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Just as there is no ‘correct’ way to direct drama, so there is no one ‘right’ way of approaching music. I have worked with musicians on my own productions, often on incidental music, but also on as-live music items. I have, in my time, also worked on UK music shows for the BBC including The Old Grey Whistle Test , Top of the Pops and Gala Performance (which centred on broadly classical music including ballet and opera). Music used in any kind of public performance, from computer games to telephones, to a performance in the village hall, will cost money
distant); an influx of professionals; territorial behaviour to reinforce social status; and collective interests dependent on forums, networks and allegiances. If we are to view the gentry not just as a construct of the historian but as an active social impulse, then music, as a cultural practice or even a commodity in fifteenth-century England, is an undeniably attractive area for study. As an index of
P ROVISION FOR MUSIC was made from the foundations of the Collegiate Church, and early documents list four clerks and six choristers among the College officers. This is a small number of singers, smaller than might have been expected for such an establishment, and it was to have far-reaching consequences, both musically and legally. Numbers shrank further when the Elizabethan charter of 1578 confirmed the singers as four men and four boys. By then the choir 1 was well established, judging from the
2 Music worlds In the previous chapter I suggested that punk and post-punk are best conceived, for sociological purposes, as ‘music worlds’, a concept I adapt from Howard Becker’s notion of ‘art worlds’ (1951, 1963, 1974, 1976, 1982, 1995, 2004, 2006a, 2006b; Faulkner and Becker 2009; see also Bottero and Crossley 2011; Finnegan 1989; Lopes 2002; Martin 1995, 2005, 2006a, 2006b). In this chapter I elaborate upon this concept. Before I do, however, I briefly review three alternative conceptions, explaining why I have chosen ‘music worlds’ over them. As much
One theme in James Baldwin’s work that has gained increasing attention in the last quarter-century is music. What has been missing from this discussion, however, has been a thematic survey of Baldwin’s writing on music and its implications for the twenty-first century. This article focuses on select music-centered texts to examine what Baldwin’s ideas about music reveal about history in our own times. Multiple themes in his writing show how racial slavery creates—in the present tense—differences in experiences and musical expression between people constructed as Black and as white. Baldwin’s writing illuminates the significance of racial slavery in American music history even beyond genres associated with Black Americans.
In this chapter, I argue that music is social interaction. This argument connects to one of the central claims of relational sociology, discussed in the Chapter 1 ; namely, that social interaction is the most basic unit of sociological analysis and a building brick from which the more complex structures of the social world are composed. That is one reason for making the argument. By showing that music is social interaction, I frame it appropriately for relational analysis and understanding. However, it is also important to establish that music is social
, reconstructing the past as an episodic narrative. This narrative dramatises the relationship between past and present, constructing a memory of the past through the recycling of particular iconography that metonymically comes to represent it. Particular fashions, music and visual images are memorialised, and become subject to reinterpretation in the present. Memories of the 1970s in the 1980s, for example, are
his engagement in politics, broadly defined, is nicely exemplified by Music Box (1989) , which deals with the, then, largely ignored history of the Hungarian Holocaust, the last large-scale operation in the final solution that was directed personally by Adolf Eichmann. Produced at a key moment in the history of Hungary (the fall of communism in 1989), this US-made film, based on a screenplay by Hungarian-American screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, breaks important cinematic ground for world cinema. Music Box is the first film to address how the Nazi final solution was
Swedish readers of this book will be familiar with Ingmar Bergman’s last major radio appearance, the 18 July 2004 edition of the talk show Sommar [‘Summer’]. 1 For those to whom this broadcast institution is unknown, Sommar is a long-running Swedish radio show that is aired during the summer months and features a daily almost two-hour broadcast, in which notable Swedes muse over life and select music for the programme, as typically more than half of the programme consists of music
Rock Against Racism (RAR) operated between 1976 and 1981, and was a mass campaign that combined anti-racist politics with popular culture. Throughout this period RAR used the medium of concerts featuring black and white musicians as a focus for, and practical demonstration of, its politics of 'inter-racial' unity. This book deals with important theoretical issues that are particularly pertinent to the party's relationship with RAR. It covers three areas: the theory of state capitalism, the relationship between the party and the working class, and the united front. The book then examines the state of the Socialist Workers Party - formerly the International Socialists (IS) - during the mid- to late 1970s. The youth cultures with which RAR most closely identified were contested between political tendencies and music industry interests before RAR appeared on the scene. Punk had emerged as a significant, if somewhat ambivalent, radical phenomenon in its own right and reggae was implicated in the politico-cultural struggles between black people and the British state. Furthermore, it is clear from the testimony from the far-right that black culture was not immune to co-option by forces opposed to the kind of multiculturalism that RAR espoused. The book also looks at some of the political and social influences on the organisation's politics. It argues that RAR's approach entailed a rejection both of the Communist Party's Cold War-inflected point of view and of those theorists who despaired of any attempt to break the grip of bourgeois ideology on the working class.