Music
Sight Readings
Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images.
Many photographers including African American photojournalists studio photographers early twentieth-century émigrés the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did.
One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research the empirical documentation of photographers their techniques working practices equipment etc. and cultural theory the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics cultural sociology the politics of identity etc. The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love.
Consent Practices in Performing Arts Education
This book explores consent as a foundational principle to guide practices and policies in university level performing arts education. It includes descriptions of the structural power dynamics present in educational spaces as well as tools for defusing them. It adapts the consent-forward protocols that are foundational to intimacy training in order to apply them to classroom and rehearsal spaces across performing arts disciplines.
This includes opening lines of communication actively discussing personal boundaries and modeling behavior that respects those boundaries. Additionally the book uses experiential reflections to address the real-world challenges that teachers face as they work to reshape their teaching habits and processes to include consent practices.
Ethno Music Gatherings
This book presents key findings from a 4-year project that sought to understand Ethno Gatherings an organized residential folk world and traditional music programme for young people aged 18-30. In response to three lines of enquiry pedagogy and professional development participant experience and the impact it had upon those who attended the authors examine the complexity of an Ethno music experience. By considering its history and current practices the following themes are explored: non-formal music making personal authenticity holistic praxis musical possible selves intercultural music exchange sustainability social media engagement song sharing and future practices. Constructed through data drawn from participant observations interviews online social media analysis onsite and video observations surveys and questionnaires the authors ask critical questions concerning Ethno’s history ethos pedagogy and philosophical ideals. First held in Sweden in 1990 Ethno Gatherings are now located in over 40 countries worldwide and are part of JM Internationals youth music programmes. As a collection of integrated thought the book’s purpose is to illuminate new understandings of what Ethno does to support its future growth and development.
From Broadway to The Bronx
The depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres focusing on jazz genres as well as the work of both New York born artists like Billy Joel or Lin-Manuel Miranda and artists living most of their life in New York City like Shinehead or Debbie Harry that are intimately connected with the city.
The book analyzes songs written about New York City and engage with the depiction of the city within them but mainly use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to and instrumental in developing. These include the musical theatre scene on Broadway and beyond but also early 20th century sheet music hip hop disco punk dancehall jazz swing rock or pop music. The collection includes essays from authors with a cultural studies media studies cultural history or musicology background making possible a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history.
Places and Purposes of Popular Music Education
This book provides a manuscript-megaphone for a variety of perspectives on popular music education including those we do not usually hear from but who are doing far and away the coolest most relevant and most interesting things.
It includes rants manifestos and pieces that are pithy and punchy and poignant which have resulted in a wide tonal variety among chapters from more traditionally scholarly pieces replete with citations and references through descriptions of practice to straight-up polemics. It is more about beliefs experiences and motivation about frustrations aspirations and celebrations. The chapters are intended to whet appetites prime pumps open eyes and keep cogs turning. This book is organized into four parts: Beyond the Classroom Identity and Purpose Higher Education and Politics and Ideology. This book is intended for academics of all ages and stages but the writing is often deliberately non-academic in tone.
The book will appeal to those working in popular music studies communication studies education research and should be of interest to those involved in policy decisions at national and regional levels. It is also directly relevant to researchers looking music industry and music ecosystems nationally regionally and internationally as education and popular music industry DIY and community sectors continue to enmesh in complex and evolving ways.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
The Psychology of Metal Music, Culture, and Dis/ability
Heavy metal has long been associated with deviance and non-conformity (Messick and Aranda 2020; Snell and Hodgetts 2007; Lynxwiler and Gay 2000) but it is less clear if that encompasses nonvoluntary forms of non-conformity. Metal culture prides itself on being inclusionary (Wray 2018) although that is more an ideal than an objective reality since despite becoming more inclusionary since its 1960s’ inception biases have prevented women (Shadrack 2021; Berkers and Schaap 2018; Heesch and Scott 2016) individuals from some religions (Moberg 2012; Hecker 2005; Kartheus 2015) and non-white fans (Dawes 2012) from being treated equally. These biases have been explored in academic and popular literature but there is less written about metal fans with dis/abilities. Consistent with Goodley (2018) this chapter uses the term ‘dis/ability’ to reference a broad range of disabilities and disorders because it acknowledges the duality of these conditions and avoids potentially ableist associations.
This chapter focuses on how widespread dis/ability is among metal fans the role of stigma historical contextualization and what psychological functions are fulfilled that make metal culture an appealing place for membership. Included here is preliminary theoretical work based on existing trends and evidence which are substantiated further by qualitative data. This chapter speaks of dis/abilities in broad strokes so although there is overlap across people of differing life experiences further nuance is needed when speaking of individual dis/abilities and experiences. This chapter outlines some possible psychological functions metal culture can provide for members with dis/abilities including mood and symptom maintenance representation social relatedness a sense of belonging and as an outlet for sharing experiences.
Disabled Drone: Trans-Feminist Noisecraft
In December 2018 Steff Juniper submitted their major research paper for their master’s in Critical Disability Studies at York University entitled Trans-feminist Witchcraft: A Psychiatric Survivor Narrative an arts-based autoethnography on witchcraft as radical healing and the politics of psychiatric survival and disability justice. It merged theories of disability mad queer and transgender studies to ground discussions on the embodiment theories of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 2008; Ahmed 2006) and enactive cognition. Steff submitted a demo cassette tape of their drone attached to the paper and through including creative writing personal narrative poetry prose and short story the paper aimed to convey the emotional non-linearity of experiencing the body and language as a limited social convention to express emotion.
Steff’s drone cassette tape sits in the office at York University’s Critical Disability Studies Department for those interested in what an arts-based approach to disability studies research may look feel or sound like. They will be drawing on the work in their master’s thesis in the formation of their submission to elucidate how the creation of drone is a process of communication and sublimation as a neurodivergent mad and disabled artist. Additionally they will explore how their identity politic grew as being foundational from the experience of ‘being a metalhead’. Their submission encompasses a phenomenological approach to their experience as a trans and disabled noise artist. Primarily they will explore how they have used making loud noise and strong-felt vibrations as a spiritual experience and activist tool to heal themselves and empower others to use their creativity to process feelings of alienation.
Content Warnings: Gender Dysphoria Gender-based Violence Psychiatric Oppression Transphobia Suicide and Suicidal Ideation
The carnelian caught my eye round surreptitiously plump like a blood python. I picked it up and felt the weight in my hands triangularly spherical smooth points of three. It asks how to acknowledge the weight of being alive so that when the lightness of lightning strikes I can notice.1
‘United We Never Shall Fall’: Metal and Disability
Outsiders to metal may conclude incorrectly that a music culture that valorizes strength would hold no place for the disabled. In fact metal’s frequent identification with social outsiders lyrical themes of personal struggle and fans’ strong sense of community hold considerable appeal for a surprising number of disabled persons. With this chapter we seek to open a conversation between the growing and increasingly sophisticated literature bringing together disability studies and popular music scholarship on the one hand and the metal studies literature on the other.
Heavy Metal and Disability
The relationship between metal and disability is distinctive. Persisting across metal’s sub-genres is a preoccupation with exploring and questioning the boundary that divides the body that has agency from the body that has none. This boundary is one that is familiar to those for whom the agency of the body is an everyday matter of survival.
Metal’s preoccupation with unleashing and controlling sensorial overload acts both as an analogue of neurodiversity and as a space in which those who are neurodivergent find ways to understand and leverage their sensory capacities. Metal offers potent resources for the self-understanding of people with disabilities. It does not necessarily mean that this potential is always explored or that metal scenes are hospitable to those with disabilities. This collection is disability-positive validating people with disabilities as different but not damaged.
While metal scholars who contribute to this collection see metal as a space of possibility in which dis/ability and other intersectional identities can be validated and understood the collection does not imply that the possibilities that metal affords are always actualised. This collection situates itself in a wider struggle to open up metal challenging its power structures; a struggle in which metal studies has played a significant part.
Putting the ego aside: A case study of the peer-to-peer feedback dialogue among electronic popular music makers within higher education
Settings where students showcase their original songs to peers and teachers can seem advantageous and harmless. However beneath this surface is a complex multifaceted negotiation. In this article I engage with the construction of this complexity. I interviewed eight Norwegian electronic popular music students at the university level on how they experienced the real-time peer group song assessment (PGSA) setting. Through semi-structured interviews I seek to give a critical view on how PGSA works as a vehicle for learning. I discuss how the student’s experience of risk varies according to what the student is presenting and what the feedback focuses on. The interviews indicate that feedback that engages with elements that contain the highest degree of creative and personal investment is the hardest feedback to give and yet most desirable to receive. Appendix 1 offers suggestions for presenters peers and teachers related to the PGSA setting.
Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby
Between 1935 and 1970 roller derby was a co-ed North American sport practised on roller skates and played on a banked track. The 2000s marked its revival when a group of women decided to give it a new lease of life: roller derby is now exclusively for women and takes place on a flat track. Teams assert their independence from established institutions and follow a model of ‘do-it-yourself’ organization. According to some critics the roller derby revival is a continuation of the feminist Riot Grrrl movement. This article aims to understand how French roller derby players use the ‘alternative’ heritage of American women. By mobilizing the frameworks of Cultural Studies and Sport Subculture the article reflects on the ways in which the legacy of Riot Grrrl as a movement to challenge a dominant order enables derby teams to create alternatives to mainstream sports models. Through 90 interviews and participant observation conducted between January 2020 and the present day the study was able to show a use of the DIY ethos articulated between resourcefulness and a claim to independence. While Riot Grrrl radically defends the values of the punk movement against the prevailing economic and gender order French roller derby and its teams propose a hybrid sporting model articulated between reflections on a different way of looking at sport and a move away from the DIY model of the early days.
Family first: Yahritza y Su Esencia, family bands and the musical education of Mexican Americans
Beginning with a description of música Mexicana’s rising stars Yahritza y Su Esencia a ‘family band’ of young Mexican American musicians we suggest that school music educators become more informed of the musical interests involvements and learning styles of Mexican American students at home within their families and in the communities that surround them. Yahritza’s trademark sierreño style is described and contextualized in light of other notable genres such as mariachi música nortena son jarocho banda grupera and trap corridos. The phenomenon of family bands within Mexican American communities is explored as a means of children’s musical enculturation away from school juxtaposed with a history of exclusion of Mexican American students from school music opportunities. The article addresses limitations of the American model of school music programmes including (1) the need for opportunities for Mexican American (and other) populations to access meaningful musical education experiences and (2) the gap between the music genres offered within the curriculum and those that Mexican American (and other) students experience at home and within their communities. Even as we acknowledge and applaud the presence of family bands and other strong music community music practices among Mexican Americans we call for a national initiative among music educators to ensure that the music which students learn in school is at least germane to students’ home experiences.
Nihilism and the ‘death of God’ in the work of Siouxsie and the Banshees
This article locates Siouxsie and the Banshees within the philosophical tradition of existentialism specifically the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Aspects of 1970s British punk-rock share with Nietzsche a concern with the condition of ‘nihilism’. For Nietzsche with the western decline in the belief in God humankind no longer has an external source of authority within which meaning evaluation and morality are anchored. Nietzsche’s philosophical project can be read as an elaboration of the conditions under which the creation of new values may be possible to avoid nihilistic despair. Following Nietzsche’s retreat into the Self Heidegger is concerned with authentic existence: his philosophical project can be read as a call to an authentic life. The song ‘Israel’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees can be read as a commentary on the collective anxiety surrounding the ‘death of God’ nihilism and a preoccupation with authentic existence in the twentieth century.
The importance of teaching performance artistry
This article will explain the philosophy and methodology behind developing and teaching the performance artistry curriculum at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. Students who study performance artistry are more prepared to work in the popular music industry/marketplace – personally artistically and professionally. They report being more widely informed about the business of their artistry having clearer goals owning their identities embracing communication with their audiences using a more honest voice on their social platforms and feeling freer to take risks. Success in this field is a combination of presentation forethought execution content strategy and effectiveness on top of talent. I will detail performance artistry assignments and illustrate their role in bringing out authenticity and excellence in a collegiate music major population. This curriculum contains valuable training tools in different educational configurations (lecture-style classes private instruction and workshop/masterclass settings) and all genres.
Throbbing Gristle
In 1976 the British band Throbbing Gristle emerged from the radical arts collective COUM Transmissions through core members Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti joined by Hipgnosis photographer Peter Christopherson and electronics specialist Chris Carter. Though having performed previously in more low-key arts environments their major launch coincided with the COUM retrospective exhibition Prostitution at London’s ICA gallery showcasing and contextualising an array of challenging objects from COUM’s various actions in performance art and pornography. In a deliberately curated strategy inviting press civic and arts dignitaries extravagant followers of the nascent punk scene and music journalists the band created an instant controversy and media panic that tapped into the restrictive climate and encroaching conservatism of late 1970s Britain. Any opportunities that were being explored by a formative punk ethos and movement around sex censorship and transgression were amplified and exposed by Throbbing Gristle and Prostitution. An outraged Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn took the bait and called the ensemble the ‘wreckers of civilisation’ providing the suitable newspaper headline that would be followed a month later by ‘the filth and the fury’ as the Sex Pistols uttered strong profanities on live television.
The switch from COUM to Throbbing Gristle encompassed a primary mode of expression in making music as opposed to art to further coincide with the energy of the nascent punk scene. The band quickly developed a radically deviant and challenging reputation through pushing the punk format past its strictures in terms of lyrical themes amateurism and considerations of what constitutes music. Through a handful or record releases on their own label Industrial Records and a sporadic string of live performances the band nurtured a strong and devoted following including key journalists and fanzine editors of the punk and post-punk scenes such as Jon Savage and Sandy Robertson. The band’s style of exploring harsh pre-recorded sounds samples of disconcerting narrative and conversation and feeding all sounds through messy electronic processing devices gave rise to the title industrial music. This was further buttressed by performing a strictly timed set of one hour and adopting a non-rockstar mode by appearing disinterested and preoccupied with electronic devices. Having given a name and impetus to the industrial music scene many of their followers and fans formed bands in later years.
Drawing on works such as Andy Bennett’s When the Lights Went Out this book looks at late 1970s Britain before during and immediately after the Winter of Discontent to situate the activism of Throbbing Gristle in this time. It explores how the band worked in and against the time and how they worked in and against punk as punk worked in and against the time and place. Punk acts as a mediating factor and nuisance value as Throbbing Gristle emerged with punk in late 1976 seemingly grappled with it through 1977 and then went on to create and eventually criticise a number of post-punk scenes that had flourished around 1979. Trowell narrates the story through a series of live performances as this is a point where Throbbing Gristle interact with the various city-scenes around England during their original period of operation (1975-1981). The band reflected (and incorporated into their live music) key tropes form the time both ‘mainstream’ and fringe (subcultural avant-garde art counter-culture taboo subjects extremes) such that Throbbing Gristle events had an impact and affect and Trowell traces these as a series of impressions and reverberations amongst fans who went on to do their own music and projects.
Throbbing Gristle
In 1976 the British band Throbbing Gristle emerged from the radical arts collective COUM Transmissions through core members Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti joined by Hipgnosis photographer Peter Christopherson and electronics specialist Chris Carter. Though having performed previously in more low-key arts environments their major launch coincided with the COUM retrospective exhibition Prostitution at London’s ICA gallery showcasing and contextualising an array of challenging objects from COUM’s various actions in performance art and pornography. In a deliberately curated strategy inviting press civic and arts dignitaries extravagant followers of the nascent punk scene and music journalists the band created an instant controversy and media panic that tapped into the restrictive climate and encroaching conservatism of late 1970s Britain. Any opportunities that were being explored by a formative punk ethos and movement around sex censorship and transgression were amplified and exposed by Throbbing Gristle and Prostitution. An outraged Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn took the bait and called the ensemble the ‘wreckers of civilisation’ providing the suitable newspaper headline that would be followed a month later by ‘the filth and the fury’ as the Sex Pistols uttered strong profanities on live television.
The switch from COUM to Throbbing Gristle encompassed a primary mode of expression in making music as opposed to art to further coincide with the energy of the nascent punk scene. The band quickly developed a radically deviant and challenging reputation through pushing the punk format past its strictures in terms of lyrical themes amateurism and considerations of what constitutes music. Through a handful or record releases on their own label Industrial Records and a sporadic string of live performances the band nurtured a strong and devoted following including key journalists and fanzine editors of the punk and post-punk scenes such as Jon Savage and Sandy Robertson. The band’s style of exploring harsh pre-recorded sounds samples of disconcerting narrative and conversation and feeding all sounds through messy electronic processing devices gave rise to the title industrial music. This was further buttressed by performing a strictly timed set of one hour and adopting a non-rockstar mode by appearing disinterested and preoccupied with electronic devices. Having given a name and impetus to the industrial music scene many of their followers and fans formed bands in later years.
Drawing on works such as Andy Bennett’s When the Lights Went Out this book looks at late 1970s Britain before during and immediately after the Winter of Discontent to situate the activism of Throbbing Gristle in this time. It explores how the band worked in and against the time and how they worked in and against punk as punk worked in and against the time and place. Punk acts as a mediating factor and nuisance value as Throbbing Gristle emerged with punk in late 1976 seemingly grappled with it through 1977 and then went on to create and eventually criticise a number of post-punk scenes that had flourished around 1979. Trowell narrates the story through a series of live performances as this is a point where Throbbing Gristle interact with the various city-scenes around England during their original period of operation (1975-1981). The band reflected (and incorporated into their live music) key tropes form the time both ‘mainstream’ and fringe (subcultural avant-garde art counter-culture taboo subjects extremes) such that Throbbing Gristle events had an impact and affect and Trowell traces these as a series of impressions and reverberations amongst fans who went on to do their own music and projects.