music Videos (Oxford University Press).

*     *    *

In 1985, the British rock band Dire Straits released their album “Brothers in Arms;” the video for one of the most well-known songs on this album was “Money for Nothing” – a blue-collar anthem that decries the relatively easy life of a rock star who makes money simply by “bangin’ on the bongo like a chimpanzee,” getting his “money for nothin’” and his “chicks for free.” The video for this song, directed by Steve Barron, was among the first to use computer generated animation (or CGI), and featured two (literally) square working stiffs who installed microwave ovens and moved refrigerators and color TVs. It won “Video of the Year” at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards for its innovation and creativity. Also in 1985 and 1986, Nintendo released its legendarily successful Entertainment System console in North America and Europe (respectively), proving that the Western world wanted its video games just as much as it wanted its MTV. The animation in MONEY FOR NOTHING bore a striking resemblance to video game graphics; however, it would take several more years for video games to reach the same level of graphic fidelity and to support three-dimensional representation). Nonetheless, this video has inspired many more video directors to include CGI into their work over the past 30 years, provoking them to use this technology to create the surreal (and often absurd) aesthetics viewers have grown to expect.

Obviously, participation is a large (and growing) part of video games. Not only do pre-packaged characters run on a pre-packaged stage created by the game designers, players can now choose the race or species, sex, or nationality of their avatar, dress them, and engage with other players in worlds that were also built by the players themselves. It seems as if participation and interactivity is becoming a larger part of music videos as well. Unsatisfied with simply playing the games, listening to the music, and/or watching the music videos created originally by the industry professionals, many music and video game fans immerse themselves within the “participatory culture” surrounding their favorite bands, performers, games and/or the characters within these games. In doing so, they create their own media artifacts as a means of creative self-expression and representation, resistance, or simply to express their love for a certain song or video game. This is often accomplished by re-appropriating clips from various media sources into a new music video and in doing so they construct new cultural meanings.

Some view the creation of these music videos as a “production-adjacent” activity – a type of fan labor that lies somewhere in the grey area between consumption of a mass-produced media product and the production of an entirely new media (art) object.[1] As new meanings are constructed using disparate media elements, the borders between each medium begin to blur.

Machinima, a portmanteau of “machine cinema,” is a filmmaking practice that utilizes the assets of videogame engines or other virtual worlds as source material. By controlling videogame avatars as digital puppets, using pre-existing videogame levels as scenery, compiling recorded clips of gameplay, and using voice-overs, non-linear editing, and other advanced techniques such as compositing and key-framing, “machinimists” (also called “machinimators”) are able to create films quickly, cheaply, and without many of the dangers or other physical limitations associated with filmmaking in real life. Machinima grew out of the practice of creating play-though demo videos of computer games such as DOOM (id Software, 1993) and Quake (id Software, 1996) in the mid-1990s. These games were popular environments in which to create machinima because they were some of the first games to allow players to edit their own maps, avatars, weapons, etc. (however, they were saved and shared as demo files that required the original game to view them). Machinima became considerably more popular in January of 2000 when Tritin Films released Quad God, a machinimatic film created in the game Quake III: Arena (Activision, 1999) and was distributed as a standard video file on websites such as machinima.com or though peer-to-peer file sharing services. Since the advent of YouTube and other similar online video-sharing services, the creation of machinima has grown in popularity as a participatory expression within fan cultures. For example, “Red vs. Blue,” a machinamatic comedy web series/military science-fiction parody created with the very popular game, Halo: Combat Evolved (Microsoft, 2001), reached an audience of over one million thanks, in part, to its free distribution online and is currently in its 13^th season.  

In recent years, many music videos have been based on video game themes and clichés, such as Leeni’s UNDERWORLD, BOY SOPRANO by Xiu Xiu, and Beck’s BAD CARTRIDGE, but music videos are also being made with video games. Machinimatic music videos are a sub-genre of machinima wherein practitioners create new music videos for commercial recordings or re-create pre-existing live-action music videos within the virtual world of a videogame. Creators of machinimatic music videos no longer needed to write a film, nor hire or serve as voice actors, but instead only “direct” a music video using the characters of the video game. Machinimists can share their love for both a particular videogame and recording artist by creating these videos, bridging the gaps between two fan cultures on YouTube or other video sharing websites. It also capitalizes on the performative nature of video games. Henry Lowood writes:

Spectatorship and the desire to share skills were the cornerstones of the creation of a player community eager to create and distribute gameplay movies. The result was nothing less than a metamorphosis of the player in to a performer…[As a result] game-based moviemaking has woven technology, virtual communities, play, and public performance together.[2]

As artifacts that straddle the interstitial space between several media, machinimatic music videos include intertextual references from the video game used to create them, an original music video they are meant to emulate, or even other music videos, internet memes, or other bits of popular culture. For example, Trace Osterham’s machinimatic music video for “Farrah Fawcett Hair” by indie pop duo Capital Cities was created in the virtual world of Second Life and features several references to the original music video and to another video in Capital Cities’ oeuvre, KANGAROO COURT. In Osterham’s video, the TV screens and characters dancing in the background from the original video and the animal faces on the characters from KANGAROO COURT appear on the small television screen in the machinimatic video.

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, are adamant in their assertion that this 3D online virtual environment is not a game. Spokesperson Catherine Smith asserts, “There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective. It’s an entirely open-ended experience.”[3] As such, Second Life easily lends itself to the creation of music videos because the video’s creator is less bound by a game’s formal elements, such as rules, game mechanics, objectives, the presence of enemies that might interrupt (or star in) a music video, etc.

Games in the life simulation video game series The Sims are similar to Second Life in that they are also a sandbox game (that is, a game wherein the player has the ability to alter the games’ environment substantially), but since they are actual games, a machinimist is more constrained by the rules of the game. For instance, there are seven life stages in The Sims 2. It can take up to 15 days for a character to grow from a baby to a teenager, but they can grow into a young adult early if the player decides to send the character to University. By completing certain in-game activities (such as completing chores or interacting socially with other characters), a player earns aspiration rewards, skill points, and other measures of success. The player must also attend to the needs of their avatar, such as the need to be fed, use the restroom, have fun, rest, etc. Keeping this in mind, consider a television program called “Video Mods” that aired on MTV2 from September 2004 to July of 2005  (created by Tony Shiff of Big Bear Entertainment) that presented professional machinimatic music videos produced by Shiff and his team.  An exceptional example is a near-scene-by-scene recreation of the official video of “Stacy’s Mom” by “Fountains of Wayne” created with “The Sims 2.“

Granted, Shiff and his crew were professionals with professional skills and software at their disposal. In order to create the characters needed for this video, they would have still have needed to raise them – that is, tend to the needs of “Stacy’s mom” for about 29 days until she becomes an adult. They would also need a character to get a job and earn enough money to be able to create a house with a swimming pool like the one in the original video, buy (or create) the requisite clothing, have the video’s characters interact socially, etc.  Other machinimatic videos that are especially inter-textual, weaving together narratives from the original videos, the video games in which they are created, and the fan culture formed in the intersection between the two.

Although the materials that comprise these videos and games is an interesting starting point for investigating these media, we should heed Marshal McLuhan’s warning that “the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”[4] Rather than simply focusing attention on the constituent elements themselves, I hope to concentrate future research in this area on an analysis of the juncture of materiality and textuality, i.e. what values lie between or are shared among video games and music videos, and what drives a fan culture to devote so much time and effort in order to participate. Again writing about the performative aspects of machinima, Henry Lowood argues that, “The importance of machinima for game studies is that it exemplifies the three-fold, interlocking nature of high-performance play: as performance of technical exploits, as performance of game skills, and as public performance for an audience.”[5]“High-performance play” is an important part of music videos, too – music videos showcase the technical exploits of a pop star though outrageous, over the top, or even sublime story lines, settings, costumes, dancing, etc., to showcase the singer’s skill as both a recorded performance and marketable, commercial secondary product associated with a recorded music single, album, or tour. I suspect that as both video games and music videos become more interactive, participatory, and Do-It-Yourself, the boundaries separating the two media will blur even further.

James Arkatov was born in 1920 in Odessa, Russia and raised in San Francisco, where his father, Alexander Arkatov, owned a photography salon.  In 1938, he was invited by Fritz Feiner to join the Pittsburgh Symphony.  Later, he joined the San Francisco Symphony with Pierre Monteux, and went on to be principal cellist of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra under Fabien Sevitzky.  Arkatov returned to California in 1946 as a studio musician and was later appointed principal cellist of the NBC Symphony Orchestra.  In 1956, he married Salome Ramras Arkatov. 

Photo: Pablo Casals with James Arkatov, 1956

In 1968, he founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) and was its first principal cellist.  According to LACO: "The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1968 as an artistic outlet for the recording industry’s most gifted musicians. The Orchestra’s artistic founder, cellist James Arkatov, envisioned an ensemble that would allow these conservatory-trained players to balance studio work and teaching with pure artistic collaboration at the highest level."

Arkatov began photographing musicians when he was with the Pittsburgh Symphony.  In 1990, he published his first book, Masters of Music: Great Artists at Work.  In 1998, he published his second book, Artists: The Creative Personality.

In May 2015, the Arkatovs donated James' photographs of world music performers to the Ethnomusicology Archive.  We are currently in the process of scanning them and hope to make them available for viewing as part of the UCLA Library's Digital Collections during this coming academic year.  But I wanted to give everyone a sneak peek of some of the wonderful images included in this collection.

Queen Ida

Ravi Shankar

Ustad Shujaat Khan

A.J. Racy

Thai Festival

Child playing Korean drums

Harmonica Fats at L.A. Festival

And because Arkatov is a musician, I had to include some of his work.

In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning by Frank Sinatra (Arkatov on cello) ℗ 1998 Capitol Records, LLC.

Photos © Regents of the University of California, All Right Reserved. (For permission to use any Arkatov world music images, contact the Archivists.)

This post highlights recordings produced by the FolkwaysAlive! project “Songs for Sustainable Development and Peace.” FolkwaysAlive! is a partnership between Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the University of Alberta that has become a platform for ethnomusicologists and recording artists to working in a range of genres, including hiphop, gospel, R&B, reggae, and traditional musics. By presenting these recordings, I will assist the project’s second goal of raising global awareness concerning critical global issues such as public health and education by “including a wide network of participants.” 

In this piece, I foreground the musics and videos produced through this process and highlight the global issues that operate within each song. If a reader would like more information and songs, FolkwaysAlive’s website and wiki provide comprehensive background information about each song and artist as well as ways to get involved. Each of the featured songs are at different levels of completion. Some of the songs are complete with a video and professionally done recording, while others have finished the recording but would like to produce a companion video. Finally, some songs remain in the demo phase looking for funding to produce a professional recording. To begin, here a completed project with the song recorded and video produced.

"Sanitation and Safe Water in Liberia"

Featuring Shadow, J-Glo, 5YA, Jacob V, and Chiller Coolnanee and sponsored by the Rotary Club of Calgary.

This recording contains electronic drums with synthesizers and clave keyboard parts that provide background tones along with lead melodic lines. The video highlights important words from the lyrics including most of the chorus. “Sanitation is what you need. So keep your area and city clean. I will sweep the dirt away. Cleanliness is next to godliness.” The Christain maxim at the end of the chorus stands out when linked with the scientific information provided in each verse. In Shadow’s rapped verse, he asks for latrine develoment, health education in schools and homes, and enviormental education that explains how individual actions effect the enviorment. Further, J-Glo explains “because of lack of santiation, people contract diseases that are so deadly” and to “wash your hands before you eat.” Tought this information may seem basic, serious health issues will continue to rise unless the entire population is practicing these protective measures Finally, Jacob V poignantly questions the government and international aid, “why don’t we talk prevention before we talk medication?” The song’s goal, as with the project at large, is to provide this information to places that might not receive it through formal means, rather the song can educate through the radio, internet, and compact discs.

"Reasons"

Funded by Sponsored by the University of Alberta Department of Music's President's Fund, along with a pro bono production remix from producer Ari Mastoras at Rhodes Recordings.

This Liberian popular music begins with a smooth R&B feel overlayed with rap vocals that shift a listener’s attention towards the lyrical content. One may even overlook the Für Elise quote at the end of each chorus when it is juxtaposed with the forthright lyrics asking, “why things are changing. Let’s come together and find a reason.” The repetitive structure helps listeners discern the lyrical content after even one listening.

“Ebola is Real”

Here Samuel ‘Shadow’ Morgan's track serves a similar lyrical function as the previous two recordings, though within a more danceable setting. According to its number of youtube hits—well over 200,000 at the time of this posting—“Ebola is Real” is one of Shadow’s more popular tracks. It has also received attention from Vice News, the New Yorker, Al Jazeera, NPR, and many more. The information provided in “Ebola is Real” remains scant with the chorus of “Don't touch your friend! No touching. No eating something. It's dangerous!” But the club-like beats and danceable music allowed the song to reach a larger audience than the previous tracks. Unfortunately, no solutions to the issue are provided only advice on how to avoid the disease and criticism of the government’s handling of the issue. The official video and the video’s plagiarists provide and example of the importance of actual videos to be made for each song. The official video provides no actual video content rather are photo slide shows. Video content could be much more effective in showing an “Ebola greeting” and the sanitation issues that contribute to the disease’s transmission in Liberia.

There are still many projects in production that continue to seek financial backing.

"Religion and people"

Featuring Shadow, KB. & Quincy B.

This track supports a togetherness between all of the worlds religions spesifically naming Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Pagean, Traditionalist, and Judahism. The artists want each religion to support and love one another.

To hear more songs and find ways to get involved or donate to spesfic projects please visit http://fwa.wikia.com/wiki/Songs_for_sustainable_development_and_peace or see the similar project, Music for Cultural Continuity and Civil Society, which does similar things as but works with other countries like Guinea, Ghana, and Egypt.

Michael Frishkopf, an ethnomusicologist from the University of Alberta, (please read a recent interview with him here ), must be acknowledged for his intergral role in FolkwaysAlive! and bringing attention to global issues through music with artists from around the world. There are links in the Wiki and Website above on ways to contact him and FolkwaysAlive! to become involved and support the musics and projects helping to address global issues.

Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music Making. Edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher. (Soas Musicology Series) Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. [268 p., ISBN 9781409444220, Hardcover $109.95].

Reviewed by Jamil Jorge / University of Illinois

The imported [brass] instruments...were more than just material objects: people across the globe adapted them to their own aesthetics, their own place and their own social and cultural realities. Brass band traditions were local re-workings of a nineteenth-century European musi-cultural product (199).

Written by Helena Simonett, these words embody the overarching themes of Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies, and Local Music Making. This collection of case studies, edited by Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher, demonstrates the plasticity of the British brass band tradition around the world. Each of the nine chapters describes different band traditions that recognizably re-work colonial and local aesthetics to become unique band traditions from the military to local amateur music makers.

Trevor Herbert, known for his research in European brass and military music, starts the book with an assertion that bands are localized and should be studied within their own social context. He argues that a historical study of bands is unfeasible because bands are established “as a consequence of [their] relative modernity” (35), indicating that bands are ensembles created in their present social and cultural context. Attempting to understand the historical development of bands runs the risk of resulting in too many assumptions that disregard a band’s present social and cultural context. Herbert’s chapter focuses primarily on British brass and military bands as they developed in what he calls their “performance domain” (33), during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The performance domain refers to the “trends” of the social and cultural period. This idea sets up the rest of the book as each chapter places focus on the performance domains of their present social and cultural contexts.

Although Herbert ventures away from extensive historical detail, the book’s introduction by Katherine Brucher and Suzel Ana Reily provides more extensive historical information for the reader who would appreciate a background on brass and military bands’ development in Britain and their dissemination through colonialism and militarism. They also contribute a backdrop for ideas of ritual, social function, amateur music making, and community establishment in space and place, all of which can be considered a part of Herbert’s performance domain.

The case studies that follow represent a larger scope than is implied by the book’s title; each chapter is about bands, but not exclusively bands with strict brass instrumentation. Some chapters center on bands that include reed instruments alongside brass instruments, and another depicts a flute band from Northern Ireland. The word “band” is most important. Herbert examined the word in the opening chapter, defining “band” as essentially referring to a united group of people (without regard to specific instrumentation) that forms purposefully within a specific community. Instrumental versatility based on the British brass band tradition, spread through colonialism and militarism, merits the compilation of many different band studies that are found within Brass Bands of the World.

Chapter 2, “Western Challenge, Japanese Musical Response: Military Bands in Modern Japan” by Sarah McClimon and Chapter 3, “Battlefields and the Field of Music: South Korean Military Band traditions and the Korean War,” by Heejin Kim are perhaps the most historically based chapters. McClimon fleshes out five historical periods (the earliest being the Edo period beginning in 1850 and ending Showa Period in 1945) and their interactions with foreign musical influences caused by westernization and militarization. Fifes, drums, and bugles outline the earlier periods, as well as the adaptations of western musical aesthetics and notations and the use of foreign musical directors. The chapter also explores symbolic prestige and power that having a successful military brass band could bring to Japan and the steps taken to continue the band tradition under local Japanese leadership instead, thus creating a Japanese style of the western art form with the purpose of instilling Japanese patriotism.

Moving north, Kim calls attention to South Korean military bands by exploring the band’s uses and influences in and outside of the military. Besides the ceremonial functions and moral boosters the marches served in the military, the bands were also a builder of nationalism, especially before and after Japanese occupation. During occupation, there was a sharp decline in North Korean military bands, but through their reemergence post-occupation found military band veterans become music teachers in South Korea’s educational systems, thus imprinting the youth with those military values and aesthetics. Post occupation, the United States military presence in South Korea brought American popular music into the South Korean public sphere; South Korean military bands were playing marches, classical music, and popular music from the U.S. for the public in order to boost morale, nationalism, and support for the U.S. alliance. Consequently, local music reflected this militarization by blending western and local aesthetics.

Like Herbert, Suzel Ana Reily focuses on the present rather than the historical past in chapter four, “From Processions to Encontros: The Performance Niches of the Community Bands of Minas Gerais, Brazil.” Reily, some of whose previous works focus on various band traditions in Brazil, recognizes the versatility of brass bands and how that versatility helped bands find their “niches” in Minas Gerais and around the world. Her chapter focuses on bands de música, wind and brass bands, which are often used for civic and religious occasions, and other public events. In a changing world of new technologies and electronic amplification, the bands de músicas have to change as well to sustain their existence. One particular result is the creation of the encontros de bandas, or “band meetings,” where bands from different regional areas will converge in a particular town to perform for one another. This has ensured sustenance for smaller community bands in towns throughout Minas Gerais.

In chapter five, “Representational Power of the New Orleans Brass Band,” Matt Sakakeeny, examines black representation by distinguishing between older, traditional performance aesthetics and modern, hip-hop-oriented approaches of second line bands. He argues that the black identity of a marginalized people can be expressed through public artistic mediums such as the brass band while remaining cautious that such representation is not representative of an entire ethnic population, but rather certain communities within such a population. Sakakeeny analyzes musical styles, repertoire, clothing and other performance aesthetics as they differ between both traditionalist (Black Men of Labor social club) and modern (Dirty Dozen Brass Band) performers. Analyzing the choices made in each group’s performance domains helps to uncover ideologies of respectable representation of black identity.

Sylvia Bruinders returns to a more militaristic style band while maintaining the theme of racial representation in chapter six, “Soldiers of God: The Spectacular Musical Ministry of the Christmas Bands in the Western Cape, South Africa.” Here, the primarily black Christmas bands have no strict instrumentation (they include brass, wind, and string instruments), but maintain military performance aesthetics (such as marching and uniforms) through band competitions. In competition, the bands create a spectacle of power, discipline, and respectability for racially oppressed South Africans. Bruinders also finds that Christmas bands maintain a neighborly sense of community and nostalgia for the past by traveling during the months after Christmas and performing at the members’ homes, many of which were relocated during apartheid.

In “Composing Identity and Transposing Values in Portuguese Amateur Wind Bands,” Katherine Brucher continues to observe the role of amateur bands in smaller community settings. She writes about the community music school created by the Sociedade Filarmónica de Covões, including its methods of musical training as well as how it operates as a social space for its members. The music-making itself (in lessons, rehearsals and performance) becomes a space of social interaction that builds camaraderie among the members, teaches morals, and establishes loyalty to the band’s particular identity, essentially creating a community within the larger community. Such values are emblematic of the military brass bands that have so far influenced studies in this book.

Chapter eight continues to rationalize community though communitas, which refers to social equality with a strong sense of camaraderie. “Playing Away: Liminality, Flow and Communitas in an Ulster Flute Band’s Visit to a Scottish Orange Parade,” by Gordon Ramsey follows the Sir George White Memorial Flute Band (a fife and drum corps) from Northern Ireland on their annual trip to Scotland to perform in the Orange Parade. While the band works to maintain a high level of respectability in their hometown, the annual trip puts the band’s members in a liminal space that allows violations of normally acceptable behavior and the playing of rowdy “party” tunes. In such a space, ritualistic emotional and transformative experiences create long-lasting memories to establish strong camaraderie among band members.

Up to this point, this book has explored the many ways the band has taken throughout the world. Perhaps the most versatile of all the bands is saved for the last chapter, “From Village to World Stage: The Malleability of a Sinaloan Popular Brass Bands,” by Helena Simonett. Simonett explores the banda tradition in Sinaloa, Mexico whose instrumentation and repertoire is influenced by a multitude of sources. Repertoire comes from traditional indigenous music, but the bands also tackle popular genres of music from around the world. Although amplification aided in the decline of bandas, the brass bands adapted and created technobandas that used electronic instrumentation and drum sets. Both traditional and modern forms of the bandas find varying degrees of success depending on their performance domains.

These chapters are not a historically linear progression, but rather case studies organized by those which remained the most like brass bands in the British tradition through bands that have successfully reconstructed themselves to the performance domains of their communities. Like the band’s versatility, Brass Bands of the World can be utilized to explore different research methodologies. The first few chapters focused on military ensembles primarily uses historical materials and interviews with veterans. Studies like Ramsey’s exercised full participation in the ensemble. Ethnomusicologists could find this book useful to conceptualize various methods of ethnomusicological research ranging on both ends of a historical-participation spectrum.

Brass Bands of the World is an admirable compilation of similar, yet extraordinarily different, band traditions from around the world that should be studied as musical communities in and of themselves. Themes range from nationalism, community engagement, racial and class identity, adaptability and versatility of brass bands. Yet, the most important theme is the concept of the “band,” a group of people that form purposefully within a community within a specific and defining performance domain.

Cornwall, at the far south west of the United Kingdom, is simultaneously a county of England, a royal Duchy, and Celtic nation, and as such its culture and heritage bears witness to a long history of conflicting social, economic and cultural pressures. Cornwall’s musical traditions have often been overshadowed by other aspects of its heritage as well as by the outputs of its Celtic cousins; however, both Cornwall’s contemporary and historical musical heritage is rich and varied, with a range of genres and styles.

Above: Map showing Cornwall, UK courtesy of Nilfanion.

Cornish carols are one such genre; a social and musical tradition performed at Christmas, as opposed to May or Easter carolling traditions. The local representation of a non-conformist religious choral practice that was widespread across the United Kingdom, the corpus known today as Cornish carols is largely the result of an upsurge in carol composition following the visits of John Wesley (1703-1791) and the subsequent growth of the Methodism. Surviving caroling traditions in Cornwall, such as those in Padstow, reflect elements of practices described in early nineteenth century accounts of caroling practices in Cornwall. These accounts describe groups of musicians touring their particular town, village or parish throughout the night singing carols to the local residents at their houses (Gilbert 1822; Sandys 1833). The musicians were also usually rewarded with some money or food and drink.

Above: Carolers outside the Golden Lion pub in Padstow, December 2010 (photo: Elizabeth Neale).

Above: The Padstow carolers performing "Zadoc" (Recorded by Elizabeth Neale, 2011).

Sounding Out: The Cornish Association

Cornish carols were spread across the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the migration of Cornish miners to the British colonies and other territories (Payton 2005). Their presence in South Australia during the 1890s is of note since the carols were explicitly tied to perhaps the most fervent contemporary expressions of Cornish identity. The discovery of copper at Kapunda, Gawler and the northern Yorke Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in thousands of Cornish miners voluntarily traveling to the colony with the aid of government-assisted passages. In particular, the towns of Moonta, Wallaroo and Kadina (the Copper Triangle) became known as Australia’s “Little Cornwall,” and continue to celebrate Cornish heritage. The prominent historian of the Cornish in Australia, Professor Philip Payton, considers that the nineteenth-century Cornish communities in the Copper Triangle not only unconsciously retained Cornish culture in their continuation of existing cultural habits, but also that “individuals and organizations deliberately replicated former behaviour or adopted ‘Cornish’ rhetoric as a means of asserting community or institutional identity in their new land” (Payton 2007:57).

Adelaide was evidently also a strong locus of Cornish identity, since it was there that the Cornish Association of South Australia (CASA) was formed in 1890. The project of a group of influential Cornishmen, the CASA’s aims were not only to facilitate social interaction and to aid new migrants in South Australia, but also to promote Cornish culture and customs. Complex narratives of race and identity immediately emerged within the CASA’s rhetoric; during the inaugural banquet, John Langdon Bonython (vice-president of the CASA) made a speech in which he overtly positioned the Cornish as the descendants of the pre-Roman inhabitants of the United Kingdom, stating that it was “the stock of these hardy Celts which were now building up this Greater Britain of the South” (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5). However, he was also at pains to maintain their British credentials and unswerving allegiance to the empire:

Their monuments were in every continent, and no people had done more to build up the British Empire than the people of Cornwall. (Loud cheers) They talked about hands across the sea uniting the various portions of the British Empire, and making federation possible, but whose hands were they but the hands of Cornishmen, who in their pride of race never forgot that they were citizens of the British Empire. (The Advertiser 22/2/1890:5).

The foregrounding of race in these dialogues reflects the contemporary social and scientific preoccupation with classification. The term race was often interchangeable with “species,” and in the context of human civilizations, connoted language and culture alongside physical and mental characteristics. As such, positioning the Cornish as a Celtic race and therefore separate from the Anglo-Saxon English was a powerful assertion of distinct biological and cultural identity.

These dialogues of race and identity were reiterated during the CASA’s promotion of Cornish carols. The Cornish Musical Society (CMS) was formed later in the same year with the express purpose of practicing specifically Cornish carols to be sung at Christmas under the auspices of the CASA. The group gave their first concert in 1890, using as their source material a collection that was published by musician, collector and teacher Robert Hainsworth Heath in Cornwall in September 1889.

Above: Frontispiece of Robert Hainsworth Heath’s Cornish Carols, Part 1, published in 1889 (photo: Elizabeth Neale, author’s copy).

The first of two collections of Cornish carols, Heath included pieces that he had collected from other local composers, as shown on the front cover, and others that he had composed himself. Well-publicized both before and after, the initial concert was a success and it was repeated and expanded the following year. At this gathering, Bonython stated that:

It was a long retrospect to look through nineteen centuries back to the time when the first Christmas carol was heard on the plains of Bethlehem. But Cornish people should never forget that a hundred years had not elapsed before carols celebrating the Nativity were being sung in Cornwall and that they had been sung there forever since. Passed down from generation to generation, the strains of these carols linked the present with the past and united the Cornish of today with the Cornish of the first century. It was no wonder that the people of Cornwall were carol singers, and that wherever they might be found they still sang at Christmastide the sweet songs of the old home. (The Advertiser 28/12/1891:6)

In spite of the rhetoric conveyed by admirers of the carol tradition, a further examination of the genre, music and texts utilized by the Cornish Musical Society further complicates the conception of Cornish identity promoted by the Cornish Association in two primary ways that highlight the musical collision between a Cornish and British imperial identity. First, while the collection includes a number of texts not yet found in extant collections of hymns and carols, and are therefore likely to have been composed by Cornish musicians, it concurrently, also includes texts such as “Joy To The World,” and “While Shepherds” from English and Scottish hymn writers such as Isaac Watts, John Cawood and James Montgomery. These are not of Cornish origin and would have been well known across the United Kingdom. Second, the style of the musical materials cannot be said to be unique to Cornwall. Cornish carols generally are written for four parts (sometimes sharing three parts between SATB) and are usually unaccompanied, although historical accounts often describe he presence of instrumentalists within caroling parties (Shaw 1967:102). While the carols may employ a variety of texts, they characteristically begin in unison, and as the stanza progresses, develop a fugal section before returning to complete the stanza in unison. As such they are rather analogous within the genre of Protestant hymn fuging tunes, popular in both England and America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Temperley 1981). There is therefore a clear disjuncture between the provenance of the musical materials utilized to support Cornish identity, and the cultural and biological heritage claimed by the CASA.

Reconstructing Music, Contesting Identity

The vision of Cornish identity disseminated by the CASA thus included intertwining and colliding notions of Celtic, English, British and imperial identity; however, the musical materials that were used to support an ancient Cornish heritage were not congruent with the history claimed by the CASA. This is not to suggest that the genre of Cornish carols is academically illegitimate, or that the CASA were deliberately misleading; rather, the intention is to recognise the constituent materials of the tradition in conjunction with the rhetoric put forward by the CASA in order to gain a deeper insight into the narratives at play. Indeed, the CASA’s initial promotion of Cornish carols appears to have bolstered the tradition significantly, considering the genre’s subsequent upsurge in performance and the further publication of other collections of Cornish carols within South Australia.  The performance of Cornish carols became an established part of the CASA’s activities in the following decades. The tradition not only musically evoked a distinct historic identity and culture, but also was active in the present, socially bonding Cornish communities in the South Australia and conceptually bonding the Cornish across the diaspora.

The CASA’s efforts reflect the contemporary European political, sociological and compositional trends towards the use of folk or traditional culture in the project of nationalism and the process of nation-building (White and Murphy 2001; Bohlman and Radano 2000). In tandem, as scholars have increasingly critiqued, debated and deconstructed the concepts of race, the nation (Anderson 1983) and the socio-cultural apparatus of nationalism (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), the door has opened for examining the construction and performance of identity within regions, among deterritorialised peoples and within other non-nation states. Further development of these debates among diaporic communities would broaden the academic perspective of migrant cultures, especially when their historical context is taken into account. As such, the Cornish caroling tradition, and the context and dialogues surrounding it, is significant not only for our understanding of historical Cornish diasporic identity in Australia, but also in ethnomusicological approaches to the music cultures and projects of historic migrant minorities.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Bohlman, Philip V., and Ronald M. Radano, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial

Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gilbert, Davies. 1822. Some ancient Christmas Carols, with the tunes to which they

were formerly sung in the West of England. London: John Nicholls and Son.

Heath, Robert Hainsworth. 1899. Cornish Carols, Parts 1 & 2. Leipzig: Robert

Hainsworth Heath.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Payton, Philip. 2007. Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

––––––. 2005. The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’.

Fowey: Cornish Editions Limited.

Sandys, William. 1833. Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern. London: Richard

Beckly.

Shaw, Thomas. 1967. A History of Cornish Methodism. Truro: D. Bradford Barton

Ltd.

Temperley, Nicholas. “The Origins of the Fuging Tune” In Royal Musical Association

Research Chronicle 17:1-32.

The Advertiser (South Australia: 1889-1931). "Cornish Association, Inaugural

Banquet – An Enthusiastic Gathering" (writer unknown). 22/2/1890:5.

––––––. "Cornish Musical Society: Christmas Carols" (writer unknown), 28/12/1891:6

White, Harry, and Michael Murphy. 2001. Musical Constructions of Nationalism:

Essays on the History and Ideology of European Music Culture 1800-1945.

Cork: Cork University Press.

Bio

Elizabeth is a second year PhD candidate co-supervised at Cardiff University and the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter. She received her BA in music and English literature and MA in ethnomusicology from Cardiff University, and her project is supported through the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Jazz has developed virtually since its inception through a close but often uneasy relationship between recorded media and live performance. Think of the “classic” recordings that are celebrated as paragons of jazz artistry, but also of the common admonishment that any true experience of jazz is a live one, in which musicians and audience members commune with one another in a unique, never-to-be-repeated musical and social event. If recent trends are any indication, however, many jazz musicians do not view these modes of performance as irreconcilable. Two albums released this year—Sylva by Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest (Impulse! 2015) and Covered by the Robert Glasper Trio (Blue Note 2015)—are exemplars of the ingenuity with which jazz musicians are testing the boundaries between recorded and live music.

Snarky Puppy, led by bassist and composer Michael League, originated in Denton, TX, comprising students of the renowned jazz program at the University of North Texas and musicians from the nearby Dallas scene. Now based in Brooklyn, they tour the world extensively, introducing audiences to their exciting genre-b(l)ending style. They have also built a following through their unique recordings. Since 2010’s Tell Your Friends, they have collaborated with director Andy LaViolette to create a film of each recording sessions that is released along with the audio album. They also invite an audience into the recording session, which sits among the musicians and listens through headphones. In this way, Snarky Puppy cultivates the intimacy and energy of live performance, but also retains the advantages of an outfitted recording studio.

Sylva, the band’s debut for Impulse!, is their most ambitious such project to date. It finds the band in the Netherlands to work with the Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley. In addition to the CD/DVD combo, the audio album is available as a digital download or on vinyl, while the videos are currently available to stream on the band’s Vevo page. The DVD, which will be the basis for this review, includes bonus material, including a short “making of” featurette and a commentary track on the film by League and LaViolette. This extra material is entertaining; the featurette, for instance, shows the band in rehearsals, working through the music, discussing arrangements and production, and joking around. But it is also helpful because it highlights the fundamentally cooperative effort that produced the music. League stresses that he conceived of the collaboration as constituting one combined ensemble rather than two distinct entities, one accompanying the other. Indeed, in the featurette, we see Buckley contributing arrangements of League’s compositions during rehearsals, and in the commentary, League notes that the band does not play live versions of the music without the full orchestra. Note also the subtle but crucial difference between “Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest” and, say, “Snarky Puppy featuring Metropole Orkest.”

The theme of Sylva is the forest. The opener “Sintra” evokes the lushness and mystery of its namesake in Portugal, and the music is enhanced by the beautiful scenery constructed on the soundstage; real olive trees interspersed with metal sculptures of plants and animals create a kind of futuristic woodland, a visual counterpart to the organic–mechanical tension that League plays with in his compositions. “Flight,” referring to a journey from Portugal back to the U.S., features synthesizers, guitars, and flutes flitting over a quirky groove. Tenor saxophonist Chris Bullock takes the first solo of the album, using a digital octave effect that contrasts nicely with the woody warmth of the orchestral instruments. “Atchafalaya” is named for the swampland in Louisiana and pays it homage with the buoyant rhythms of a New Orleans second line. The trombones are featured, and Metropole member Vincent Veneman takes a lively solo. Here, the advantages of the album film are especially appreciated; viewers watch the Snarky Puppy horn section and Veneman’s colleagues in the Metropole responding enthusiastically to his playing, perhaps delighting in the small irony that it is a member of the orchestra and not of Snarky Puppy who is ripping through a great jazz solo.

The album’s high point is “The Curtain.” League reveals in the commentary that this tune was the most challenging for the band, with sections featuring odd meters, multiple key changes, and forms with an odd number of bars, but also the most familiar, recalling the kind of music they used to play together at UNT. The familiarity shows. Jay Jennings' flugelhorn solo is outstanding, his lyrical playing bolstered by the tasteful interactivity of the rhythm section and some beautifully building orchestral background figures. A new groove introduces League’s similarly impressive bass solo (well-deserved accolades for his roles as leader and composer mean he is sometimes overlooked as a stellar bassist) and a funky, virtuosic organ solo by Cory Henry. The musicians look on wistfully during Bill Laurance’s lovely, Chopin-esque piano cadenza, before joining him for a closing waltz.

League describes the inspiration for the last tune, “The Clearing,” as a forest of his childhood where teenagers hung out and sometimes got up to no good; fittingly, the tune captures a sense of melancholic nostalgia but also playful mischievousness. There is more great composing and arranging from League and Buckley, but when the tune settles into a funky groove, Snarky Puppy is really in its wheelhouse. (“Our favorite thing in the world to do is to find a groove and play and not change anything,” League tells us in the commentary.) Strong solos by guitarist Mike Lettieri and trumpeter Mike “Maz” Maher are buttressed by the relentless groove of drummer Robert “Sput” Searight, percussionist Nate Werth, and the Metropole percussionists. Coming at the album’s end, one wishes there had been a few more opportunities to stretch like this one; fortunately, fans can return to their previous work or go and see them in concert.

It must be acknowledged that the seemingly monumental task of audio engineering the project was accomplished masterfully by Eric Hartman, who can be seen setting up microphones and discussing recording techniques with League during the featurette. Hartman passed away unexpectedly earlier this year. The band has been outspoken about the essential role that he has played in their music. He was the chief engineer of all of their albums, the impeccable sound of which reveals the depth of their relationship. The group recently helped organize a benefit concert for Hartman’s young family, featuring many musicians from the Dallas scene.

Robert Glasper’s Covered is a less ambitious project, but it also trades on a creative combination of live and recorded modes. There has been a satisfying symmetry to Glasper’s catalog since his debut for Blue Note in 2005; his 2009 Double Booked—a double album featuring both his acoustic trio and his electric quartet The Experiment—is a fitting pivot point from his first two albums to his groundbreaking Black Radio releases. This sixth album sees him reuniting with his original trio, featuring Vicente Archer on bass and Damion Reid on drums, but the repertoire and approach foreground the style and aesthetic he has cultivated through his more recent work. Covered was recorded in front of a live audience at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. It was released on CD, as a digital download, and on vinyl, and several companion videos have been released, one every two weeks, beginning shortly before the album dropped. Unlike Sylva, the videos do not seem to have been produced as a full-length film; instead, they can be viewed on Glasper’s Vevo page, YouTube, or on Blue Note’s website.

The album is called Covered for a reason. Glasper states in the introductory track (after delivering the line quoted in the title of this piece) that he wanted the trio to interpret “things that are on my iPod,” and the eclectic set features tunes by the likes of Radiohead, Musiq Soulchild, Joni Mitchell, and Kendrick Lamar, as well as a couple of his own compositions, a standard (“Stella by Starlight”), and a spoken-word performance by Harry Belafonte. For fans of contemporary jazz, it is actually a pleasantly predictable collection of material. An affinity for Radiohead and Joni Mitchell among many jazz musicians is well known, as is the relationship between jazz and Philadelphia neo-soul. Glasper himself is probably best known for his new take on the blend of jazz and hip-hop, so the inclusion of the Lamar track as well as a new interpretation of his own “I Don’t Even Care”—which originally featured rapper Jean Grae—are not at all surprising.

This latter tune is a strong start to the album, featuring a compelling solo by Glasper that begins with a leisurely melody and gradually builds into frenetic, two-handed unison lines. Other highlights include “So Beautiful,” which tastefully incorporates a voicemail recording of Musiq Soulchild thanking Glasper for choosing the tune and explaining the message he hoped to convey with it, and Jhené Aiko’s “The Worst,” which works well as a single.[1] Glasper sounds at home on the soul tunes “Good Morning” and “Levels,” and knowing that several of these tunes were written by dear friends—Glasper and Bilal began as classmates at The New School, for instance—makes listening to them especially affecting.

“In Case You Forgot” is a sharp departure from the rest of the album in terms of both length and style. The performance shows off Glasper’s prodigious technique and depthless inspiration, and provides one of the few times that Archer and Reid have opportunities to shine as soloists. It also provides some great moments of humor, as when he interjects snippets of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time”—yet another pop tune familiar to jazz audiences—and Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” This concept works very well live because it usually elicits knowing laughter from the audience; I also saw him employ it in call-and-response with Jason Moran at New York’s Town Hall in January 2014 to similar effect. On this particular album, it might even be read as a sly commentary on the very concept of the jazz cover, which are indeed sometimes played for the amusement of an audience.

There are some unusual choices in the mixing of the album, moments where the interplay of the “live” and the “recorded” sound a bit more awkward than intriguing. “Reckoner” has an oddly placed fade in the middle of Glasper’s solo, fading back in again after a cut to later on in the tune. Other tracks also end with fades, which elide the presence of the studio audience. Many albums recorded live seek to reproduce the experience of the original performance as faithfully as possible for home listeners, helping them imagine that they were there. This is not one of those albums. The value of recording live in this case is largely that it helped to cultivate a particular kind of energy in the music, privileging the spontaneous, unpredictable interactions between musicians and audience members, and reveling in the feeling of risk that comes from the knowledge that the first take is probably the take.

Covered may be most memorable, however, for its powerful commentary on and contributions to the current movement against racial injustice. The album is dedicated “to the victims and the families of those who were wrongfully killed by the police,” and its closing pair of performances insists on the urgency of ending state violence against people and communities of color. “Got Over,” invoking the gospel classic, features Harry Belafonte reciting a brief, poetic version of his life story. “I’m Dying of Thirst” incorporates recordings of children reciting the names of recent victims of police brutality.[2] The juxtaposition of the voice of an aging Civil Rights icon recounting his perseverance and those of children reading the names of young people whose lives were taken is brilliant and deeply moving.

Sylva and Covered are bold experiments in the complex relationship between live and recorded music, and both feature strong compositions, exceptional musicianship, and powerful messages. It is especially exciting that, for both ensembles, the majority of their music has yet to be played.

Notes

This review is a longer, combined version of two reviews that originally appeared on Black Grooves. They can be read here and here.

Bette Yarbrough Cox was a music educator in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, the founder of the BEEM (Black Experience as Expressed through Music) Foundation for the Advancement of Music, a Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Los Angeles, and a longtime friend of former Mayor Tom Bradley.

As she recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 1995, the school district first accepted the teaching of black history in the late 1960s, a seismic shift from her UCLA undergraduate days in 1938.  To enhance her classroom curriculum, Cox looked for books about the black history of music in Southern California.  Her search through the usual channels – library shelves, newspaper clippings, etc. – came up mostly empty.  Cox decided to do something about this lacuna and spent the next 20 years unearthing the untold history behind the music of black Los Angeles.  She ultimately published her research in the book Central Avenue--Its Rise and Fall, 1890-c. 1955: Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles.

As Professor Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje says of the collection:  "Given the fact that African-American musical scholarship has focused primarily on the South, Midwest, and Northeast, the Bette Cox collection is important because it fills a much-needed void. The interviews she conducted with major figures in Los Angeles were used for her book, Central Avenue: Its Rise and Fall (1890-c.1955): Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (1996). Thus, not only was Bette Cox a pioneer in documenting the music of Black Los Angeles, she may have been the first music researcher to bring attention to the importance of the Central Avenue community as a setting for Black musical creativity. Instead of focusing on one genre such as jazz or gospel, her materials cover the entire spectrum of the Black experience in Los Angeles. They provide insights about Los Angeles musical artists representing classical music, religious music, jazz, and more. Since more research is needed on African American regional studies, especially California contributors to the history and development of Black musical traditions, the Cox collection is a major contribution to musical scholarship generally."

The Ethnomusicology Archive holds the Bette Cox collection and is thrilled to announce that all of her recordings relating to African American music in Los Angeles are now available online at California Light and Sound Collection (CLS) on the Internet Archive.  This in thanks to the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP).  CAVPP is a partnership of 85 libraries, archives and museums developing a new research resource: an online database of film, video and audio recordings documenting California history.  The project takes a sampling of media from diverse institutions, digitizes them, and makes them freely accessible.  You can check out all the Archive's recordings currently on CLS by going to the Ethnomusicology Archive channel.

I thought I would highlight several of the interviews that were part of Cox's Black Experience as Expressed through Music (BEEM) series, Unsung Musical Heroes and Heroines in the Black Community of Southern California.

In 1935, Jester Hairston (1901-2000) was commissioned to perform in Warner Brothers' Green Pastures.  Hairston moved to Los Angeles in 1936 where he established a successful career as an actor and choir conductor for film music.  In 1949, Hairston began to arrange spirituals and compose when he worked at the College of the Pacific each summer. Not only did he compose the spiritual "Amen" for the film Lilies of the Field starring Sidney Poitier (he also supplied Poitier's singing voice in the film), he was also well known for his acting career in radio (Amos 'n' Andy) and TV  (Amos 'n' Andy, Amen, and That's My Mama).  In addition to being actively involved in the Los Angeles community as a conductor and arranger of spirituals, he traveled extensively to various parts of the world introducing and conducting spirituals.  In fact, the arrangements of his spirituals continue to be performed nationally and globally.

Buddy Collette was a Grammy-nominated jazz saxophonist, flautist, bandleader and educator who played important roles in Los Angeles jazz as a musician and an advocate for the rights of African American musicians.  He was one of the activists instrumental in the 1953 merging of the then all-African American musicians union Local 767 and the all-white Local 47.  Collette had already crossed the color bar before that in 1949 and 1950 by performing as the only African American musician in the orchestra for Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life radio and television shows. Collette's many non-performing activities included urging the development of the UCLA Oral History project, Central Avenue Sounds, and the co-founding of JazzAmerica, a nonprofit organization working to provide education to gifted high school musicians.  In 1998, Mayor Richard J. Riordan designated Collette "A Living Los Angeles Cultural Treasure."  As an educator, Collette served on the faculties of Loyola Marymount University, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Pianist Florence Cadrez ''Tiny'' Brantley was the secretary of the Musicians Protective Union Local 767 for sixteen years.  Local 767 was the black musicians union and was formed in 1920.  In 1953 local 767 merged with the white musicians union, local 47.  "On April 1, 1953, Local 767 and 47 of the American Federation of Musicians, with the approval and consent of their respective memberships, consolidated their two locals under the name of Local 47 American Federation of Musicians."

Ginger Smock (1920–1995) was a violinist, orchestra leader, and local Los Angeles television personality.  She starred in Dixie Showboat on KTLA and led one of the first all-female jazz combos to perform on television. She played in a variety of Los Angeles clubs in the 1940s and 1950s.  She is perhaps best known from her recordings with the Vivien Garry Quintet. In addition to her work in jazz and rhythm & blues, she performed with the All City Symphony Orchestra of Los Angeles.  She was voted into the Black Hall of Fame at the Black Museum of Southern California in 1995.

Again, you can see all the Cox materials online, here.  

And I wanted to finish with a wonderful home movie of Bette Cox from 1972.

Hearing Landscape Critically:

8-11 September 2013, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

The Hearing Landscape Critically conference hosted by Stellenbosch University in September 2013 was the second in a series of four interdisciplinary meetings and the first sponsored as part of an International Research Network funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The event drew together over 100 delegates from a range of disciplinary backgrounds with a view to interrogating relationships between landscape, music, sound, and place. The conference opened with two contrasting activities responding to the violent “shaping” of the South African land. The first was a Druid walk, conducted by visual artist Willem Boshoff, which led delegates across edgeland sites in the Stellenbosch area (a rubbish dump and an informal settlement). The second was a screening of Aryan Kaganof’s study of free jazz artist Zim Ngqawana’s response to the criminal vandalization of his Johannesburg music institute, The Exhibition of Vandalism (2010), followed by reflections from Justice Edwin Cameron, AIDS activist and sitting judge in the South African Constitutional court. Ngqawana and pianist Kyle Shepherd’s improvisations on damaged instruments turned the desecrated space of the institute into a painful exploration of landscape and violence as well as an anguished indictment of the failures of instruments of state to protect its citizens against such devastation. 

Jonathan Cross’s eloquent analysis of Harrison Birtwistle’s evocations of a Hebridean landscape, in the context of the Highland clearances, introduced one of the recurrent themes of the conference: the forceful removal of people and so-called “cleansing” of land. District 6, a mixed Cape suburb declared a “whites only” area in 1966, supplied the mnemonic and visual impetus for Kyle Shepherd’s improvisation on the lives of those displaced by the apartheid government. The bulldozing of District Six hastened the decline of another extraordinary cultural phenomenon. The Eoan group, founded initially as a “cultural and welfare organisation for the colored community in District Six,” became the first company consistently to stage full-scale opera productions in South Africa. Through Kaganof’s 2013film, An Inconsolable Memory, and a multimedia exhibition curated by Lizabé Lambrechts and Ernst Van Der Waal, conference delegates experienced some of the most powerful operatic moments heard on South African stages and the remarkable narratives of those singers entangled in a struggle for personal dignity, political freedom, and creative expression. Stephanus Muller’s reading of An Inconsolable Memory proposed three properties of scale and excess (quantity, heterogeneity and dislocation) as markers of the ethical imperative of the South African landscape, shaped by the lived experiences of remembrance, curation, and creativity. 

Geographer Jessica Dubow dwelt on the idea of landscape as a sight/site of abstraction and nonrevelation, while Christabel Stirling foregrounded this notion of haunted landscapes in her paper on Orford Ness, a remote shingle bank in Suffolk that was used for much of the previous century by the British military as a site where “the physics of death were tested and perfected.” The mutability and stability of embodied response was strikingly illustrated in Katja Gentric and Marie-Anne Staebler’s study of a multimedia work, Scoring Boschpoort, which considered the human trace of ecological decay at a now defunct granite quarry in Mpumalanga. In their sound installation and discussion, Hannelore Olivier and Laura du Toit illustrated the creative possibilities of “clay-sounds” in the making of a “soundtrack for the broken earth.” Flutist Marietjie Pauw’s lunch-hour recital underscored a body of South African art musics that, more and more, is asserting its distance from an Austro-German nineteenth-century template to reveal a transgressive hybridity bespeaking the aesthetic energy of a nation in search of forging new identities. 

Emily MacGregor gave a striking account of the landscape of the twentieth-century Austro-German symphony through her study of early performances of Pfitzner’s Symphony in C sharp minor, evoking Foucault’s image of the panopticon as a model for understanding the baleful role of the symphony as an agent of social, political, and creative discipline. Winfried Lüdemann’s reading of Gideon Fagan’s responses to South African nature in his Karoo Symphony, composed in the 1970s, argued for an aestheticized rather than an explicitly politicized understanding of music and landscape. Christine Lucia offered a syncretic reflection of the South African landscape through Winston Mankuku’s album Yakhal’ Inkomo (Be"ow of the Bu"), in touch with the country’s political struggles in the 1970s and the increasingly muscular voice of black musical protest. Marie Joritsmaa’s compelling analysis of antifracking songs in the semi-arid Karoo region cast music as a response to an urgent political and environmental crisis. Willemien Froneman, meanwhile, unwound the intertwined relationships between boeremusiek and the Karoo landscape, dwelling on the common motion shared by the borehole drills of nineteenth-century imperial surveyors and the repetitive songs and dance music of a contemporary accordionist and drill operator, Theo Slubbert. 

In a very different context, Jo Hicks was immersed in the idea of musical landscapes as social recreation, through his study of riverside cafes and the archetypal figure of the accordionist in early twentieth-century Paris. A cluster of papers on musical (re)creation in the nineteenth-century metropolis were introduced by Roger Parker’s study of the animated dioramas that became a popular spectacle in Victorian London: their silence spoke both to hoary reservations about the affective power of sound, and the urgent need to maintain a utopian vision of the contemporary city. 

Notions of mobility, (re)creation, and the city were dovetailed once again in Thomas Peattie’s paper on the sonic mapping of Mahler’s sonic subjects. Moving from a Nietzschean idea of the Romantic wanderer to a more prosaic notion of Mahler’s pedestrian journeys in the Austrian Alps and the Vienna Ringstrasse, Peattie examined the role of walking as a Figur in Mahler’s middle symphonies. Walking and the environment were likewise central threads in Angela Impey’s paper on women, music, land, and conservation in east Africa, arguing for a more locally-attuned acoustemology of place as an alternative to the hegemony of Northern European landscape epistemologies.

Pressing issues of responsibility, care, and ownership were foregrounded by Cherryl Walker’s keynote address on land rights and social justice in South Africa, drawing attention once again to the devastating legacy of historical territorialization and occupation, and to the complex and often competing claims of notions of home in the nation’s current land debates. A second keynote paper, by Carol Muller, offered a moving personal tribute to the Capetonian jazz artist Sathima Bea Benjamin, who died on 20 August shortly before the beginning of the conference. Recalling the beauty of Benjamin’s voice, Muller drew on Latour’s idea of vital materialism to argue for the richness of diaspora as the source for localized modes of expression. 

Geometries of language, ritual, and space were prominent in Chris May’s thematic analysis of Arvo Pärt’s critical reception, deconstructing the use of spatial metaphors as a means of articulating different notions of boundedness (spiritual, creative, expressive) in Pärt’s work in lieu of a more rigorous engagement with the technique and rhetoric of his music. Reading landscape as a recurrent trope in Adorno’s writing on music and aesthetics, Sebastian Wedler drew the distinction between “Stimmigkeit” (coherence or accordance) and “Stimmligkeit” (vocality or voicedness), arguing that Adorno’s understanding of landscape in music as a “lyrical” category emerges more through the dialectical relationship between musical events rather than residing in the events themselves. 

Haunting, memory, and the materiality of place were key themes in a panel chaired by Daniel Grimley. In dialogue with two South African composers, Hans Huyssen and Theo Herbst, the panel discussed language, the grain of borrowed or sampled sounds, and the troubled landscapes of South African contemporary music. Geographer George Revill re-invoked many of the themes and anxieties raised during the panel, and recurrent throughout conference discussion, arguing for a closer critical engagement between geography, music, and sound studies in our critical attention to the acoustic quality of landscape. Perhaps the most striking summation of the conference, however, was a lunch-hour concert given by Neo Muyanga. In a program comprising songs about play, water, soil, love, earth, and protest, Muyanga rendered the violent extremities and alluring arrest of the South African landscape as an uninterrupted flow of textures, melodies, and rhythms. A further innovation was the commissioning of creative responses to the event from Kaganof and the writer Stacey Hardy. Kaganof’s film entitled Night is Coming: a Threnody for the Victims of Marikana and Hardy’s short story, River Blindness, raise crucial questions about the abstractions of academic debate in forms that are precisely liberated from the conventions of that discourse. 

A no less vivid memory was the warmth of the welcome at Stellenbosch. The conference organizers are indebted to the Local Organizing Committee, especially Marietjie Pauw, Hilde Roos, William Fourie, Stephanus Muller, and Santie de Jongh, for their unstinting efforts in supporting such a fruitful and challenging event.

The third meeting in this series took place at Harvard from 14-16 January 2015, and the fourth is still to come. More information is available at www.hearinglandscapecritically.net, where selected papers from the Stellenbosch conference are also available as podcasts.

Korean P’ansori Singing Tradition: Development, Authenticity, and Performance History. By Yeonok Jang. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2014. [312 p., ISBN 978-0-8108-8461-8, Ebook: £51.95; Cloth: £51.95].

Korean Musical Drama: P’ansori and the Making of Tradition in Modernity. By Haekyung Um. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. [272 p., ISBN 978-0-7546-6276-1, Cloth: £63.00].

Reviewed by Dorothea Suh / Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

P’ansori, performed by a singer and a musician on a barrel drum, noticeably gained attention in the national and international mainstream media after the success of the novel Seopyeonje by Yi Chung-Jun and its screen adaptation in 1993, showing the dramatic story of a fictional female P’ansori singer. In 2003, P’ansori was proclaimed as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage by the UNESCO for its refined art of singing and storytelling.

Both Korean P’ansori Singing Tradition (KPS) by Yeonok Jang and Korean Musical Drama (KMD) by Haekyung Um examine the origins of P’ansori and follow the evolution of the schools and styles and contemporary performances; however, each book has a different focus area.

Yeonok Jang, a visiting lecturer in P’ansori studies and Korean Music at Dankook University, highlights the change in P’ansori performance style in the 1980s, the reception and perception of P’ansori through the audience, and the role of P’ansori in Korean society. The book is divided in three parts, titled: 1. Development, 2. From Sarangbang^[1] to Theater, 3. Cultural Identity, and each part has two subchapters. As a professional kayagum^[2] player and amateur P’ansori singer, Jang writes from a musician’s perspective and gives detailed insight into the transmission of the craft and the conflicting issues arising in the late 1980s through the previously implemented Intangible Cultural Property System in South Korea.

In Part 1 Development of KPS, Jang introduces different theories about the origins of P’ansori: shamanism, folk tales, novels, storytellers or Chinese oral traditions, but discards the majority of those theories due to lack of evidence. One of her suppositions is that “the storytellers were the creators of P’ansori” (39) with market places being the crucial factor in popularizing P’ansori. Jang is aware that her first statement conflicts with her secondary proposition: “the genre might have developed through the influence of Chinese narrative songs in the North or East Coast of the country” (39). There is no definite answer for placing the origin of P’ansori. The Chŏlla province in the south is mentioned as the birthplace of P’ansori, but Jang adds that P’ansori could have been based on the Beijing drum song, due to striking similarities in aesthetics and musical style and therefore possibly performed in North Korea first.

Part 2, From Sarangbang to Theater, continues the development of P’ansori, starting from the performances of P’ansori in traditional Korean houses (hanok) held by noblemen and literati towards the theater stage in the twentieth century. Jang states that refined singing techniques and the change of the audience from market place visitors to “upper class audiences” (73) are the “most notable factor[s] in the nineteenth century P’ansori history” (90) and suggests, that the transformation of the singers’ voice was a result of a different audience (market places to houses) and the rising competition between singers (a louder voice to receive attention). Jang also discusses the expansion of P’ansori towards the theater stage and Ch’anggŭk, a singing drama, as its successor.

Due to conflicting views from various scholars regarding the origin of the genre Ch’anggŭk itself, the chapter continues with describing the genre and its reception by P’ansori singers and audiences. Jang affirms that Ch’anggŭk “is performed less frequently and with less public interest. Its mass popularity has dwindled” (102) and that Ch’anggŭk needs to break away from “the notion that it has evolved from P’ansori” (102). However, current research and new productions such as the experimental “Mr. Rabbit and the Dragon King” (2011) and the critically acclaimed Seopyeonje (2012/2013) clearly show through their critically acclaimed productions and recurring performances in the upcoming season of the National Theater of Korea that mass popularity has not “dwindled” and the chosen topics for the newly created pieces are deeply connected to P’ansori, be it as an interpretation of existing P’ansori songs or an examination of the genre itself.

In Part 3, Cultural Identity, Jang stresses that P’ansori now “serves to express the traditional culture of Korea” (135) and therefore becomes involved in political schemes. The contemporary performances from the 1970s to the present were observed and investigated by Jang and analyzed through a comparative study of the song Kalkkaboda^[3] from the P’ansori Chunhyang, where Jang examined two different singing styles (tongch’o and posong), music, rhythm and text. Because P’ansori is traditionally not written down (while the notation of the rhythm^[4] has its own system), western staff notation was used to transcribe both versions of the songs. Those transcriptions provide a valuable guiding principle, but should not be seen as a fixture. While repetitions are a part of the learning process in P’ansori, a professional performance is seldom repeated twice—instead of following notations, the ability to improvise is held in high esteem. In terms of cultural identity, it is an interesting observation by Jang that the singer of the posong style used a vibrato similar to the western style of singing and that the socio-cultural environment with its ever present western media and art might be responsible for this. However, this was not a quantitative study, because the analysis was based on the examination of only two master singers, O Chongsuk and Song Ch’angsun.

Jang concludes, that while “P’ansori performance style has been in a constant process of change throughout its history” (230), it keeps “the nation’s cultural uniqueness” and portrays a cultural evolution. She questions, whether someone “can revolutionize the singing style of P’ansori to meet the taste of contemporary audiences” (230), because, although P’ansori may be a valued cultural asset, it does not have a necessary, growing audience. Instead, it may be a better choice to preserve P’ansori rather than modernizing the genre.

A more analytical approach is provided by Haekyung Um, lecturer in music at University of Liverpool. Her book includes eight chapters: 1. Performance, 2. Origins and Histories, 3. Text and Music, 4. Schools and Styles, 5. Individual Styles, 6. Aesthetics, 7. P’ansori in Diaspora, 8. New P’ansori. Um addresses a rarely researched topic, she studies the “relationship that exists between music-making and identity amongst the Korean diaspora in these post-soviet states”^[5] (Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) and follows up with a representative cross section of newly created P’ansori, giving the reader a comprehensive introduction of the current P’ansori scene.

In her first section, Performance, Um dissects a P’ansori performance and explains how P’ansori is currently being presented – the settings, its purpose in being performed, the dynamics between the Cultural Heritage Administration and the musicians and lastly, related performing arts, such as Ch’anggŭk and Kayageum Pyong’chang. Um mentions that “competitive P’ansori performances are highly ‘presentational’ in their setting and purpose” (21) and “informal events and actions involve participatory music-making by connoisseurs and amateurs” (21). Therefore there are three distinct places for P’ansori to be performed and enjoyed: the auditorium, private clubs and student clubs. Um considers those P’ansori clubs, especially founded by student members and a professional artist, to be “integral to what could be called the P’ansori scene” (22), because they provide fans with self-run blogs, online fan sites, teachings, and other events.

Part two of KMD, Origins and Histories, shares similarities with Jang's KPS. Um introduces various theories about the origins of P’ansori, such as shamans from the Jeolla Province, traveling singers and Chinese literature, a possible origin which she notes is criticized because “by their nature, narrative genres share certain features rather than necessarily demonstrating cross-cultural influences” (36). As in Jang’s KPS, Um provides a detailed historiography and cultural history of P’ansori, embracing the so-called golden age in the nineteenth century towards significant changes in regard to the music making policy in the 1970. She argues that the progress and expansion of P’ansori was elucidated through seven stages: pre-eighteenth century, the eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, reconstruction and renewal: 1945-164, and 1964 to the present. Through providing in-depth annotations, these seven stages display the complexity of P’ansori, because “social, political and economic changes in Korean society have produced conditions in which P’ansori has transformed profoundly” (55).

In the third chapter, Text and Music, Um uses the P’ansori Chunhyangga as an example to analyze the text, narrative structure, themes, speech styles and rhetorical devices characteristic of the P’ansori genre. The latter is of great interest, because the spoken text of a song is often stylized and studded with Sino-Korean words. According to Um, whereas “the Chinese words are associated with a display of spectacle or grandeur, vernacular Korean is usually used to express inner feelings and emotions”(64). Um describes the theoretical aspects of P’ansori, the rhythmic cycles (changdan), which she transcribes using square notation^[6]. She then explains the vocal techniques of P’ansori and its connection to other folk genres. Here, she uses western staff notation to transcribe examples for displaying the various modes^[7] and characteristic melodic types distinctive for specific master singers. The examples of the spoken text, changdan, and modes are mostly based on Ch’unhyangga, but they can be adapted to all five remaining P’ansori as well. Um concludes that “the text is linked to changdan, which in turn is combined with cho, and cho is related to the text” (100) and suggests that “these musical devices reinforce the implicit meaning of the text, which in turn are culturally and historically located.”

In chapter four, Schools and Styles, Um conducts a comparative analysis of six versions of Ch’unhyangga, questioning “the factors that define and influence the creation of certain styles” (101). The most important factor is che, meaning “system, construction or structure” (101). Starting from the two main schools, donpyeonje (eastern school) and seopyeonje (western school), Um follows the classification of che provided by P’ansori scholars starting from 1940. As che can also mean School of Singing or Sub-School ^[8], genealogies of Ch’unhyangga sung by famous singers are provided. For example, genealogies include that of master Song Mangap (1865-1939), Kim Changhwan (1854-1927), and Chong Chongnyol (1876-1928). These detailed genealogies are also of importance for P’ansori scholars tracing back current styles of other P’ansori, regardless of school^[9]. Um explains the stylistic features of the major schools and individual styles using prior knowledge covered in chapter three, Text and Music, as well as examines the importance of che and it's meaning.

Chapter five, Individual Styles, continues examining the different schools and styles, based on Um’s fieldwork and lessons with the master singers Song Uhyang (1935) and Cho Sanghyon (1939)^[10]. Um closely examines and analyzes the teaching methods and the influence of teachers based on transcriptions of public lessons, live performances, and studio performances. This chapter also gives the reader an insight into the education of students, how older teaching methods, learning by ear and repetition, have transformed and adapted to modern times.

For example students taping their lessons and learning different versions (beginner’s version or advanced version) of one musical piece. Interestingly, there is a brief view into gender issues within P’ansori. Um recalls Cho Sanghyon suggesting “that P’ansori had originally been developed for the male voice” (129), a statement based on the fact that the first noted female singer was Chin Ch’aeson from the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, Um states that “the gender of the teacher can also influence teaching,” such as learning yoja-sori (female style of singing) and the counterpart namja-sori (male singing style) (129).

The sixth chapter in KMD, Aesthetics, shares some similarities with part two, From Sarangbang to Theater, of KPS. In KMD, Um shows the development of P’ansori from a historical perspective, including the audience and patrons of P’ansori. Using the P’ansori Ch’unhyangga, Um describes the censorship of P’ansori and how patrons thought of P’ansori – a vulgar play with “real” characters but with values to be shared for educational purposes.

Socio-cultural changes through the decades, such as the “gentrification of P’ansori in the late nineteenth century” (153) and the “yangbanization,” altered the appreciation of P’ansori. The former middle and lower classes became more powerful than the elite through their increasing wealth, which led to “the appropriation of upper-class values... to display and affirm their newly elevated position” (153) including the support of P’ansori performances. Another section dwells deeper into the aesthetic criteria of sound, sentiment, and meaning, which draws further from the points discussed in prior chapters three through five. In the conclusion, Um states that the changing views on the aesthetics of P’ansori, such as the individual preferences of the musicians, a diverse audience and the inclusion of said audience in the performance, influenced P’ansori in developing and refining its lyrics and music.

Chapter seven, P’ansori in Diaspora, draws on Um’s research in the former Soviet Union and China. Providing historical background about the Korean migration to Russia following the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1910 to the end of World War II, Um describes transnational P’ansori in the former Soviet Union and the opening of Choson Kukchang (Korean Theatre) in 1932, when Korean plays were performed alongside patriotic Soviet dramas. Um argues this was because “it was necessary for these Koreans to be seen to be assimilated into mainstream Soviet society,” therefore producing patriotic dramas such as Hong Pomdo in 1942, an anti-imperialist and revolutionary (169). Um argues that the Korean diaspora in China is much older than the migration to Russia, it began in the seventh century and continued in waves. P’ansori was introduced in 1939 through a touring P’ansori troupe and survived the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution until it ended in 1976. Newly composed Chinese-Korean P’ansori were mostly political and later merged with western opera styles. Um calls this a hybrid song narrative named ch’angdam, which later evolved into different forms. The meaning and value of P’ansori in the diaspora are different from in its homeland because P’ansori serves to “create a social space and a sense of community… a cultural memory of the common past which the diasporas share with other Korean transnational communities” (176). But Um adds, that at the same time, the younger generation of ethnic Koreans prefer the pop culture of their home (be it China or Russia) to P’ansori, because P’ansori “can be very distant from their current social world… and everyday life” (177).  Similar to chapter three, Cultural Identity, in KPS, KMD reflects on identity. In terms of P’ansori in the diaspora, Um finds “that diasporic performances and their ethnic and cultural identity are also defined by hybridity rather than by essence or purity” (178), which, in a way, is an inversion of the perception of identity and P’ansori within Korea.

The last chapter of KMD is a critical view of the new P’ansori in South Korea, called Ch’angjak P’ansori, which began being performed in 1904. The new compositions began to gain popularity after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945 and, according to Um, reached “another creative peak in the 1970s. As was the case for many artistic endeavors in Korea” (181). Um categorizes the Ch’angjak P’ansori in three categories: Patriotic P’ansori, Religious P’ansori and Socio-Political P’ansori. Patriotic figures, such as General Yi Sunshin or revolutionary heroes of the resistance against Japan became protagonists of newly composed Ch’angjak P’ansori. Religious-themed P’ansori took their inspirations from famous buddhist monks (for example Yujong from the sixteenth century) or Christian topics, like the salvation of Christ.

Both, the patriotic and religious P’ansori were developed by professional singers and Um finds that they often depict “historical figures and events that are associated with the nationalist and anti-colonial struggle, thereby merging religion with national politics” (183). The third category of Ch’angjak P’ansori, the socio-political P’ansori, named minjung P’ansori, was the most popular among the new compositions and dealt with the politics and social issues of Korea starting from the 1970s. Based on contemporary issues and literature, socio-cultural P’ansori was mostly created by semi-professional singers, which gives it a connection to more traditional P’ansori – but in terms of creation, this is the only similarity. No longer orally taught, “new P’ansori has two stages: firstly the text is written and then the music is arranged,” using the traditional changdan and modes (185). Um indicates a shift in P’ansori from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century: while the former P’ansori were dramatic and tragic, the current P’ansori highlight humor above other characteristics. In addition, the use of elaborate costumes, requisites and the focus on professional acting gained more importance, as a way to express the narrated and sung story (189).

Finally, Um cites the rigid cultural policies used to keep nineteenth-century values alive and nostalgia as reasons for the tensions between old and new P’ansori performances. Despite these tensions, he stresses that “modernity is not a threat to the future of P’ansori” (212). Since the singers of the younger generation, such as Pak T’aeo and Yi Charam, surprisingly express the importance of traditional P’ansori instead of stressing the need for new P’ansori (even though both of them are successful with their new P’ansori projects), Um suggests that P’ansori is by no means meant to be a static art. Recognizing and accepting the choices these young artists make for their careers it requires a profound understanding of the dynamics within the decisions of these singers who are “in a milieu of competing forces (local, regional, global and historical)” (212).

Anyone interested in P’ansori, Korean traditional music, socio-cultural issues and cultural transformations in diaspora, will find these two well written and extensively researched books extremely useful. While KPS gives a complex and almost intimate take from an active musician’s point of view, KMD shines with definite, in-depth explanations and very detailed knowledge of the latest state of the art, including contemporary P’ansori in and outside of Korea.

In my opinion, both books tell the story how P’ansori became the highly honored art it is today. They both include an outlook into the future, and continue to honor the legacy of one of the most famous English publications, “The Korean Singer of Tales” by Marshall R. Phil, in popularizing P’ansori in academia. Both books do not need the other, but I believe that in some chapters, both books do represent distinctive opinions and demonstrate contrasting styles of research, presumably due to differing access to other resources and focus areas (such as singers). Because analysis of master singers, especially in the English language, are rare to find, KPS and KMD present a chance for non-native speakers to fill in the gaps of previous, incomplete research and work as a foundation for future investigations. ^[11]

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with our friends at Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you Crossing Borders, a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee welcomes submissions from scholars working on music from all disciplines!

This month's author is Devin Beecher. Devin is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is interested in the intersections between literature, music and medicine. In his latest research he studies the standardization and rhetoric of personal illness narratives.

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Béla Bartók’s opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, first performed in 1911, has an abstract story and enigmatic score which make a metaphorical interpretation unavoidable. Here, Duke Bluebeard becomes the “Everyman,” and Judit the “Everywoman,” or sometimes even the “Eternal Eve.” The two attempt to enter into a relationship, which apparently takes place entirely within the psyche of the Everyman. This is a gloomy place, whose darkness primarily conceals certain memories that the Everyman must not reveal to his Everywoman. She, however, wants this knowledge—perhaps because she thinks it would be healthy for the man to divulge it, or because her conception of a relationship involves mutual understanding, or because she is just too damn curious, as many interpreters seem to think. Eternal Eve deviously convinces Everyman to reveal his memories to her, but in doing so she has doomed their relationship, or, more specifically, herself. She disappears behind a door of the castle of his memories. One writer who generally supports this interpretation claims that its misogynistic aspects can be moderated by recognizing that the situation is entirely reversible—women too have their impenetrable secrets.^[1] These, however, are not suggested in the opera itself. Rather, Judit is transformed from an initially free human subject into a prisoner and finally into a metaphor, both in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and also in this interpretation.

Gustav Klimt, Judith (1901)

In the 1901 Judith, manfulness can be physiognomically read from her strong chin and arm, animosity and superiority from her up-tilted head, sexual delight from her orgasmically half-closed eyes. Her teeth glint appealingly and her nakedness is so luminescent that the fabric she wears cannot conceal it, yet the viewer is both warned off and oddly drawn in by the repelling sight of Holofernes’ head. 

Gustav Klimt, Judith (1909)

In the 1909 Judith, the deadliness of Judith is symbolized by her serpentine pose, mirrored and emphasized by curves of the fabric hanging from her body. The appealing color of the 1901 Judith’s skin is transformed in the 1909 version into a livid and frightening pallor, and her strong hands have become vulturous claws. Read together in this way, the two paintings suggest that the viewer ought to beware of this Judith, for she will cut off your head and turn ugly besides. Judith, herself, is reduced to standing metaphorically for the many things of which her male spectators are terrified.

However, by focusing on the locus of action in the Judiths, one can see an alternate story, primarily told through metonymy and synecdoche, which reinstates the subjectivity of Judith as manifested through her act. The action of the story is, obviously, Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes, though at first glance neither painting directly depicts this; rather, they seem to be static and symbolic representations of Judith, shown as posing rather than as acting. However, if we analyze the specific point of contact between Judith’s hand and Holofernes’ head—precisely where the action takes place—it becomes apparent that it displays a kinetic tension which disrupts the static iconicity of the paintings. 

Gustav Klimt, Judith (1909)

In the 1901 Judith, her right hand is bent backwards at an unnaturally acute angle, farther than a hand could typically bend without some sort of opposing force acting on it. This force must come from the head, since that is what the hand touches, and particularly from the part of the head not represented within the painting. What about it presents resistance, one must ask: perhaps Judith is pressing it from the other side with her other hand, or perhaps the head is still partially attached to the body and she is forcefully trying to dislodge it. Either way, read like this, the painting becomes representative primarily of the act—the beheading of Holofernes—a metonymical function centered around the contiguous and causal relationship of hand and head. Focusing on the act as act, rather than as metaphor for manfulness, chastity, or castration, lets us reappropriate it rhetorically as a synecdochical representation of Judith’s subjectivity (given the assumption that a subject’s compounded actions constitute the subject itself).

Gustav Klimt, Judith (1909)

The 1909 Judith can be read similarly. The detail is again the hand and the head, and the exceptional element is that Judith is not really grasping it at all. Her hand is clawing at, rather than clutching, Holofernes’ hair. Judith is apparently not actually holding the head in this painting, but rather is in the process of dropping it. We then realize that the ambiguous fabric covering the head’s lower half is actually Judith’s bag, and the painting as a whole represents Judith’s next significant act: hiding the severed head in her bag so as to transport it back to Bethulia. The serpentine curve of Judith’s body and of her clothes can now be seen as effects of her turning to exit Holofernes’ camp, rather than as symbolic evidence of the dangerous essence of her character. In this painting, as in the 1901 version, finding the point of action serves to disturb the dominant metaphorical interpretation of Judith. That this specific point is minimized and placed in the far corner of both paintings indicates the tendency of viewers and interpreters to strongly favor the other reading, symbolized and supported by Judith’s metaphorically fertile and centrally depicted body. In both paintings this element enables a reading based on the metonymical relationship of hand to head which emphasizes the act as a synecdochical representation of Judith’s subjectivity.

In Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the blood motif can be read not only as a metaphor for death, but also as evidence of the work’s displacement of its disguised violence. The clue for this reading is the odd discrepancy between the extreme bloodiness of the two traditional stories that the characters’ names evoke, and the lack of explicit violence in the plot of Bartók’s opera. The story of Judith and Holofernes centers around a necessarily brutal beheading, which I discussed earlier. The second story is no less grim: it is that of Bluebeard, a character based upon a 15th-century serial killer who first appeared in a fairy tale written by Charles Perrault in 1697. There have been many retellings of this story, all of them far bloodier than Bartók’s version: in some, the previous wives are slaughtered; in others, Bluebeard’s wife also is killed; in others it is Bluebeard himself who is killed by the wife’s brothers. Nobody is literally killed in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, and in this way it is a very bloodless retelling of the story. There is, however, the blood that Judit finds everywhere: on the castle walls, and in the torture chamber, armory, treasury, garden and surrounding estate. This suggests that it is ultimately reductive to read the blood and the blood motif merely as metaphors in the light/dark and life/death binaries which support the allegorical model of the opera that I outlined earlier, especially as this model depicts Judit as responsible for the turn toward darkness. Rather, we should pursue an interpretation in which these elements function as displacements of the blood found in the original tales of Judith and Bluebeard.

Though it is not recognized as this at the time, the first appearance of blood (and the blood motif) comes when Judit, feeling her way forward in the darkness, touches the wall and finds that it is “sweating.” Again, the contiguity and causality involved in the gesture of touching allow us to pursue a metonymical reading of the blood, suggesting that it has an existential relationship with someone in the opera. If we accept the castle as a metaphor for Bluebeard’s soul, then it is logically his blood found throughout. (This is precisely the opinion of conductor István Kertész. He says, of Bluebeard, that “the blood Judith keeps finding everywhere is his blood, his suffering. The tears of the sixth door are his tears.”^[5]) However, if we reverse our notions of literal and figural, the castle becomes very obviously a literal prison for Judit and the three wives before her. The blood is thus theirs, not Bluebeard’s. The libretto even provides evidence for this: when the three imprisoned women are revealed, Bluebeard says that “they have bled to feed my flowers.” By reading elements of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Klimt’s two paintings of Judith as non-metaphorical rhetorical devices, I hope to have revealed the absurdity of an interpretation that portrays Judit as the antagonist and Bluebeard as the victim of the opera. I hope also to have countered the excessive allegorizing of these stories found in other interpretations, exposing instead the literal violence not quite shown in the actions of Judit and Judith.

Earlier this year, the Erroll Garner Jazz Project gifted the University of Pittsburgh a trove of materials relating to the career of Garner, assembled by his longtime manager Martha Glaser. The collection will be maintained by the University Library System and will live alongside Pitt’s renowned program in Jazz Studies. Michael Heller, professor of jazz studies and historical ethnomusicology, is teaching a course this semester called “Music, Media and the Archive: Jazz Collections of Pittsburgh,” for which students will work hands-on with the Garner archive and present their findings in a variety of forums, including the Pitt Archives blog. I spoke to Prof. Heller over Skype about the course, the Garner archive, and the productive connections between critical archival studies, jazz studies, and ethnomusicology.

Michael Heller: There are two different pre-histories of the project and the class. One has to do with my background and interests, and the other has to do with the collection and Pitt's acquisition of it. I’ve been very closely engaged in my work with a movement that's sometimes referred to as “critical archival studies” or “the archival turn,” which emerges most closely out of critical theory, history, and cultural studies departments. The core of the movement is the idea that archives aren’t just neutral spaces for the gathering of data, that archives are both structured within certain types of power systems and they themselves structure discourses in ways that it’s important to try to unpack and understand. Part of this movement, too, have been a few people who have tried to construct what are sometimes referred to as “ethnographies of the archive,” and they’ve done that in different ways. Sometimes it’s a matter of talking about the goals of the archivists as they put particular archives together and how that structured what was there. And sometimes it has to do more with the relationship of the researcher with the materials and how that influences the way writing is done. And so a big part of my work over the last several years has been with these kinds of issues. The book that I have under contract is dealing with all of this stuff in relation to private archives held by loft jazz musicians. Connected with all of this, I was involved last year [at UMass Boston] with a colleague at Harvard in founding an archive studies group that reached across several universities and disciplines.

Parallel to all of this, there had been negotiations for a number of years with the people at the Erroll Garner Jazz Project. It’s run by a woman named Susan Rosenberg, who is the niece of Martha Glaser. When Garner died, there were some things left to the family, but there was a huge cache of material that he left to Glaser. And so Pitt has been in touch with them for several years, primarily because of Garner’s connection to [the city of] Pittsburgh, being born and raised in Pittsburgh and a part of this Pittsburgh piano tradition that’s really sort of jaw-dropping. With the Garner Project, one of the things that’s amazing about what they did is that they had hired their own archivist [Jocelyn Arem] and had really done a lot of the collection processing beforehand. So when Pitt finalized the deal to acquire the collection over the summer, it came in pretty good shape; there were already databases and finding aids. So then I get this job [at Pitt] and I hear about the collection, and, as with any library collection, they really want people to use it. I already had in mind doing a class that would combine some of this critical [archival studies] reading with some hands-on work in an archive, so it was just this perfect marriage. So that’s how the class ended up coming about, and we’re really dividing our time 50-50, doing these readings about how to approach archives and then doing work in the archives themselves.

Dean Reynolds: In your first blog entry, you note that your approach to excavating the archive will be “experimental.” How do you conceptualize that “experimental” approach?

MH: I have some inspirations that are the background for this. One is Brent Edwards at Columbia, who was a committee member for my dissertation. He’s taught a seminar several times called “Black Radicalism and the Archive,” where they worked with several archives that had come to Columbia. The other inspirations were a couple of classes at Harvard—one taught by Alex Rehding and the other taught by Anne Shreffler—where the goal of the class—like our goal—was to put up an exhibit at the end of the semester instead of having the students write term papers. So, I’m not coming up with all of this myself. In terms of the process, I think that, well, I would frame it like this: Part of the thrust of a lot of the critical archive studies literature is this idea that it’s impossible to know an archive; the archives are never complete, but also, as a researcher in an enormous archive, you’re only ever going to see certain fragments of it. And as a result of that, the way that archives were traditionally used is somewhat problematic, because in more positivist traditions of writing, there’s this idea that you go in, you get a grasp of it, and then you write as sort of this “authority” on the archive. The more recent literature has started to engage with this idea that it’s never that simple. You’re always going in—and this could be a nice ethnomusicological connection—as a subject that has a position. Being more reflexive about the process of being with the archive, reading through the archive, and figuring out these sticky, fascinating temporalities between present, past, and future has to be part of the story. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted the students to start writing really early. At this point we’ve only been working with the materials for two-and-a-half weeks, a couple hours a week. So it’s not as if we know what’s there. People keep asking me, “Oh, what are some of the things you’ve found?” and I keep wanting to say “Ask me in sixth months! I’ll know some more things!” [laughs]. But rather than try to hide behind that or take that as a shortcoming, I want to see what it’s like to start writing early and start writing about things when maybe we don’t know what they are, and to have the wherewithal and—courage is too strong a word—the self-awareness about that process of not knowing.

DR: I think “courage” is the right word. I mean, you have to be unafraid to be wrong about something, or not to be wrong necessarily, but to approach something with a sense of “we’re not really sure where this came from, what this is.”

MH: Exactly. It sounds a little too self-important for me to phrase it that way, but it’s something like courage anyway.

DR: You’re working towards a bigger exhibit of some of this material, so what role will the [prospective] audience play? With so much material, you have to come with some kinds of assumptions about “what kinds of things am I looking for?” Do you have a particular audience in mind that you expect to take an interest in this material?

MH: It’s going to be for the general public. The exhibit is going up in the International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame, which is inside of the Pitt Student Union. So we’re assuming from the outset that the audience will know nothing about Garner. But we’re also going to be aiming to determine some kind of analytical perspective. The exhibit isn’t going to be something like “Erroll Garner: Genius of the Piano.” That’s not really what we’re going for. I know that one thing that several of the students are interested in and the Garner Project people are interested in is thinking about the political resonances of Garner’s career. Actually, the first time I talked to Susan and Jocelyn from the Garner Project, that was one of the first things they said, that they’re really interested in presenting the materials as evidence of Garner’s position in the black community and role within a larger black arts tradition and [the struggle for] recognition of rights for black artists. And that was interesting to me because Garner is not the first person I think of when I think of that stream of jazz, especially coming out of my loft work. But through this archive there are these threads that come out. One of them is Glaser and the way that she protected Garner’s rights through legal contracts, because Glaser herself was a fierce negotiator and had a background in Civil Rights advocacy. So we’ve already found that, for instance, the standard contract that they would send to performance venues had an anti-Jim Crow clause, where they had to have integrated audiences. She was constantly fighting regarding the rights of black artists, proper remuneration, these sorts of things. So it’s possible to read through this archive as an illustration that even a mainstream black artist had to navigate these issues and sometimes had to work behind the scenes to get the recognition he deserved.

DR: You’ve said you don’t really know what’s in there yet, but are there other threads that you’re going to follow along based on the material?

MH: One of the things that I think is going to be fascinating long-term for scholars is dealing with the recordings in the archive, which we’re only going to be touching on because they’re still working out some access issues. I believe in Glaser’s contracts they insisted that they take copies of entire session reels. So there are thousands of recordings, from which we’re hoping it may be possible—and from what we’ve talked about with Jocelyn it might be—to really listen to Garner’s approach in the studio, how he interacted with fellow musicians and his voice as a leader. That’s one thread that we’re interested in. Tracing his tours throughout the world and his global impact is going to be really interesting. Tracing the afterlives of some of his most famous outputs. “Misty,” for instance, has several folders of material relating to not only the composition itself but also licensing agreements to use it in various films. The post going up next week is actually about the film Play Misty for Me. [The album] Concert by the Sea is another important thread, which is strangely not acknowledged enough today, even though for years it held the title as best-selling jazz record of all time.

DR: You mentioned that fabulous tradition of piano playing but also of jazz in general in Pittsburgh. Do you sense that work with the archive can help create an even stronger awareness about Pittsburgh’s central role in jazz? I’m also thinking of [Carol Bash’s] new Mary Lou Williams documentary. I wonder if there’s going to be an increasing visibility in more mainstream circles of Pittsburgh’s role in jazz and if you see this archive as really helping to contribute to that.

MH: Well, that’s absolutely a goal. And that’s a goal that’s closely tied into the growth of the jazz program at Pitt. Pitt has one of the oldest Jazz Studies programs in the country. Nathan Davis was the real core of it; he was hired by the University in 1969. In 1971 he started the Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert, which is an annual series of talks and concerts by musicians. And there’s also a fabulous archive of jazz at Pitt that just was processed last year and is now available to researchers. Dr. Davis was always very interested in [the Erroll Garner archive]. He retired several years ago, and they hired Geri Allen to replace him, and she is working on getting the program revamped, and now this year they’ve hired me and AJ Johnson. So there’s this big expansion, and Pittsburgh’s jazz tradition is something that we’re looking at very closely. Dr. Davis did a lot of work on this topic with several students coming out of the program, who have written studies of Pittsburgh jazz of various kinds. This year’s Jazz Seminar is going to focus on some of the piano tradition, including a screening of Bash’s documentary and a Q&A with the director. And having Allen as one of the preeminent performers of Mary Lou Williams’s work is also an extension of that. So the archive is now part of that too.

See the latest posts on the Pitt Archives blog using #Erroll Garner Tuesdays.

This interview was condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Michael C. Heller is a musicologist and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on jazz, sound studies, and archival theory. His current book project, The Loft Scene: Improvising New York in the 1970s (under contract, University of California Press), examines issues of musician agency on the levels of performance, economics, and archival practices.

In October 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed resolutions--House Resolution 780 and Senate Resolution 298--officially recognizing October as Filipino American History Month.  "Recognizes the celebration of Filipino American History Month as a study of the advancement of Filipino Americans and as a time to renew efforts toward the examination of history and culture in order to provide an opportunity for all people in the United States to learn more about Filipino Americans and their historic contributions to the Nation." 

In honor of Filipino American History Month, I thought I would highlight the Archive collection Archiving Filipino American Music in Los Angeles (AFAMILA).  AFAMILA was a yearlong archiving and documentation project by the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive and community partner Kayamanan Ng Lahi.  Support for the project was provided by a UCLA in LA grant from the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, 2003-2004.  The finding aid for the collection is on the Online Archive of California, here.

Jesse Ruskin wrote about the project in volume 11 (2006) of Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology (now Ethnomusicology Review), "Collecting and Connecting: Archiving Filipino American Music in Los Angeles."  To quote the abstract, "Scholars have recently reconceptualized the archive not only as a repository of knowledge, but also as an active producer and arbiter of knowledge. The study of archives, from this perspective, must attend to processes as well as products. This paper examines UCLA’s Archiving Filipino American Music in Los Angeles (AFAMILA) project as a case study of collaborative archiving, from the perspective that both methodology, the strategies and practices of collecting, and musical content, the sounds collected, determine the meaning of music archives. Furthermore, the study seeks to demonstrate how the collaborative approach, with its emphasis on dialogue and exchange, subverts the discourses of power that have historically shaped music archiving."

The AFAMILA recordings are now available as part of the California Light and Sound Collection on the Internet Archive.  California Light and Sound is a project of the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP).  You can, of course, always browse the Ethnomusicology Archive channel.

An Evening of Thai and Philippine Music at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, October 9, 2003

From Acapulco to Manila, Kayamanan Ng Lahi and Danza Floricanto/USA, Quetzal, Rondalla Club of Los Angeles, October 4, 2003

Teach-In on Pilipino Studies at UCLA, February 28, 2004

Festival of Philippine Arts and Cultures 2003 - San Pedro, CA, September 6, 2003, Kayamanan Ng Lahi, Joe Bataan, Immij, Peng, DJ Battle (finals, mainstage)

In Bali, the word Niskala defines a praxis involving the occult. More often described in contexts with its counterpart, Sekala, the two terms interlock to evoke the liminal state between the intangible and tangible world, respectively. It is at the crux of Balinese philosophy and ceremony that defines its cosmology. Thus, Niskala is often interpreted as a safe haven of ideological exigency. My interests for this project lie between two musics: a sub-sect of the metal genre, math-metal (also under the alias of progressive metal) and processional gamelan from Bali called baleganjur. In discussing the performative purpose, these two genres are conflicting. One uses ‘dark’ and ‘negative’ culture as a mode of composition and communal creation (metal) and the other is performed specifically to dispel or ward away evil spirits (gamelan baleganjur). Why then, do these two practices share inherent musical features? Both genres are loud, brash, and rhythmically technical among other, non-musical, intersections. This study researches musical hybridity as a locus of juxtaposing ideology, particularly at the production of like-sounding musics. I use a gamelan math-metal band, Niskala (U.K.), as a case study; looking specifically at the musical devices shared by gamelan baleganjur and math-metal that confirms ideology and provides a safe haven for conflicting principles.

Bridging Baleganjur and Math-Metal: Niskala, U.K.

In the summer of 2011, I found myself back in Bali for summer vacation, but also to help run the family sanggar (Balinese arts commune), Manik Galih. Run by my mother and father, Bapak I Made Lasmawan and Ibu Ni Ketut Marni, whom are Indonesian arts teachers, Sanggar Manik Galih afforded students with an opportunity to study Balinese culture in a localized village context far away from the more globalized, tourist driven cities. This also happened to be the year that the sanggar was officially established and gamelan math-metal band, Niskala, was born. I met the creator of Niskala, Luke Geaney, during his stay with our family. He had encountered a gentleman at a party in England who happened to be Pak Made Lasmawan’s old student. This gentleman recommended the stay at the sanggar and the following year, Geaney was in Bali. Along with about twenty other college students, Geaney took classes in music, dance, wood carving, and studies in religion. Being a drummer himself, we found a way to dig up my old, dusty, drumset and shred drum licks. Inevitably, we found the rest of the compound frequently yelling, “Be quiet!” to the sounds of heavy-metal grooves. During this disseminated quiet time, we found ourselves discussing our shared affinities for metal music and gamelan.

This condensed anecdote highlights the impact of shared music and the beginnings of new musical practices. I chose to share this particular story to account for the fact that out of Niskala’s seven members, Luke Geaney is the only one that has been to Bali; a faction of study that is integral to analyzing Niskala’s music.

Although Niskala’s aesthetic is reminiscent of Balinese musical sensibilities, none of the members are Balinese. Comprised of seven members (and still expanding) from the surrounding Manchester area, Niskala utilizes a dismembered rock instrumentation with traditional Balinese instruments; primarily found in gamelan baleganjur called ceng-ceng kopyak (processional cymbals) and tawa-tawa (bronze kettle pot used to keep a pulse). In a typical rock band, the drumset is played by one person and is fairly conventional in configuration: snare drum, bass drum, tom-toms, and an array of cymbals. Niskala has divided their drumset to be used by two people, with the omission of drumset cymbals. The rest of the band includes two electric guitar players, two ceng-ceng players, an electric bassist, and a vocalist. This particular set-up provides the tools for a loud yet crisp use of complex musical noise. 

Not only is rhythmic syncopation a key feature and integral mode of composition that ties math-metal and gamelan baleganjur together, but the use of kotekan (rhythmic and melodic interlocking) produces the convolved sound of cohesion. Kotekan is a system of hocketing that accounts for why Niskala decided to dismember the drumset. Both math-metal and gamelan baleganjur are rhythmically complex with an air of through-composition in the midst of cyclicity. This means that the rhythmic phrasings are asymmetrical within the larger foundation of a symmetrical musical repetition. What defines their unique compatibility is the idea that performers negotiate space with different textures in very micro-scaled temporality. This is what kotekan evokes when performing at high tempi. Niskala’s mixture of beautifully brash music also connote an embodiment of their physically carnivalesque costuming.   

Topeng in Bali is translated to masked arts. Specifically, it involves a performativity of dancing ascribed to shamanism. It engages the concept of niskala to evoke and communicate with intangible realities. Often times, topeng characterizes an individual archetype found in Balinese mythology or society that portray a humanistic or divine quality. All of the members in Niskala perform with topeng masks assuming a character in the ensemble. Not unlike a popular trend in metal music, the hyper-reality delegated by the artists constitute a realm of playfulness that forms the ideological safe-haven. 

Examples of topeng masks

Dispelled Darkness: Juxtaposition of ideology

Musically, gamelan baleganjur and math-metal share sonic qualities that necessarily define their formative structure. Why then do juxtaposing ideologies gravitate toward one another? Does the spectrum of polarity invite a philosophical clamor? I am inclined to suggest that this phenomenon would not occur without an ontology of deviancy. There must be something inherent in the musical properties that render the intentions ostensible. It is merely a product of communal cohesion through an air of exile. Metal in particular harbors community of exiles from the normative societal pool (I should know because I was one). The inviting sounds of gamelan baleganjur attracts first, then steers away from normalcy. This is different than the conventional notion of baleganjur merely warding off or dispelling evil spirits. Musical hybridity as a safe haven for juxtaposing ideology does not presume the oversight of problems likely to surface, but rather forms a praxis of play that includes a developing exigency for knowledge. It is a way to efficiently delve into cultures that are at the margins. Niskala is a band in infancy with a healthy growing artistic muse. Their stamp on metal music and gamelan as a whole, designate the placelessness of contemporary music and thought that examines a transitioning practice and ultimately, a new era.

References

Bakan, Michael B. 1999. Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan Beleganjur. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eisman , Fred B. 1990. Bali: Sekala and Niskala. Vol. 1, Essays on Religion, Ritual, and Art. Tokyo: Tuttle.

McGraw, Andrew Clay. 2013. Radical Traditions: Reimagining Culture in Balinese Contemporary Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

This piece originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of the Ecomusicology Newsletter.

The interdisciplinary nature of ecomusicology makes for rich teaching possibilities. An initial survey of the members on the Ecomusicology Listserve revealed several people teaching new or recently created university courses on or related to ecomusicology. Many of us feel like we are doing this for the first time, and indeed some are currently teaching or developing ecomusicology related courses for the first time in our respective countries. The upside to this is that there is no standard ecomusicology course or singular approach, but the downside is that we may feel that we are working on these courses in relative isolation and possibly inventing the wheel simultaneously. This is an excellent time in the development of this field to review what people have taught and are teaching, and to share successful ideas and gather inspiration. 

Here are the results of this initial survey: Of eleven people, five are in the US, three are in Canada, one is in England, one is in Finland, and one is in Hong Kong. All but one are based in some sort of music department as their home department (from musicology to composition), though some have appointments in other departments as well, from anthropology to European studies to Chinese civilization. Out of sixteen reported courses, ten are fully devoted to ecomusicology in some way with the remainder including one-to-three-week units on ecomusicology. 

Even this relatively small sampling of courses reveals a breadth of topics and syllabi that draw on readings and approaches from biology to landscape and urban studies to composition. Notable course titles include “Landscape and German Music,” “Soundscape Composition,” “Pop Music and Urban (Ethno)musicology,” and “Other Species’ Counterpoint: Human Music and Animal Songs.” Perhaps surprisingly, only two courses seemed to focus on a particular geographic location, the ecomusicology course in Finland, addressing the northern perspective, and the urban music course, which had the students create installations having to do with Edmonton, Alberta. 

I plan to continue this survey, broadening the target audience and potential submitters and discuss the results in more detail in the next issue of the Ecomusicology Newsletter, so please contact me at sonja.l.downing@lawrence.edu if you have a related course you would be willing to tell us about. Many thanks, and happy teaching!

Each month, Ethnomusicology Review partners with Echo: A Music-Centered Journal to bring you “Crossing Borders,” a series dedicated to featuring trans-disciplinary work involving music. ER Associate Editor Leen Rhee (leenrhee@ucla.edu) welcomes submissions.

This month, our post is from Rosaleen Rhee (aka Leen). Rosaleen is a PhD Musicology student at UCLA with a background in museum studies and piano performance. She is interested in music and politics, urban history and design, race and affect, and in exploring the different intersections of humanities education.

Status of HIV/AIDS in KOREA

Since Korea’s first detection of HIV in 1985, but especially since 2000, the number of people infected with HIV has drastically increased. Despite Korea’s relatively low number of infections (compared to South Africa or India for instance), this anachronistic incline of new HIV diagnoses and AIDS-related deaths over the past decade and a half, suggests how little progress Korea has made in countering the misconceptions and phobias associated with the disease. Statistically, more than 90 percent of HIV-infected Koreans are men and the gender ratio between men and women living with HIV/AIDS is projected to increase to 20:1 by 2017.[1] As such, the overwhelming majority of HIV-positive people in Korea are men, or as in the medical community likes to call them, “MSM” (men who have sex with men). However, activism of gay and sexual minority rights have been slow to gain momentum in Korea. Despite moderate success in creating on-line networks and grassroots organizations since the 1990s, the homosexual population in Korea continue to face accusations of being “promiscuous, hedonist, and AIDS-spreading aliens hiding in the dark.”[2] Misconceptions about homosexual or trans-sexual people abound, and people still seem to associate “gayness” with tropes of sexual deviance and moral corruption.

Such bewildering misconceptions about homosexuality and HIV/AIDS are quite common in Korea. These stems in large part from inefficient sex education in schools, as well as the near absence and misrepresentations of LGBT populations in public media. In an article that looks as the absent publicity of same-sex activism online, Thomas Chase delineates the major challenges of gay and lesbian activists fighting for recognition in Korea. The following is a quote from one activist who was a proponent of the highly contested Anti-Discrimination Bill:

“Unlike other countries, in Korea there is no law that either opposes or supports sexual minorities ... through this [Anti-Discrimination] law, by making the Korean government prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians, we are also making them acknowledge that they exist.”[3]

Despite the un-acknowledged existence and the very real forces of exclusion that people living with HIV/AIDS in Korea confront on a daily basis, anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns have been growing over the last ten years, and now I will talk about one such effort, that tried to call out and counter the ignorance people have regarding AIDS.

The Music Video – “Loving Memory”

In 2007, Jaurim and Tiger JK recorded a duet titled “Loving Memory” in support of the “Stop AIDS: Spray Love” campaign. Initially, “Loving Memory” was composed for Jaurim’s 6^th rock album Ashes to Ashes. However, for the campaign version of the song, the musicians revised “Loving Memory,” which was a Rock Ballad, to accommodate the stylistic markers of hip hop fit for Tiger JK. Lee Yong—a prolific and widely admired director of television commercials and music videos—infused the music video of “Loving Memory,” with scenes redolent of female sexuality and tragedy. The music video’s connections to anti-AIDS activism is made explicit only at the very end, when we see messages from both artists about the neglect and resulting suffering of those people infected with the disease. 

[Picture of the rock band Jaurim and Tiger JK, by Duk-hoon Lee: From left, Tae-hoon Goo, Tiger JK, Sun-kyu Lee, Yoona Kim, Jin-man Kim]

Sonic Analysis

“Loving Memory” begins with a melancholic tune played on the solo trumpet, with the static timbres of a phonograph crackling in the background. The mood this introduction sets, plays a pivotal role in framing the entire song. The sound of the phonograph’s crackling signify nostalgia, the echoing solitary presence of the trumpet give the impression of a soliloquy, and the reluctant but ultimate step-wise descent of the melody connote a heavy-hearted yet acquiescent disposition. This prelude heralds a nostalgic and melodramatic mood, which I believe inspired a film noir packaging of the entire music video.

The timbre of the trumpet solo conjure up images of dark urbanity, such as underground jazz bars often seen in noir films. The one that seems particularly relevant to the sonic aesthetic of “Loving Memory” is Jerry Goldsmith’s music for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). “Love Theme from Chinatown” is the leitmotif of J.J. “Jake” Gittes and Evelyn Cross Mulwray, played by Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. As the plot reveals Evelyn Mulwray’s identity and cause of suffering, the inevitable specter of death draws nearer. Similarly, the prelude to “Loving Memory” acts as a harbinger of the suicide we witness in the end of the M/V. 

The melody outlined by the trumpet and throughout the chorus, has a striking resemblance to Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film)” in the album OK Computer. Composed for Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, the lyrics of “Exit Music” talk of escape and death by choking. Phrases such as “today we escape,” “now we are one in everlasting peace,” and “we hope that you choke” paint an eerie picture of the accidental and real suicides that take place at the end of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. That “Exit Music” alludes to the story of fatal love, and that “Loving Memory” articulates the sorrows of unrequited love as being fatal, deserve attention. 

Lyrical Analysis

The lyrics of “Loving Memory” is divided into two perspectives, whose difference is further accented by the divide in gender. Yoona Kim—the lead singer of Jaurim—sings about the tribulations of a disheartened person, longing the memory of what seems to have been a haunting love affair. The protagonist pictures her heartache as being drenched in winter’s cold rain. She laments having even met her former lover, and seems incapable of escaping the “scar” and “mirage” of her past. All she has left is her loneliness and faint memory. In comparison, Tiger JK forthrightly addresses what he imagines people living with HIV/AIDS must feel. He stresses topics of ignorance, neglect, and victimization. Then during the second verse, he makes an explicit stance of advocacy, insisting that “the world can change if you show attention.” The back-and-forth between Yoona Kim’s forlorn melody and Tiger JK’s vexed rap solidifies the gender binary represented visually in the music video.

Visual Analysis

Director Lee Yong’s adept use of red- and blue-color lighting and manipulated scenes of abstract bodily fluids, form the backdrop of a supposedly AIDS-infected female character’s (supposed) suicide. In my visual analysis, I pay attention to the connections made between gender, space, and the disease (HIV/AIDS).

As feminist scholar Donna Haraway once said, “Siting and sighting boundaries,” are risky practices. In “Loving Memory” the boundaries between the diseased and healthy are drawn using boundaries between female and male, in addition to boundaries between mobile public spaces and contained private spaces. While Tiger JK roams the city’s graffitied tunnels with his entourage, the female protagonist sits, lies, and eventually dies in the bathroom. In the end, the alienated female character in the music video forfeits her desires to live.

The female protagonist is always alone and always confined to lavatory spaces such as the toilet stall or the bath room. These associations, coupled by the ambiguous shots of blood and bodily fluids, contribute to a sexist and perplexing portrayal of a person living with HIV/AIDS. Despite the implicit acknowledgement of pain that HIV/AIDS-infected patients experience, there are no manifestations in the music video of the body in physical pain. Instead, drops of blood, bodily organs, and other ambiguous surgical and organ-like materials intervene the narrative.

Furthermore, the female character often gets camouflaged with the colors and materials in the mise en scène. Her body, her body parts, and ambiguous fluids operate as proxies for the disease, and these detached corporeal scenes paint the actions of the female character as acts of resignation. In other words, she never gains autonomy, but behave as if the background is dictating her. So, in the end, the agency of the diseased and neglected heroine gets erased twice: first through the apathetic body, and then again through the body effacing into the backdrop. This mirrors the invisibility of people living with HIV/AIDS in Korea, and suggests that they and their HIV positive status is hidden or secret.

Affect Analysis

Crucial to my examination of “Loving Memory” is Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies.” Ahmed describes that “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments.”[4] Adopting this framework, we can reason that the representation of gender, hygienic spaces, and allusions to film noir in “Loving Memory,” attach the females living with HIV/AIDS to contained, dark spaces. And since both the bodies and the spaces they are in, are hidden from view, it becomes almost impossible to attach a social space to these bodies. Moreover, Ahmed sees “emotions as psychological dispositions” and urges us to “consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.”[5] Accordingly, the psychological dispositions of deviance, covertness, and fatalism conjured up by the sounds and images of film noir mediate the relationships between the diseased and healthy, and between the moral and immoral.

This is why I find the gendered and spatial representations in “Loving Memory” in need of critical attention. The confinement of invisible populations in underground spaces makes it difficult for us to identify and locate these people. For now, the enigmatic, vulnerable, and mysterious female body contains the disease and therefore embodies the invisible population living with HIV/AIDS.

*     *     *

The music video’s message: That we should pity those who suffer and not let their suicides happen, might be a right step forward. But what we are supposed to sympathize with here, is a misrepresentation. The “this” part of the we should not let “this” happen, is a fabricated, aesthetic, and cinematic image based on the music’s timbral and melodic qualities. In other words, the music—rather than the message of the campaign—prescribed the protagonist, plot, and mise-en-scene of the music video. The forgotten, ignored, and the increasing yet preventable deaths of people living with HIV/AIDS, are reasons for scholars to keep interrogating efforts that aim to make visible their invisible status.

By guest columnist Carol Merrill-Mirsky, Ph.D.

Jeff Richmond, Jacqueline DjeDje, and Carol Merrill-Mirsky at the "Peace Cave" where the 1738-39 Peace Treaty was signed.  Photo courtesy Jeff Richmond.

In 1986, Professor Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje and I made a short field trip to Jamaica to observe and record the January Sixth celebration of the Maroons of the village of Accompong, which commemorates both the birth of the Maroon leader, Kojo (Cudjoe), and his victory over the British, which resulted in the signing of the peace treaty of 1738-39. Jeff Richmond, as videographer, and our daughters, who were nine and ten years old at the time, accompanied us.

The Accompong Maroons are descendants of Africans taken to Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who successfully resisted enslavement by the British rulers of the island. Accompong is the largest of several Maroon villages in the remote mountain area of Jamaica known as the Cockpit Country.  In 1986, Accompong was a town of about 1,600 inhabitants.  It is located in St. Elizabeth parish in the western part of Jamaica approximately thirty-five miles southeast of Montego Bay.

A chance meeting with a UCLA film student last year in 2014 caused me to rethink the value of our old VHS field video.  I had edited it down from endless hours of footage during the summer of 1986 and never gave it much thought again, mostly because the quality of the video left a lot to be desired.  Shooting on VHS was fairly new at the time, definition and color were poor, and editing was primitive.  But this film student, whom I met at a hipster event in Echo Park, said that there was an interest today in old VHS tapes like the ones I was sharing that day of my dissertation research on hand-clapping games.

While I was a bit skeptical that old videotapes were interesting to anyone, I dug out the Maroon video along with the hand-clapping videos and another video I made in the late 1980s called “Rhythms & Roots: Five Musical Families,” when I first started work as curator at the Hollywood Bowl Museum.  Recently I had been working on videos for the Bowl with Hoku Uchiyama at Vanishing Angle, a Los Angeles-based film production company.  I was about to retire.  I suddenly had time to do my own projects. I worked with Vanishing Angle to digitize and improve the old tapes as much as was possible; we re-edited, added subtitles, and created new titles to replace the funny-looking dot-matrix titles from the 1980s. 

Jacqueline DjeDje and I met to talk about what we wanted to do with the new version of the Maroon video.  Publish it?  Sell it? Make it available on a fee-based academic website?  We quickly decided that we wanted to make it available for free to anyone who was interested.  When we visited Accompong in 1986, there was no electricity or running water.  I’m pretty sure they have computers and smart phones there now.  We are reaching out to contacts in Accompong who can view this video, see their friends and family members of thirty years ago, and share the documentation of a piece of their cultural history.

Farika Birhan, a friend of the Accompong Maroons, organized the 1986 trip.  With funding and support from the UCLA Academic Senate, Center for African-American Studies, Institute of American Cultures, and Department of Ethnomusicology, the project was accomplished with the cooperation and assistance of all residents of Accompong. 

In addition, an article by DjeDje, entitled “Remembering Kojo: History, Music, and Gender in the January Sixth Celebration of the Jamaican Accompong Maroons,” that documents the 1986 celebration can be found in the Black Music Research Journal, Volume 18, Number 1/2, Spring/Fall 1998. 

The film is now online on the Ethnomusicology Archive channel on the Internet Archive.

Bring the Noise's recent article, Music for Airports, inspired two ER readers to document their own experiences with the soundscapes of what Marc Augé called "non-places." Augé's term refers to anthropological spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places". Other "non-places" include highways, hotel rooms, supermarkets, train stations, and bus terminals.

The original article focused on the soundscapes of airports in relation to Brian Eno's 1978 album Music for Airports. Edwin Porras documented the soundscapes near the San Pedro Terminal Station and opted to let the sounds speak for themselves. Nicole Andrew's documented her experiences with the sounds inside airports and wrote about the connection of the sounds to her feelings and experiences in each "non-place." Here are comments and excerpts of audio and video taken by both scholars.

Porras

I explored the sound of the fountain outside the San Pedro Terminal Station. This fountain automatically plays music in 10 minute intervals and without regard if anyone is listening. People might pass by as they work out or stroll down the length of the tramline. This terminal serves as hub for buses, boats, and trains.

Andrews

Inspired by the concept of consciously observing music in "non-places," I decided to record my findings during my international travels to Bulgaria and Berlin in the summer of 2015. Numerous connecting flights meant I got the opportunity to observe a number of different airports in various cities, including Los Angeles (LAX), Rome (FCO), Sofia (SOF), Vienna (VIE), and Amsterdam (AMS). I used my phone to collect the recordings, holding it as close to the music source as possible, and took a photo that was representative of the location.

I initially thought I would encounter much more music than I did. The vast majority of the airports I came through did not have music unless it was coming from a shop, and every shop had their own music.

One of the more interesting examples I found was in Sofia, where there was a piano next to departing gates, available for anyone to play. It so happened that I walked past as a man was playing. He stopped shortly after I finished recording to give a short lesson to one of his children. Other intriguing examples were a forest-themed lounge in Amsterdam, and by a large video of water falling, near baggage claims and customs in Los Angeles, which both had corresponding nature sounds.

I later identified the songs I recorded, which I have paired with their location and a short description of the setting:

1. LAX  (Los Angeles). Airport, shopping center: "Telephone" - Lady Gaga feat. Beyonce

2. LAX (Los Angeles). Airport, shopping center: "Peace of Mind" - Above & Beyond feat. Zoe Johnston

3. FCO (Rome). Airport, just getting off my plane, standing near bathrooms and a bookshop: "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" - Green Day

4. FCO (Rome -> Sofia). Airplane: "Bye Bye Mon Amour" - Ludovico Eunaudi

5. SOF (Sofia). Airport, by my gate: "Fallen" - Blank & Jones with Delerium & Rani

6. SOF (Sofia). Same airport, closer to my gate: Beethoven Sonata No. 8 “Pathetique” (live)

7. SOF (Sofia -> Vienna). Airplane: "Visoko, Visoko" - FSB

8. VIE (Vienna). Airport, by luxury shops: "Aber Dich Gibt's Nur Einmal Fu‪ür Mich" - Nilson Brothers

9. AMS (Amsterdam). Airport lounge: nature sounds

10. AMS (Amsterdam). Airport, restaurant area: "Amar Sin Condicion" - Maelo

11. LAX (Los Angeles). Entering baggage claim and customs: nature sounds

References

Augé, Marc. 1995. "Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity." London: Verso Press.

Nicole Andrews is an undergraduate student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA and has performed in the Department's Indian, Bulgarian, Bluegrass, and Gospel ensembles.

Edwin Porras is a graduate student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA focusing on the role of the corneta china in Cuban society.

Lucas Zangirolami Bonetti is a PhD candidate at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo, Brazil. He is currently a Visiting Graduate Researcher in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles where he is conducting field research on the work of Brazilian composer Moacir Santos. His website is www.moacirsantosfilmscores.com. Bonetti has presented at conferences throughout Brazil, Argentina and in the United States and has performed as a guitarist in the Orquestra Jovem Tom Jobim  the Big Band da Santa, the Lucas Bonetti Octet, and the Lucas Bonetti Quartet. His research is supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP): grant #2012/11195-4, grant #2013/23992-9, and grant #2015/03111-3.

In 2001 two extremely prolific Brazilian musicians, Mario Adnet and Zé Nogueira, initiated the rediscovery of the work of one of Brazil’s most important maestros: Moacir Santos (1926-2006). Due to their efforts, musicians and the general public gained access to an incredible body of material. Since then, a number of performers have started including Santos’s music in their repertoire and academic researchers have begun to focus their resources on investigating this breathtaking music. Some of the most important contributions during these years have come from Andrea Ernest Dias, who released the book Moacir Santos or the Paths of a Brazilian Musician and organized two editions of the Moacir Santos Festival (2013 and 2014), held in several cities across Brazil.

I began my research on Santos’s film music in 2012 at UNICAMP (State University of Campinas - Brazil), investigating his work for the Brazilian market in the early 1960s. This was published in 2014 as my master’s dissertation. In the same year, I started my doctoral studies at the same university, extending my research to include Santos’s film work from his time in the United States. This ongoing research is due to finish within in the next couple of years. Professor Ney Carrasco, who runs the Research Group on Music Applied to the Dramaturgical and Audiovisual, is supervising the project.

My research has received support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) as well as a 2014 grant from RUMOS Itaú Cultural to develop an interactive website showcasing the materials I have found and produced so far. I am fortunate to be one of 104 selected projects out of 15,120 candidates. In 2014, the application process was vastly de-bureaucratized, impelling many artists to apply for the prize. The Itaú Cultural Foundation was extremely flexible and committed to the work during the first year of the site, offering fresh ideas and suggestions that aided the project’s growth and development.

Over the last four years, I have been able to transcribe the cues from some of the films on which Santos worked. All of my musical transcriptions as well as the corresponding video excerpts, extracted from the movies, are available on the website. During the transcription process, Dias, the most important scholar on Moacir Santos’s music, gave me access to an old personal notebook that she had found during her field research in California. Among all the sketches and compositional ideas, I found crucial material, including melodic profiles of his film cues, some orchestration directions, and a bullet point list of his ideas for the music for Os Fuzis.

After almost eight months of intense and lonely transcribing activities, I was able to hire several specialized musical editors with the support of Itaú Cultural. These editors are some of the best active Brazilian musicians, including Nailor Proveta and André Mehmari. After six more months of careful revision, I was able to publish the scores in their final version.

In September 2015, I conducted several events celebrating and advertising the website’s launch in Brazil. Talks were held at universities and music conservatories, such as the State University of Campinas (Campinas, SP), Santa Marcelina College (São Paulo, SP), Souza Lima College (São Paulo, SP), and the São Paulo State School of Music (São Paulo, SP), as well as at a screening of Ganga Zumba (dir., Carlos Diegues, 1964) at the Campinas Image and Sound Museum (Campinas, SP). The English language version of the site will receive its first launch on December 9, in Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UCLA. It is particularly special to have this event for the Los Angeles community, an area where Santos lived for almost 40 years.

Between 1963 and 1966 Santos scored six Brazilian films: Seara Vermelha (dir., Alberto d'Aversa, 1963), O Santo Módico (dir., Robert Mazoyer, 1964), Ganga Zumba (dir., Carlos Diegues, 1964), Os Fuzis (dir., Ruy Guerra, 1965), O Beijo (dir., Flávio Tambellini, 1965), and A Grande Cidade (dir., Carlos Diegues, 1966). For the most part his film scores were written in as the Brazilian cinema industry transitioned from a wealthier, studio-driven period in the 1940s and 1950s (led by companies like Atlântida and Vera Cruz, who mimicked Hollywood productions of the time) to a more modest, auteur-driven period in the 1960s. This movement became known as Cinema Novo, when the directors, producers, actors and crew members worked for little to no money. In the early years of the 1960s, big budget productions became rarer over time, and film music reflected this path. In his first scores from 1963, Santos was artistically attuned with the Cinema Novo concepts, but was paid and had funds to pay for an orchestral recording. The films Santos scored between 1964 and 1965 had dramatically reduced instrumentations due to budget issues, but he was still paid to compose original music. For his last Brazilian production, in 1966, he performed the role of Musical Director, merely selecting the most appropriate pre-recorded songs and concert pieces. At that time copyrights payments were not as strict as they are today, and using pre-recorded material meant saving a great amount of money.

Santos ended up working for cinema after many years in Brazilian radio, following the path of several older musicians, including Radamés Gnattali (1906-1988), Guerra-Peixe (1914-1993), and Leo Peracchi (1911-1993). People who worked in radio during its “golden age” were the most qualified for film scoring responsibilities. Those composers worked mostly in the late 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, with Santos following approximately a decade after (between the 1950s and early 1960s). Santos’s path was not easy. He was the first Afro-Brazilian musician to become a maestro at Rádio Nacional, after a series of Euro-Brazilian maestros. His music has strong ties with Afro-Brazilian culture, and his first album released in Brazil, Coisas, is considered a landmark example of Afro-Brazilian music. Despite the reputation of this important album, Santos’s music and life remain little known both in Brazil and in the United States. By making this website an open resource in both English and Portuguese, I hope to contribute to the spread of knowledge of this important musician outside of the small circle that currently celebrates him.

For more on Santos's work and all of my transcriptions, see www.moacirsantosfilmscores.com.