World Music: A Collection of Thoughts on Sound

Link to Playlist:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZi7usYx9ca90vzaa114eN-zEGTwhy_6C Artist Statement:   The theme of this playlist was video game music covers. As we talked about in class with our discussion of Mariachi Entertainment System, video game music can be a way for artists to attract listeners to different genres of music (in MES' case mariachi). The idea is that people will be more likely to listen to songs in a genre they aren't used to if they recognize the song being covered. With that in mind, I searched for covers in different genres to demonstrate how video game music is used to introduce people to lots of different styles of music. I personally believe these covers serve another purpose as well. In my experience, many people tend to unfairly regard video game music as a lesser type of music because of the medium it is used in. When this music is covered in a genre that people more readily recognize as music, such as jazz or metal, they're more l

Schafer, R. Murray. “Music for Wilderness Lake.” In   On Canadian Music . Bancroft: Arcana Editions, 1984. Summary: Schafer opens up talking about how performance spaces are often what shape musical styles, and suggests that every major revolution in music was accompanied by a change in performance space. For example, during the time of concert halls, music was catered towards the "upper class" and made complex, but with the rise of the radio, music had to evolve into something geared towards aII people, and it therefore became a more "abbreviated" form of entertainment. After this introduction, Schafer discusses an experimental piece of music he was involved with called "Music for Wilderness Lake." The experimental aspect is not in the sound itself, but in the performance space (a wilderness lake). It was specifically composed to be played by a lake, preferably in the summer. I noticed that in his description of the piece Schafer once again expressed h

Hammond, Nicol. “The Disharmonious Honking of the Vuvuzelas: Homogenization and Difference in the Production and Promotion of the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa.”  Soccer & Society  12, no. 1 (2011): 46-55. Summary The author starts out by explaining the importance of sports (soccer and rugby in particular) to the history of South Africa. They then describe the complex music scene of modern South Africa that arose as an aftereffect of apartheid. Because of race segregation, black South African music is associated with traditional practices and "primitivism" while white South African music is associated with "modernity." Unfortunately, the promotional campaign for the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 reinforced these stereotypes a lot of the time. At the very end of the article, the author made the argument that the music of the World Cup was portrayed as the "feminine" element of it and that the soccer games themselves were portrayed as the

 To those of you stumbling onto this blog for the first time, you can find more information about it in my post "Soundscapes on the Wesleyan Campus." For this particular assignment, I am analyzing a short audiovisual sample, in this case a small excerpt from the 1933 Betty Boop animated short Snow-White .  The short is a retelling of the classic fairytale story Snow White by Fleischer Studios using some of the studio's trademark characters, Betty Boop, Bimbo, and Koko the Clown. Betty Boop plays the titular Snow White while Bimbo and Koko play guards who disobey the Evil Queen's order to execute Betty who sees Betty Boop as a threat to her title as "fairest in the land." The segment I chose to analyze starts about 4 minutes into the short, when Koko sings the song "St. James Infirmary Blues" to lament the supposed death of Betty.     Snow-White  was animated by Roland Crandall and directed by Dave Fleischer, one of the two brothers that owned F

Werthman, Christine.  “Alan Lomax, Beyoncé, and Sampling Sounds from the Jim Crow South,”  Genius , Genius.com, 28 April 2016, Web, April 16 2016.  https://genius.com/a/alan-lomax-beyonce-and-sampling-sounds-from-the-jim-crow-south Summary This article discussed Beyoncé's use of samples in her song "FREEDOM," specifically those from Alan Lomax. Starting in the 1930's, Lomax started recording "slice of life scenes from black America" during the Jim Crow era. The first sample is a reverend preaching while a choir rehearse in the background and the second one is of a prisoner from the Mississippi State Penitentiary singing "Stewball." Lomax has been criticized for exploiting minorities and misportraying the sonic landscape of black America through what he chose to record. He would mostly only record gospel, spirituals and the blues and ignored anything he saw as influenced by white music, which sounds a bit like how ethnomusicologists treated Bali&

Harnish, David. “Teletubbies in Paradise: Tourism, Indonesianisation and Modernisation in Balinese Music.”  Yearbook of Traditional Music  vol. 37(2005) 103-123. Summary: The advertised version of Bali as an island paradise untouched by other cultures fails to take into account the violence, modernisation, and other elements Bali has been affected by and adapted to over the last century (the author uses the ubiquity of Teletubbies in 2005 on Bali as an example). This idealized version of the island wasn't even presented until after Dutch colonization when Bali's original culture had already been significantly changed. For example, the Dutch removed the courts, who had power over the island before they came along. The removal of the courts initiated a new type of gamelan music called gong kebyar, because the court gamelans disbanded and sold their instruments to villages, who formed their own gamelans and innovated in their separate environments. In 1959, the first gamelan co