Music
Punk Rock Museum: An interview with Rob Ruckus
Rob Ruckus is a veteran of the Las Vegas punk scene and has played in punk bands and been involved in various punk projects across the past four decades. Since the Punk Rock Museum opened in Las Vegas in April 2023 Rob has managed its Jam Room. The Jam Room features a range of instruments donated to the museum by various punk bands. All the instruments are all available to be played by visitors to the museum and Rob is as enthusiastic about encouraging people to play the instruments as he is talking about the museum or his experiences in punk. Rob spoke with Paul Fields in July 2023.
Music Making and Civic Imagination
In a world facing multiple existential crises music might be seen as little more than a distraction. However in this synthesis of ideas developed over a decade a timely re-appraisal of the potential of musicing for human flourishing is presented emphasising its role in the history of human evolution alongside its potential as a resource for sustainable development.
A holistic philosophy of music is outlined which recognises the complex web of meaning which spreads across complementary musical dimensions of performance and participation whilst emphasising the ‘paramusical’ benefits which arise from both. Highlighting the notion that the social bonds which arise from musicing share much of the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment and love musicing is presented as a resource with the potential for facilitating ethical human connection.
The humanistic values which are thereby materialised during musicing – love reciprocity and justice – form the experiential grounds for inhabiting alternative social realities. The book addresses how such a holistic philosophy of music might be implemented in practice drawing on the author’s professional praxis as a performer educator community musician composer and researcher in particular their experience of musician education at Sage Gateshead Royal College of Music and Trinity-Laban Conservatoire in the UK.
Building Community Choirs in the Twenty-First Century
This book explores how five community choirs construct and imagine collective identity formations in Northern Ireland. Original insight is provided through ethnographic research conducted between 2013-2018. Working with five choirs in disparate locations with different repertoires and demographics resulted in the creation of an integrated comparison that drew out both diversity and commonalities of approach revealing the malleability of choral practice.
The research is framed through communities of practice a theory of learning through engaging with other people in a common endeavour. Research findings demonstrate how choirs re-imagine identity through the manner in which they organise rehearse and perform. Choirs develop a distinct choral identity and ethos highlighting both the musical and social importance of the community of practice. Research suggests that choirs re-imagine multiple conceptions of identities within their groups including gender later age religious faith inclusivity and ethnic diversity that can both influence broader structures of community in the region and be influenced by them.
Community choral practice in Northern Ireland is under-researched. As such this book provides unique insight into how members of community choirs are attempting to transcend sectarian boundaries through their practice developing academic understandings of identity formation community music-making and choral practice.
In Search of Tito’s Punks
The book traces the story of how a song recorded in 1981 by a young punk rock band from a cultural backwater on the English-Welsh border and released on a tiny independent record label became famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito? Why was it 30 years before the members of the band found out? How did this ‘socialist’ country have one of the most vibrant punk scenes in the world?
Gloucester England 1981; multi-racial teenage street-punk band Demob recorded and released what would become their best known and most enduring song No Room For You. A rasping vocal told the story of the 1979 closure of a short-lived punk rock venue at a disused motel on the edge of the provincial city. Depending on your mind-set the lyrics were either a howl of rage at the injustice a wail at the loss or a love-song to an era.
More than three decades later the author – and Demob’s bass player in 1981 – set out to follow the song across a country that no longer exists. On the road he heard the life stories of the heroes of Yugoslavian punk and the punks themselves; from the Tito era through the disintegration and wars forced displacements and permanent exiles to today’s turbulent ‘reconstruction. Who were ’Tito’s punks’ and who are they now?
An unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue part history the book is both and neither of those things. Rather it is a mural and soundtrack of a journey through a time and place which no longer exists.
The latest addition to the Global Punk series from Intellect.