Resistance through Music
Whether contemplating Potlatch Records ceremonial music from the Potlatch bans of 1885-1951 or the work of Black Quantum Futurism, who synthesize quantum physics with Afro-diasporic principles as a way to create new futures, music is a site for resistance. Such forms of music offer spaces to push back against racial stereotypes while also being a distinct form of self-expression that is part of many cultural traditions replete with their own style and language.
Tufts Resources
Music, Longing and Belonging by
With contributions from musicologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and literary scholars, this book provides an interdisciplinary perspective on how different modes of musical sociability - ranging from opera performances to collective singing and internet fan communities - inspire imagined communities that not only transcend national borders, but also challenge the boundaries between the self and the other. While the relationship between music and nationhood has been widely researched, few comparative and transnational studies on music and identity exist. The main focus of this volume, therefore, is on forms of musical belonging not bound by national identity, which take place in contexts of appropriation and displacement. The essays collected here address different modes of musical self-expression through the art of others and frame music as a unique medium of desire, which not only channels the experience of belonging during times of social and political upheaval, but also induces its opposite - non-belonging, detachment and dissent. The book is organized into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of musical experience: music as a site of cultural appropriation, music as a conduit of transnational identities, its role in diaspora and displacement, and, finally, music as a means of negotiating gendered identities.
Call Number: Music Library: ML3916 .M876 2013
Music, Power and Liberty by
Music is a complex and multi-faceted art form. Yet too often it is regarded as discrete and self-contained. The chapters in this groundbreaking book explore different aspects of how music may shape society and culture, yet go much further in viewing musical activity as a mode of power that can transform the lives of communities and individuals. The contributors (who include sociologists, musicologists and performers) focus above all on the relationship between music and the political upheavals of the Arab Spring. They examine key topics like music and revolution in Tunisia; the Egyptian musical tradition of the Revolutionary Song; and the ambivalent social status of the Arab musician, revered by the public when performing but also facing suspicion in a society where music is rightly seen as dangerous and subversive. In showing how music has been used to challenge the status quo, as well as enforce it, the ambiguity of music is fully revealed: it can be used to bolster both regime power and popular liberty, often simultaneously. This is a vital contribution to more nuanced understandings of music and politics.
Call Number: Music Library: ML3916 .M8782 2016
Music and the Racial Imagination by
"A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.
Call Number: Music Library: ML3795 .M782 2000
Western Music and Race by
This contributory volume, the first book of its kind, provides a snapshot of the ways in which discourse about Western music and race overlapped and became intertwined during the period from Wagner's death to the rise of National Socialism and fascism elsewhere in Europe. At these two framing moments such overlapping was at its most explicit: Wagner's racially inflected 'regeneration theories' were at one end and institutionalised cultural racism at the other. The book seeks to provide insights into the key national contexts in which such discourses circulated in the interim period, as well as to reflect a range of archival, historical, critical, and philosophical approaches to the topic. National contexts covered include Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and North America. The contributors to the volume are leading scholars in the field, and the book contains many illustrative music examples and images which bring the subject matter to life.
Call Number: Music Library: ML3916 .W47 2007
Open Access
Conceptual and Experimental Music
Often characterized by improvisation, chance, and indeterminacy, both conceptual and experimental music incorporate interdisciplinary approaches to pushing the confines of what music has been and can be. Dive deeper into current scholarship around this boundary-defying genre of music in these sources.
Tufts Resources
Eight Lectures on Experimental Music by
Brilliant lectures by the most influential experimental music composers of our time In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide rare insights by composers whose work has shaped our understanding of what it means to be experimental: Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Collected here for the first time, together these lectures tell the story of twentieth-century American experimental music, covering such topics as repetition, phase, drone, duration, collaboration, and technological innovation. Containing introductory comments by Lucier and the original question and answer sessions between the students and the composers, this book makes the theory and practice of experimental music available and accessible to a new generation of students, artists, and scholars.
Call Number: Music Library: ML197 .E33 2018
Electronic and Experimental Music by
Electronic and Experimental Musicis a second edition of a well-known text on the history of electronic music. Holmes' original book, first published in 1985, was a beginner's introduction both to the theories of sound and sound production and to the history of some of the earliest experiments in instrument building and composition. In this new edition, the author thoroughly updates and enlarges the theoretical and historical sections. He also presents new material on using home computers and the many software and Internet resources available.
Call Number: Music Library: ML1380 .H64 2002
Experimenting the Human by
An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we're already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier's neurofeedback music, Pamela Z's BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik's musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros's experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.
Call Number: Music Library: ML3877 .B37 2023
Tomorrow Is the Question by
In recent decades, experimental music has flourished outside of European and American concert halls. The principles of indeterminacy, improvisation, nonmusical sound, and noise, pioneered in concert and on paper by the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, can now be found in all kinds of new places: activist films, rock recordings, and public radio broadcasts, not to mention in avant-garde movements around the world. The contributors to Tomorrow Is the Question explore these previously unexamined corners of experimental music history, considering topics such as Sonic Youth, Julius Eastman, the Downtown New York pop avant-garde of the 1970s, Fluxus composer Benjamin Patterson, Tokyo's Music group (aka Group Ongaku), the Balinese avant-garde, the Leicester school of British experimentalists, Cuba's Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC, Pauline Oliveros's score for the feminist documentary Maquilapolis, NPR's 1980s RadioVisions, and the philosophy of experimental musical aesthetics. Taken together, this menagerie of people, places, and things makes up an actually existing experimentalism that is always partial, compromised, and invented in its local and particular formations--in other words, these individual cases suggest that experimentalism has been a far more variegated set of practices and discourses than previously recognized. Asking new questions leads to researching new materials, new individuals, and new contexts and, eventually, to the new critical paradigms that are necessary to interpret these materials. Gathering contributions from historical musicology, enthnomusicology, history, philosophy, and cultural studies, Tomorrow Is the Question generates future research directions in experimental music studies by way of a productive inquiry that sustains and elaborates critical conversations.
Call Number: Music Library and ebook: ML197 .T63 2014
Music and Gender Expression
As with all aspects of one’s identity, gender expression plays a role in musical compositions as well, whether through the composer/musician themself or more specifically in their work, like Sarah Hennies who explores expressions of trans identities through voice, and C. Spencer Yeh who uses synthetic female voice in Mandarin Chinese dialects to explore Asian identities. The following resources explore gender expression through voice and presentation in music.
Tufts Resources
Book Chapter: Transgender Passing Guides and the Vocal Performance of Gender and Sexuality by
Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.
Call Number: ebook
Grounds for Possible Music by
Gender, voice, language and identity are particularly pertinent topics for musical creation--for the shaping of a canon, and for interactions in the field. All four are strongly contextually determined, and necessarily raise issues of paradigms and otherness. In Grounds for Possible Music, these four core notions serve as a set of lenses permitting different perspectives on one another. Some 20 sound artists, whose work varies in form, strategy and language, and in sub-fields within the sound arts, explore these questions--among them Antye Greie, Andrea Parkins, Aur lie Lierman, Bonnie Jones, Cathy Lane, Susanne Kirchmayr, Felicity Ford, Heimo Lattner, Jaume Ferrete V zquez, Judith Laub and Marc Matter.
Call Number: SMFA: ML3838 .G768 2018
Performa 13: Surrealism / the Voice / Citizenship by
The fifth volume in the acclaimed series by performance art historian RoseLee Goldberg, Performa 13 features projects from more than 120 of the leading artists working in performance today, in collaboration with more than 100 curators and arts institutions--works that broke down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts. Participating Performa 13 artists included Pawel Althamer, Malik Gaines, Martha Graham, Rashid Johnson, Joan Jonas, Christopher Knowles, Ryan McNamara, Alexandre Singh, C. Spencer Yeh and many others who premiered major new works. This catalogue presents documentation of the festival in photographs, scripts and storyboards, along with contributions from curators, writers and the artists themselves, elaborating on the themes of the festival. Performa 13 stands not only as a beautiful document of a remarkable biennial, but also an invaluable reference guide for the performance art of our time.
Call Number: SMFA: NX456.5.P38 G65 2015
Open Access