Love and Death in Classical Music-Methodological Problems in Analyzing Human Meaning in Music*

It has been clear since the work of Weber that the relationship between social structure and musical syntax is an important potential area of sociological investigation. Little work has been done in this area, however, probably because of methodological problems. Discussions of methodological problems in analyzing meanings in music converge in music theory and sociology on the issue of objectivity. Recent comparisons of musical syntax with language and the work of Heinrich Schenker in music theory provide the basis for an interdisciplinary methodology for analyzing typified collective meanings communicated through musical syntax. It is suggested that, on the basis of this methodology, these collective meanings could be analyzed “objectively.” Two examples of this approach are provided through typified collective musical expressions of love and death.     

Romancing the nation,effacing history: reading Kenya through patriotic choral music

This article looks at music as one of the channels used by oppressive regimes to persuade the public to pledge loyalty to the nation and government of the day while at the same time blinding citizens from acknowledging the social, economic and political realities on the ground. Music composed, performed and accompanied by dance and visual images, and subsequently broadcast through different media channels, can be effective in achieving this mission. This article examines the song Tuishangilie Kenya (1984, revised 2012) as an example of the way music and performance in the Kenyan context become tools to efface substantial historical realities in order to project an imagined vision of a united nation. This article draws on Stuart Hall’s argument that music channelled through mass media can instil a sense of patriotism and national consciousness, and Nicholas Cook’s analysis of music in television commercials, to argue that the 2012 remaking of Tuishangilie Kenya provides a potential avenue for constructing a kind of double meaning, one overtly intended and one subverted at the end. Through an analysis of the song’s lyrical, musical and visual parameters I demonstrate how the audience is “hoodwinked” but how propaganda can backfire.     

The Aural and Moral Idylls of “Englishness” and Folk Music

The idea of “Englishness” is explored as an historical social construction that is subject to ongoing negotiation. Important features of “Englishness” are embedded in the sacralized symbolism of the “rural idyll,” which represents traditional English values. “Landscapes” and “soundscapes” are utilized to construct personal and national identities in periods of “revivalism.” By viewing English folk music through an interactionist framework, responses to the music build upon earlier collective works that have shaped traditional song. “Englishness” is problematized as either an inclusive, or exclusive, identity. Ideational artifacts thus provide a foundation for social action.¹     

The aesthetic and practical fields of excrementality of L’boulevard festival

The revolutionary aspect of performance is given ample room in this article. “Conflict” deserves a renewed importance, because it places the term “transgression” in relation to festivals as sites for the embodiment of social struggles. We will hone in on L’boulevard festival, which not only participates in a dialogue with social conflicts, but also epitomises them through an ambivalent theatricality that merges the real with the unreal. As festival agents identify their marginal place in relation to the body of the system – generally present in the festival through panoptical surveillance, badges, barriers and an entire discourse of social categorisation, and as they are cognisant of the festival as possibly an empowering threshold, a place for no system other than that chosen by the theatres of roleplaying, they activate their excrementality, a mentality which, in its ideological framing, creates and innovates, inspired by excrement, its functionality and symbolism. Excreta-mental types would perform the very khsoriya (vulgarity) expected of them, by performing their marginality (their becoming central), among other things, through art.     

Promoting young people’s musical identities to facilitate recovery from mental illness

The new ‘youth mental health paradigm’ (IAYMH. 2015. “International Association for Youth Mental Health.” Accessed February 15, http://www.iaymh.org/) promotes the need for youth-friendly mental health options. Music therapy initiatives offer innovative modes of working towards young people’s recovery in ways that align with the ethos of these services (McCaffrey, Edwards, and Fannon. 2011. “Is There a Role for Music Therapy in the Recovery Approach in Mental Health?” The Arts in Psychotherapy 38 (3): 185–189). This paper details a participatory research project investigating how and why promoting young people’s musical identities can facilitate their recovery from mental illness. Young people accessing a music therapy programme in a youth mental health service in Australia participated in collaborative qualitative interviews that were analysed using constructivist grounded theory techniques. Cycles of action and reflection resulted in a grounded theory explaining the recovery of musical identity, and mapping young people’s community-based music needs for wellbeing. We propose that promoting young people’s musical identities facilitates recovery through: the construction of a health-based identity; facilitating meaning-making; and supporting social participation. Findings are discussed in relation to recovery literature and social justice issues that arise in response to findings about young people’s needs for appropriate music access.     

The Interaction Order and Musical Sound: Shopping with Erving Goffman

Drawing on qualitative interviews and extending insights provided by Erving Goffman (1983, 1971), this article argues that music plays a crucial role in the interaction order of retail environments. I suggest music permeates these locations of consumption; shoppers are presented as perceiving musical sounds as both “territorial offenses” and sounds that can also represent an “intimate ally.” Crucial here is the nature of territoriality that manages an individual's exposure through the symbolic and literal placement of boundaries around the self, covering and protecting the self while navigating public space, tacitly securing rights in relation to others, and minimizing encroachments upon the “territories of the self.” I contend that when shopping, participants can feel “at home” in these locations thanks in part to the role of music but also in other cases actively avoid these situations, using privatizing music as a means of regaining auditory discretion. The contribution of this article extends Goffman's formulation of the interaction order, accounting for the dual role that music represents, as both a territorial offense and an intimate ally for shoppers.     

All Sons of Gaika

Departing from a consideration of Jacob Dlamini’s book, Native Nostalgia, this essay critically reviews the conceptual terrain implied by “nostalgia,” re-situating it in relation to memory, especially where it intersects with debates over the status of “truth” in relation to “history.” We explore nostalgia through three dualities that underpin a burgeoning literature: remembering and forgetting, witnessing and testimony, and mourning and melancholia. Against conceptual oppositions that pit remembering against forgetting, or alternatively, that seek to remedy the fallibility of memory by seeking access to the “truth” of history, we suggest that nostalgia is probably more usefully understood as a practice of coincident temporalities. Nostalgia, in this sense, denotes a specific way of enfolding the past into the present, and indeed the future. We discuss two projects of post-apartheid testimony that work from, and on, the presumed antagonism that nostalgia sets up between “truth” and its possible distortions in memory: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996–1998, and the Apartheid Archive Project initiated in 2009. We conclude by suggesting that South Africans may need to pursue what Ackbar Abbas has called an “affective politics of disappointment” if the past is to be brought more creatively to bear on South Africa’s future.     

Creativity and Learning Jazz: The Practice of “Listening”

This article is about interaction, culture, and creativity. The ethnographic setting is a set of jazz performance classes at a California university. Although I write about jazz music, the reader need not have a background in studying or performing jazz (or music in general) to understand this article. In the title of the article, the term “practice” refers to (1) “listening” as a culturally specific communicative practice, and (2) the practice (a.k.a. rehearsal) of that culturally specific version of “listening”. I document and analyze how jazz instructors communicate with students about group interplay during musical performance. Extrapolating from this focus, I suggest some ways that contemporary linguistic anthropology can contribute to theories of creativity, focusing on the role that cultural norms of interaction defined by a particular activity play in constraining or shaping creative processes.     

Black Edens,country Eves: Listening,performance, and black queer longing in country music

ABSTRACT

This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black country music listeners and performers, the experience of being a closeted fan also fosters an experience of ideological hailing, as well as queer world-making. Royster suggests that through Black queer country music fandom and performance, fans construct risky and soulful identities. The article uses Tina Turner's solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! (1974) as an example of country music's power as a tool for resistance to racial, sexual, and class disciplining.     

Framing Atmospheres: Goffman,Space, and Music in Everyday Life

In this article, we synthesize Goffman's microsociology with recent developments in fields such as aesthetics, geography, and urban studies labeled “atmosphere theory.” Our central rationale is if microsociology is to deepen its account of embodiment and the noncognitive it needs a theory of spatialized moods. In the second half, we develop our synthesis with respect to musical atmospheres and conclude by drawing on our own research regarding how social actors use music to shape “involvements” and “disinvolvements” in the spatial ambiances of public transportation, the street, the workplace, and the home.     

《爱上邓丽君》——“中西合璧”再现经典歌声

中国著名音东剧制作人李盾的艺术创作生涯中,有一位“女神”一直深深地打动着他,那就是邓丽君。在他眼中,邓丽君的歌声曾经“改变了一个时代,引领了一个时代,感动了一个时代,也温暖了一个时代。”邓丽君生前有一大遗撼,未曾在大陆举办演唱会,为热爱她的人们现场演绎她音乐的美。今年6月至8月,李盾携手美国百老汇创作班底,将原创音乐剧《爱上邓丽君》（2014修排版）搬上北京东方剧院的舞台,用一种特殊的方式让邓丽君“魂归故里”,也让年轻一代重新认识邓丽君,爱上邓丽君。     

Between Literary and Subliterary Paradigms: Skaz and Contemporary Russian Estrada Comedy

The present article contends that literary skaz has significantly influenced the narrative framework of contemporary Russian estrada comedy. Skaz’s “theatricality,” “orality,” ambiguous authorship, spontaneity, and “folksiness” have the potential to add a rich, conversation-like complexity to the generally non-improvisational Russian comedy performance. Skaz’s allocutional projection of the audience into a comedian’s performance also creates an illusion of mutual communication between performer and public. While relying on Bakhtin’s treatment of skazas a double-voiced narrative, I argue that skaz allows the comedian to deliver sharp social commentary through a provincial or uneducated persona. Of particular interest for this study is the practical motivation for Russian comedians to resort to the mask of skaz narrators in the 1990s, an era of seemingly open public discourse. I argue that the continuing appropriation of a written, literary text (skaz) by an oral, popular performance (estrada comedy) suggests the versatility of the literary form, while simultaneously testifying to the on-going health of the written and spoken word in contemporary Russia.     

从“摇滚”到“佛系”:流行歌曲中的青年亚文化流变解读

音乐是文化的符号,流行歌曲根植于所处时代的现实土壤之中。改革开放以来,不同时期的流行歌曲以一种鲜明的风格记录时代声音,为我们透视青年亚文化流变提供了独特的视角。“摇滚”歌曲反映了改革开放初期,青年释放自我与现实抗争的文化情结;“怀旧”音乐是青年人在“前面无路想回头”境况下的一种心理调节;以“自我”为主题的歌曲是青年主体意识增强的现实回应;“佛系”歌曲映射了青年人自由空间被挤占后的一种养心策略。     

Consequences of the increasing rationality of music: A reassessment of Weberian rationalization

Max Weber's theory of the rationalization of music is used to demonstrate that there is a nexus between the tonal structure of music, which is formally “rational” in the Weberian sense, and the fundamental irrational properties on which it rests. It is posited that Weber, although failing to differentiate between types of irrationality, was primarily concerned with only two forms: harmonic‐structural and interpretational. Ironically, there is another more sociological type of irrationality that Weber failed to address. This type may be termed “interactional” irrationality. The importance of recognizing this element within the musical organization is critical, as the balance between rationality and irrationality becomes increasingly delicate. Case studies of professional, classically trained symphonic musicians and conductors illustrate the irrational consequences of growing rationality within the social organization of symphonic music.     

Collaborative Music‐Making with Digital Audio Workstations: The “nth Member” as a Heuristic Device for Understanding the Role of Technologies in Audio Composition

This article examines amateur music‐making using a digital audio workstation, showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music‐making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi‐modal activity through a heuristic device: the “nth member.” Whereas sociology has typically been concerned with the cultural facets of how music is made and consumed, we explore the material practices of collaborative song creation utilizing conversation analytic techniques—“turn‐taking” and “next‐selection”—to capture two key interactional moments.     

Secondary Popular Culture

In the context of “primary process” assumptions concerning mass distributed culture, the idea of “secondary process” assumptions is developed. A secondary popular culture process (1) is focused on the time period after “legitimate” distribution is conventionally considered complete, (2) treats “finished” cultural materials as raw materials, (3) takes for granted the design and actualization features of “legitimate” production and distribution (which is tantamount to “sacredness”), (4) “turns over” nationally (and internationally) produced wants (“markets”) at the local level for local profit, and (5) creates localized occupational, professional, and stylistic identities which are unanticipated consequences of the centralized producer's work. The idea is then illustrated through a brief discussion of the author's research concerning local popular music performers.