‘Let the People Sing’: J.B. Priestley and the Significance of Music

Abstract

In a writing life that spanned the 1910 to 1970s, J.B. Priestley engaged with a variety of subjects, across various literary forms, ranging from politics, popular culture and Englishness through to theories of time. However it has rarely been noted that he also wrote passionately and knowledgeably about music, with the latter playing an important role in key novels, plays and nonfiction. Priestley also promoted chamber festivals, wrote the libretto for an opera ‘The Olympians’, and even occasionally performed himself. Priestley’s writings on music fitted into his concerns about the rise of an Americanized mass order, and his mistrust of commericalized musical forms was shared by other critics of the time. However, Priestley’s work is more significant than a binary high/low low cultural validation of classical music/dismissal of more popular musical forms. He was often critical of jazz and ragtime, but more positive about popular music that was produced in, reflected, and empowered the individual and community. Priestley’s writings on music marked a genuine attempt at understanding the role of music in culture, and contributed to his democratic critique of the mass society.     

When is a discovery? The affective dimensions of discovery in music consumption

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of music discovery and seeks to provide a definition of the act of discovering music content. Research on music consumption has weakly theorized what the moment of “discovery” consists of, since it has been more preoccupied with debates about the conditions of discoveries, which either highlight the importance of individuals’ social milieus or the enhanced technological agency that they enjoy in the digital age. Drawing on qualitative data about musical experiences, this article frames discoveries as affective responses to music content that occur within individuals’ life narratives and mediate their interpretation and definition of music.     

The emerging (national) popular music culture in China

ABSTRACT

Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in that country have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. The modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan – the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. How the Chinese authorities coped with the production, distribution and consumption of this ‘foreign’ popular music, is reflective of the swing of the pendulum between relaxation and control, and hence the changing ideologies of the state. Based on the cultural and institutional analysis on a few classical Chinese popular singers since the mid‐1980s, this paper illustrates such a transformation. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities have evolved from a dictatorial authority, which chose to control popular music by means of direct bans and censorship, to an active agent, through various strategies, managing and producing a kind of popular music that can be conducive to, and be resonant with, the national ideologies.     

Gigging “classical” in Iran

ABSTRACT

The term “classical” is often applied to the genre of Iranian music known as musiqi-e sonnati (traditional music), normally identified by a form of music making involving extensive extemporization based on a structural framework called the radif, historically performed at length in intimate settings among initiated individuals. Today, classically trained musicians working the public concert circuit in Iran face a somewhat different picture of musical practice. Concert halls are typically much larger, audiences much wider, and performances much shorter. Many musicians tend to categorize themselves as classical, though they do not always perform according to the traditional parameters of the sonnati genre. This raises questions about new developments in classical music that fall just outside radif-based performance, and about the perceived conceptual relationship between sonnati and new-classical performance as the genre evolves. This article explores some of these dynamics through reflections among performers navigating Tehran’s classical concert circuit today.     

Musical exploration via streaming services: The Norwegian experience

ABSTRACT

Streaming services for music are growing worldwide, and the Nordic countries are leading the way. In Norway, streaming represented 88% of digital music revenues in 2014 versus just 23% globally. In essence, streaming services offer subscribers access to vast databases of music and offer artists new means of exposure and sources of revenue. This article argues that the possibility of musical discovery is essential to these services’ distribution model. It examines the provisions for exploration through streaming, pointing to automated algorithms and human curation as key devices. It then collects quantitative data on the presentation of music via a Norwegian service (WiMP/Tidal) and qualitative findings from interviews with consumers about their experiences with music streaming. Key discrepancies arise between the promise and the reality of streamed-music discovery, both for artists seeking new fans (and funds) and for audiences expecting streaming to supersede existing forms of musical exploration.     

The Salisbury Annual Musical Festival 1770–1800

ABSTRACT

By analysing the factors that precipitated the decline of what had been a flourishing provincial institution, the Salisbury music festival, this article captures late eighteenth-century provincial culture at a stage of transition from a society dominated by aristocratic patronage to an increasingly commercial society. It argues that the displacement of gentlemen amateurs from the heart of Salisbury's musical culture and their replacement by professional musicians and concert managers brought about a change in attitudes to music in the city. Ultimately, these modernizing influences of commercialization and professionalization proved detrimental to the grand occasion of the Salisbury musical festival, prioritizing alternative concert forms and a commercial, rather than civic, attitude to music.     

Problematizing the popular: the dynamics of Pinoy pop(ular) music and popular protest music

ABSTRACT

In 1973, the pop music industry in the Philippines, long dominated by the American Top 40, was jolted by the emergence of a new kind of sound that delivered soulful Filipino lyrics in the medium of Western rock. At about the same time the protest movement found, in the popular forms of Western rock and folk, powerful vehicles for cultural resistance. This experimentation within and outside the industry generated great interest across social classes and opened many possibilities for new kinds of popular music, later to be called Pinoy (slang for Filipino) rock or Pinoy pop music. This article looks into the dynamics of Pinoy pop/rock and protest music during the period of authoritarian rule and after, marking their points of intersection and divergence and analyzing the factors that account for the rich popular music production in the 1970s and the 1980s.     

Using Music as Historical Text in Teaching European History

ABSTRACT

With a greater emphasis on understanding how meaning has been constructed by past societies, historians and university students have in recent years become familiar with using a wide range of historical sources. This article considers practical ways in which music – of different kinds – can be used as source material for historical investigation in university teaching. It suggests that by relating musical examples to categories of analysis already widely used in history, such as class, race, gender and citizenship, music can profitably be integrated with and used alongside other kinds of historical evidence, for example literary sources and visual images.     

Eric Hobsbawm and the Significance of Jazz

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Eric Hobsbawm’s interest in Jazz, and argues that he helped popularise the music, gave it intellectual credibility and that his jazz writings are still relevant for jazz scholars and cultural historians. Jazz also influenced his view of history. Drawing on his recently catalogued private papers, it suggests Hobsbawm consistently argued for the historical significance of jazz, was flexible in the use of genre and subgenre and was aware of the role of the music business, and the way critics and writers helped shape the music’s meanings. The paper also argues that Hobsbawm wrote partly as fan, and that his penetrating analysis of jazz sometimes led him to undervalue other popular music forms.     

Screaming and crying androids: voice and presence in Chinese popular music

Abstract

The voice is, next to the face, a defining aspect of the persona of popular music stars. This article seeks to understand the voice prior to lyrical content and genre convention. How does the voice relate to a singer and his or her body? Is the singing voice a sign of an individual? Does it rather embody a tradition, a nation or a generation? Or are the voices of Chinese popular music radically disembodied and phony?     

Contesting Popular Dancing and Dance Music in Britain During the 1920s

ABSTRACT

This article examines various reactions to new forms of dance music and dance in Britain during the 1920s. It shows how these new cultural forms were part of broader social and economic changes, and notes how they are seen to represent a considerable break with previous cultural forms. In particular, such changes have been seen as symbolic of the widespread ‘Americanization’ of British culture. This article questions the degree to which this was true. It thus examines attempts by ‘professionals' to fashion ‘British’ versions of both dance music and social dances. In addition, it examines how audiences resisted and exacerbated these developments.     

Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay identifies the major themes of the special issue, emphasizing both indigenous peoples' anticipation of how imperial modernity hailed them and their determination to work with as well as against it. The mobility, and restlessness, of the actors examined in the essays that follow helped to guarantee this defensive agency and to produce a shared grammar of engagement and resistance across disparate native communities in the nineteenth and twentieth-century worlds they travelled through.     

Music and Middle-Class Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the making of bourgeois cultural identity by way of analysing and comparing the ethos and organization of Leipzig's Gewandhaus and Birmingham's Triennial Festival during the nineteenth century. Whilst the origins of Leipzig's music culture are placed firmly within the emergent tradition of Kantian and Romantic idealism and the eighteenth-century revival of classicism which informed the cultural and educational ethos of the German Bürgertum, the beginnings of Birmingham's music culture are placed within the context of British empiricism. Both are then substantiated through an empirical analysis of concert repertoires, journals, newspapers and attitudes towards conductors and artists.     

The changing faces of politics and repression in Malaysia

Abstract

For a long time popular music and aesthetics have been considered as mutually exclusive categories within the musicological discourse. Based on the predominance of idealistic autonomy aesthetics, the concept of the (musical) ‘work of art’, at its core, legitimised the exclusion of popular music from the realm of aesthetics. Since the concept of autonomy constituted the beauty of art as a sphere free from social functions and independent from interests of the culture industries, two antithetical strategies in researching pop music have recently emerged: on the one hand pop music has been described as art, on the other hand it has been considered as a cultural phenomenon solely explored through sociological approaches. This paper looks for an alternative way in order to overcome the dualisms of art and everyday life, aesthetics and society, without neglecting the inherent aesthetic dimension of popular music cultures or the processes of identity‐making of the involved people. For this purpose, concepts developed in theatre and ritual studies seem to be fruitful for describing pop music as ritual in social space (musicking), and in terms of an aesthetic of the performative. Based on participant observations and interviews, the paper discusses a rock concert that the Yoon Band from South Korea held in Germany. In view of the event character and of liminal and transformative processes within the performance, it gives an example of how Korean people in Germany negotiate their identities and draw national boundaries through actively participating in and through music. Thereby, the way popular music constitutes the diasporic community can be detected in the underlying social, symbolic, and sound patterns of the performance.     

Micro: global music made in J‐pop?

Abstract

This article tackles J‐pop as a result of diverse influences from Western music. Its strength stems from its capacity to ‘tame the exotic’, i.e. assimilate and recreate from styles that were uncommon for Asian cultures by integrating elements of rock, reggae, hip hop, etc and labelling these J‐rock, J‐reggae, J‐rap. This assimilation and indigenization process in J‐pop creation could be seen as a way to resist against competitors from other places of music production. The article also attempts to identify the specificities and assets of J‐pop in the music scene in general. It elaborates on J‐pop's coolness, and the reason why it could expand throughout East‐Asia. Pop music and pop culture flows in East‐Asia could be regarded then as a means to trigger a sense of community and togetherness through the consumption of pop culture products. Throughout the analysis on J‐pop, the article will rely on one musical example, Def Tech and Micro, as this artist tends to explore various musical genre and intermingles them, so as to create a specific style, coined ‘Jawaian reggae’.     

Indigeneity,Agency and Modernity

ABSTRACT

This afterword argues for the importance of an historical consciousness in thinking about the contemporary era. The articles in this special issue suggest a much more complicated and entangled relationship between concepts of the indigenous and modernity. Attention to the lives of Sarah Winnemucca, Joseph Brant, Robert Kerr, Anthony Martin Fernando and Kahgegagahbowh suggestively recasts our understandings of rights and modernity away from a central starting-point in the metropole to much more fluid and multiple sites of generation in different locales.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

Government,Church and Māori Responses to Mākutu (Sorcery) in New Zealand in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

ABSTRACT

Traditionally Māori attributed disease to supernatural causes, including mākutu (sorcery) and, as with some other indigenous cultures, considered that killing sorcerers was both just and right. Belief in mākutu ran counter to the Church's desire to gain religious primacy, and mākutu-related murders challenged the State's claim to sovereignty, and its desire to ‘civilize’ Māori. Each indigenous society possesses unique characteristics, just as the nature of each settler society develops within its own environment. While some similarities with other colonized societies can be identified, distinctive local conditions influenced the relationship of Māori to the New Zealand colonial state, and thus attitudes and actions relating to sorcery-related crime. This article explores how mākutu brought Māori communities into conflict with both Church and State, and how the latter in particular was constrained by political realities. As the nineteenth century came to an end, the murders had largely ceased and the State and Church became more concerned with Māori spiritual healers. The article also shows that Māori reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took a lead in changing Māori attitudes.     

The lyrics of laborious life: popular music and the reassertion of migrant manhood in Northeastern Thailand

Abstract

The focal subject under investigation in this paper is the gendered identities of overseas male migrant workers as presented in the contemporary popular song lyrics from Northeastern Thailand. My reading of such lyrics is informed by my ethnographic fieldwork of Thai migrant workers in Singapore. I intend to uncover some complex, cultural junctures of transnational labor migration, in which men, mobility, and music have come across and formed a social force to reshape cultural imagination of migrant manhood. I argue that popular music celebrates male heroism of overseas migrant workers. Instead of challenging existing structures of hegemonic masculinity in the region, popular song texts poetically reaffirm and reassert the traditional dominant gender ideology and cultural practice. Overseas workmen are usually depicted as hard‐working, self‐sacrificial heroes in their attempts to rescue their families as well as romantic, caring lovers and morally responsible fathers.     

Raiders of the lost archives

ABSTRACT

Fantastic Man (2014) and Searching for Sugar Man (2012) mobilize tropes of discovery occurring in the filmed process of collecting and curating the work and identities of two reluctant, elusive, and resistive figures. These documentaries are part of a discourse of collectability marked by the urge to discover and narrate a “quest” that has its precedents in record collecting as obsessive cultural practice and in the fetishizing of obscurity. Furthermore, they can be seen as “performances” of the artiste and repertoire (A&R) process but for a “post-rock” era in which the customary roles of A&R have largely been eclipsed by social, economic, and technological changes to the music industry: the “(re-)discovery” of Onyeabor and Rodriguez exemplifies an increasingly common fusion of, rather than oscillation between, novelty and nostalgia in the music industry, as “old” artists are “newly” discovered through practices of media archaeology aimed at unearthing artifacts of cultural and economic value from an ever bigger and denser digital archive.