Varieties of Music

Genres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x (...) is the genre of that work). A work can be good all things considered, but genre membership provides us with an additional set of evaluative criteria over and above those of the medium, which colors how we interpret and appreciate the work. Given this importance, it is not surprising that philosophers of art have been interested in providing an account of what, exactly, a genre is. Despite this interest, there is not widespread agreement about what it takes for something to be a genre, nor what kinds of considerations are relevant in determining whether a work is a member of that genre. Beyond this, we might also want to know to what degree we ought to consider genre in evaluating a work of art and why it should matter at all. Here, I explore the variety of recent theories that philosophers have taken up on the topic of genre and why we should ultimately think of genres as artistic practices rather than the alternatives. (shrink)

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice, whether that is about hip-hop music, romance novels, or film noir. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genres. Whether they are giving accounts of genres as such or of particular genres, genre talk abounds in philosophy as much as it does the popular discourse. As a result, theories of genre proliferate as well. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so far focused on capturing all (...) of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art. (shrink)

Can music be considered a language of the emotions? The most common view today is that this is nothing but a Romantic cliché. Mainstream philosophy seems to view the claim that 'Music is the language of the emotions' as a slogan that was once vaguely defended by Rousseau, Goethe, or Kant, but that cannot be understood literally when one takes into consideration last century’s theories of language, such as Chomsky's on syntax or Tarski's on semantics (Scruton 1997: ch. 7, see (...) also Davies 2003: ch. 8, and Kania 2012). In this chapter, I will show why this common view is unwarranted, and thus go against nowadays philosophical mainstream by defending what I call the musicalanguage hypothesis. In Section 1, I will introduce the musicalanguage hypothesis and present, based on empirical evidence, some of the many similarities between language and music and explain why we should take them seriously. I will introduce a framework that aims to explain the communicative power of music using what we already know about linguistic communication (1.1). I will then outline several working hypotheses about musical grammar, musical meaning, and affective meaning (1.2), and thus defend that music is indeed very close to literally be a language of the emotions. In Section 2, I will detail some of the methodology, expectations, and preliminary results of a cross-cultural study on musical grammar that I am presently conducting between South India (Chennai) and Switzerland (Geneva and Lausanne)4. This empirical study focuses on two musical idioms and their grammatical features: Western classical music of the Common Period (ca. 1600-1900) and South Indian classical music (also know as Carnatic music). The main hypothesis of this study is that you need to master the grammar of a musical idiom in order to properly understand its musical meanings. (shrink)

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand this role in terms of our habitual relationships to place, asking whether and how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, and with what consequences. This inquiry is anchored in a series of site-specific improvised performances by Jen Reimer and Max Stein, and the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. (...) The argument made interpreting these performances is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, and Alia Al-Saji’s reception of it. This paper claims that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record (...) labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. (shrink)

The article consists of two parts. The first, more general, contains a description of the phenomena associated with improvisation, especially guitar, detailing the execution issues facing the improviser. Two points of view are presented: the first, more detailed, describes the elements of music and its importance in the process of improvisation, the second - more general - speaks of phenomena which cannot be described or analyzed in a simple way, or that are different for each track. These include the interaction (...) between team members, expressing emotions through music and research problem of searching for one's own voice in art. Moreover, this section contains a description of three very different approaches to guitar improvisation. The first is the use of a tonal center (enriched with dominant tensions); the second method (used in fusion music) is to combine the harmony of the composition with relevant scales; the third (typical for bebop music) is based on the strict use of improvised chord sounds without the use of scales. The second section of the text provides a description of a specific type of polyphonic improvisation with the use of two-handed tapping on the guitar. This model stands in contrast to the three previously described ways of understanding guitar improvisation. The system is based on methods used in both the Renaissance and Baroque polyphony (among others in the leading Cantus Firmus melody or the counterpoint rules) as well as on assumptions of one voice bebop improvisation (the use of leading sound solutions specific to natural foursounds). This description refers back to the first part of the article, grouping issues around the individual elements of a musical work. This section contains notes and observations collected during the eight years the author spent searching for his own musical way. (shrink)

Although popular music is increasingly recognized as an important area of inquiry in philosophy of art, many organizing principles have been taken over from other fields without scrutiny. This article selects heavy metal as an example of the value of applying philosophy of criticism to discourse about popular music. Metal is now in its fifth decade, and its combination of longevity and diversity have made it an attractive topic in popular music studies. In accounts of metal by musicologists and social (...) science researches, metal is almost always referred to as a genre of music, and the genre is said to unify diverse metal subcultures, which are associated with diverse styles of metal. An examination of the concepts of genre and subculture as they are typically understood in popular music studies generally, and in metal studies in particular, suggests that they do not function to delineate metal as a unitary category. However, contemporary philosophy of art provides several theoretical principles that provide criteria for identifying a unified genre. The relevant theories are historical definitions of art and Kendall Walton's account of style. Viewed in terms of these philosophical developments, metal should be seen as an evolving assemblage of related styles, only some of which are associated with fans who constitute a subculture. However, it is not a "category" in Walton's sense of that term. Video abstract. (shrink)

This article presents a new aesthetic of the improvised jazz solo, an aesthetic grounded in the premise that a solo is an act indivisible from the actor and the context. The solo's context includes the local and large-scale conventions of jazz performance as well as the soloist's other work. The theme on which a solo is based serves not as a “work,” but as part of the solo's stylistic context. Knowledge of this context inheres directly into proper apprehension of the (...) musical surface; it does not constitute a separate plane of appreciation. I begin by examining the improvisational error. This examination supports the position that the solo is an act, not a work. From this position, I detail a new aesthetic of the improvised solo, grounded in the soloist's virtues. In a successful solo, the soloist's actions display a balance of two aesthetic “virtues”: compositional skill and a commitment to the spirit of improvisation. Compositional skill manifests in a solo as coherence. The improvisational spirit manifests as courage, spontaneity, and related qualities. These virtues often come into conflict; each soloist negotiates this conflict differently. (shrink)

In this paper, we contest Peter Kivy’s claim that there is a clear opposition between ‘absolute music’ and programme music and between musical form and musical expressiveness. We argue, on the contrary, that much music falls somewhere between absolute and programme music as Kivy conceives the categories, and that such music is often primarily organized not on purely formal principles but by means of the overall ‘expressive trajectory’ or ‘poetic idea’ of the piece. Kivy is dismissive of all ‘narrativist’ interpretations (...) of what he considers absolute music, arguing that they add an ‘extraneous’ story to music that neither has nor needs one. We argue on the contrary that the history of the ‘heroic’ plot type in the tradition from Beethoven to Shostakovich demonstrates that composers in the Russian Romantic tradition conceived of their music as unified by ‘poetic ideas’, which were handed down and elaborated by one composer after another. (shrink)

Complete analysis of gender in rock music.

Music, said Zen patriarch Hui Neng, "is a means of rapid transformation." It takes us home to a natural world that functions outside of logic, where harmony and dissonance, tension and release work in surprising ways. Weaving memoir, travelogue, and philosophical reflection, Sudden Music presents a musical way of knowing that can closely engage us with the world and open us to its spontaneity.Improvisation is everywhere, says David Rothenberg, and his book is a testament to its creative, surprising power. Linking (...) in original ways the improvised in nature, composition, and instrumentation, Rothenberg touches on a wide range of music traditions, from Rob Nachman's stories to John Cage's aleatory. Writing not as a critic but as a practicing musician, Rothenberg draws on his own extensive travels to Scandinavia, India, and Nepal to describe from close observation the improvisational traditions that inform and inspire his own art.The accompanying audio disc features eleven original compositions by Rothenberg, none of which have been previously released on CD. Included are a duet with clarinet and white-crested laughing bird, and another duet with clarinet and Samchillian TipTipTip Cheeepeeeee, an electronic computer instrument played by its inventor Leon Gruebaum. Also featured are multicultural works blending South Indian veena and Turkish g-clarinet with spoken text from the Upanishads; a piece commissioned by the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival with readings of texts by E. O. Wilson accompanied by clarinet and electronics; and improvisations based upon Tibetan Buddhist music, Japanese shakuhachi music, and the image of a black crow on white snow.Sudden Music is a concise and delicate work of beauty. It will help all readers experience the world as a musical place, full of wonderful events that come out of nowhere to create a strange and rhythmic harmony. (shrink)

A lively comparison of musical meaning in Ohio's Jazz, metal, and hard rock scene. This vivid ethnography of the musical lives of heavy metal, rock, and jazz musicians in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio shows how musicians engage with the world of sound to forge meaningful experiences of music. Unlike most popular music studies, which only provide a scholar's view, this book is based on intensive fieldwork and hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews. Rich descriptions of the musical life of metal (...) bars and jazz clubs get readers close to the people who make and listen to the music. Of special interest are Harris M. Berger's interviews with Timmy "The Ripper" Owens, now famous as lead singer for the pioneering heavy metal band, Judas Priest. Owens and other performers share their own experiences of the music, thereby challenging traditional notions of harmony and musical structure. Using ideas from practice theory and phenomenology, Berger shows that musical perception is a kind of practice, both creatively achieved by the listener and profoundly informed by social context. (shrink)

Dangerous Crossroads surveys an extraordinary range of these musical fusions: Puerto Rican Bugalu in New York; Algerian rai in Paris; Chicano punk in Los Angeles; Indigenous rock in Australia; chanson Quebecois in Montreal; swamp pop in Houston and New Orleans; reggae, bhangra, and juju in London; and zouk, rap, and jazz in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Throughout, Lipsitz highlights the issues that unite inter-ethnic music fusions across geographic boundaries.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different (...) versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates. (shrink)

Jazz ist die einflußreichste Musikform des 20. Jahrhunderts. Kritische Auseinandersetzungen mit Jazz gehen aber vielfach davon aus, daß er den gleichen ästhetischen Gesetzen gehorcht, die die europäische Musik beschreiben. Zu einer Ästhetik des Jazz beginnt den Weg nach einer neuen Einschätzung des Jazz. Richter untersucht das Werk vieler einflußreicher Jazzmusiker: Längere Abschnitte widmen sich Theolonious Monk, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis, dem Art Ensemble of Chicago, Louis Armstrong, Ran Blake, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday und Benny Goodman. Mit (...) einem abschließenden Kapitel über Jazz in bildender Kunst und Literatur macht der Autor das Eindringen der ästhetischen Ideen des Jazz in andere Formen von Kunst nachvollziehbar. (shrink)

From Janis Joplin to P.J. Harvey, Women and Popular Music explores the changing role of women musicians and the ways in which their songs resonate in popular culture.

This study concerns the application of the paradigm of self-organization science as an informing principle in the realm of artistic creation. In his book Entropy and Art, Rudolf Arnheim presents two cosmological theories and their applicability to art theory. The self-organization paradigm of Ilya Prigogine provides a reconciliation of the two theories, establishing a model of an open, nonlinear system, exchanging matter and energy and fluctuating between periods of order and chaos. Because of the immediacy and accessibility of the creative (...) act in jazz improvisation, an assessment of Prigogine's paradigm of self-organization can be used to address two aspects of the art experience: the creative act of producing a work of art and the expressive form of the work from which meaning is perceived. ;Three concepts concerning the relationship of time and space in painting were developed and applied to the analysis of selected examples of jazz improvisation. Narrative time was shown to arise from certain paintings employing illusionistic perspective and was divided into two distinct modes of expression: linear and nonlinear narrative. Improvised solos by J. J. Johnson and Charlie Parker were analyzed according to principles of temporal ordering presented by the two modes of narrative time. The temporal and spatial relationships presented in works of Analytical Cubism provided the foundation for the concept of Simultaneity which was applied to the hard-bop solos of John Coltrane . The final concept, Timelessness, was developed from the non-objective paintings of Jackson Pollock. This concept was then used to analyze selected improvised solos from Coltrane's late recordings . ;The significance of Time in the Prigoginian paradigm, which is in sharp contrast to the role of time in the Newtonian paradigm, provides a means for assessing the improvised solo in terms of linear and nonlinear concepts of narrative. Furthermore, the relationship of determinacy and indeterminacy so crucial to development of order in self-organization science establishes a model that portrays the creative force of the jazz solo and may even extend to the act of artistic creation in general. This key element of the movement from disorder to order is also apparent in the dissolution of temporal references in the works of Pollock and Coltrane, effectively creating an art where meaning is focused on process rather than product. (shrink)

The date of "completion" of the original maquettes of Jazz has been considered to be 1944, mainly due to three letters of Matisse, in spite of the date, juillet 1946, written in the maquettes. What is the meaning of this delay? The connection between Matisse and Surréalisme contributed in establishing the artistic environment around him from the 1930's. It changed Matisse's artistic view from static to dynamic, especially the concept of signe. Furthermore, the method of paper cut-out accelerated this tendency. (...) Matisse's interest in Bergson in Jazz explains the dynamic character. In 1942, Matisse finished Thèmes et variation. The central idea is a series along the same theme, with the same model. The connection between the drawings gives the figure a Bergsonian durée. In Jazz Matisse created signes from his memories. He used his intuition to be united with the objects, and realized the inherent durée, which was built right into the process of this work. This is the reason for the delay in working on the maquettes. The durée produced by this delay is the indispensable character in the completion of Jazz founded on the correlation between the maquettes and the texts. (shrink)

Volume I of this dissertation concerns the work of Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. He began his career as a serial composer and by the time of the premiere of his Scontri in 1961, was considered to be one of the best and brightest of the new generation of "modernist" composers. In the early 1970s, however, he turned away from the serialist techniques and modernist model toward a completely new approach---a distinct new compositional direction. Music writers and musicologists have since grouped (...) him together with Arvo Part and John Taverner and dubbed them the "holy minimalists," probably because of their shared interest in religious topics and because of a characteristic repetition in their music. This term does very little to explain Gorecki's procedures or the context of his works within his life or ours, however. ;Through a survey of current scholarly discussion of time in music, the groundwork is laid for an analysis of the temporal aspects of Gorecki's works. The author then explores the experiences of time in the music of Gorecki and the specific techniques and procedures that the composer uses to create these experiences. Special attention is paid to Scontri, Symphony No. 3, the two published string quartets, and Kleines Requiem fur eine Polka. ;The double bass is an instrument that has many very different identities; Volume II of the dissertation explores two of these identities: the jazz/pizzicato and the singing/arco aspects of the instrument. Inspired by the work of arranger Harry Burleigh, bassist Charles Mingus, and singer Paul Robeson, this four-section, continuous-movement concerto is a virtuosic amalgamation of classical Western techniques and jazz styles with opportunities for improvisation by the double bass soloist, pianist, drummer, and alto saxophonist. The concerto is orchestrated for a chamber orchestra with a small compliment of winds and brass together with a piano, drums and percussion, and a chamber-size string ensemble. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of the decline of improvisation in Western classical music, investigating both its disappearance from performance practice and the scholarly neglect of this phenomenon in music histories and theories. Music historians have traditionally situated the disappearance of improvisation at the end of the Baroque, but improvisation continued to be an important part of Western classical music until well into the nineteenth century. The failure to account for its importance in the Classical and Romantic periods raises questions (...) concerning the methodological limitations of early music scholarship and the scholarly tradition that ensued. ;The decline of the practice of improvisation coincides with the period around the middle of the nineteenth century when this musical tradition underwent a process of formalization and canonization. This process went hand in hand with a post-Romantic recontextualization of historicism, the aesthetics of genius, and music scholarship. The disappearance of improvisation was caused by the confluence of these developments and the impact each had on the others. The Classical musical tradition then became synonymous with the preservation, study, and reproduction of a body of fixed works conceived as the metaphysically-charged legacy of genius. ;An underlying goal of this dissertation is to question some central aspects of the received concept of "Western Classical music." A reflection on the role played by improvisation in the history of this music makes it evident that this is a rich tradition of music-making and musical aesthetics that is not reducible to the narrow, formalist concept of work with which it is largely identified. This reflection opens up theoretical and practical possibilities that might help us to think about and experience Western Classical music from exciting new perspectives that are nevertheless firmly rooted in tradition. (shrink)

The exploration of sound's character as a demonstrative representational medium--as when sounds represent other sounds--is the common activity linking the successive chapters of this dissertation. An account emphasizing sound's unusual representational flexibility, which has particular resonance within twentieth-century technologies of sound recording and processing, is developed over the course of six chapters. The opening chapters rely on contemporary aesthetics , and deal with fundamental attributes of sound, and with the affects of those attributes on sonic representation. A comparison of the (...) relations of visual and aural stimuli to their source objects stresses sound's disembodiment, its emanation from its source. ;The third and fourth chapters consider the interactions of what Cone has termed "realistic" with space and time in fictional worlds constructed in operas , and in films . ;Concluding chapters focus on the evidential force of recorded sonic images , and consider digital technology's subversion of this realism. Grundberg's concept of an unsettling hybrid imagery constructed from a tension between fact and fiction informs an analysis of Lansky's computer music composition Smalltalk. Beckett's delineation of noncorporeal personality in his works for stage and radio, and Fried's concepts of spectatordom, are brought to bear on what I posit as a new musical/dramatic genre constructed from sound alone. (shrink)

This is an historical and critical study of the discipline of musicology. The study is divided into two major sections: a retrospective of musicology, and a critique of musicology. The retrospective is an historical-chronological survey of selected writers on music beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending at the close of the 19th century. The writings of these musicologists are scrutinized for content, methodology and continuity of ideas and concepts. ;The critical part of the study is in the Kantian mode (...) using a methodology derived from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. This part is a critical study of the sources, scope and limits of musicology as delineated in the retrospective and as found in the 20th century through phenomenological critique of the sub-regions within the discipline. From the critical study it is demonstrated that the field of musicology exhibits one fundamental characteristic: an attempt to be a systematic study of musical phenomena. Within this field there are many sub-regions which share the above-mentioned common musicological characteristic but which are different from each other in essential ways; these differentia are fully described in the critique. ;Finally, the study may be read in two ways: as a critique of musicology as described above; or as an example of applied phenomenology. (shrink)

What does it mean for something to be called “avant-garde”? The ambiguity of such a label fails to define the works of which it is typically applied. It’s more relevant to think of the term as an on-going process that explores new artistic possibilities. This thesis will look at some factors that helped propel such a process into motion and the shared aesthetics that came as a result. An avant-garde process began in the early 20th century as individuals and groups (...) sought out a divergent worldview that began to question the rapidly developing Western worldview dominated by science and its frameworks. By looking at the works and statements of key individuals of the time such as the surrealist André Breton, psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and poet Charles Olson, one gets a clearer picture of the many factors that fueled this divergence. The most notable being World War I with its atrocities and globalized horrors, the splintering of social groups between capitalism and communism and increased secularization. In cataloguing the connections between both political and artistic groups it becomes clear how the collective skepticism and questioning of the then dominant worldview led to the eventual creation of an altogether new worldview centered around concepts and ideas not available in old. The development of jazz is seen within this light as a uniquely culturally positioned art form. From more traditional jazz styles to more experimental, jazz is looked at as following a parallel trajectory into a moment of avant-garde synthesis. In looking at the early development of progressive jazz musicians Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, this thesis aims to cement the 1950s as a hotbed in which an avant-garde aesthetic converged, ultimately resulting in music of the likes of free jazz and beyond. (shrink)

Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's (...) low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives. Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means. (shrink)

This stimulating and perceptive study of jazz relates the work of jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman to such subjects as primitivism in the arts, neoclassicism, good and bad taste, improvisation and recordings and the imperfection of art, and aesthetics in general.

In this study of Baraka's transformation of white avant-grade poetics into a unique black poetics, Harris argues that Baraka's work can be best understood in the context of a jazz aesthetic. Baraka, he says, has taken white avant-garde and postmodernist poetic modes and political ideas, and through a formal and social process of transformation typical of jazz revision, transformed them into a black poetics and metaphysics. Harris describes the failure of the postmodernists to provide suitable aesthetic and social solutions for (...) ethnic and political problems. Baraka set as his models jazzmen like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, who attempted to destroy white music so that a new black music could be born. To "jazzify" his poetry, he adapted a "fast rap" of scatting, "songification" and other oral and performance techniques. Harris concludes a discussion of Baraka's influence on black literature. ISBN 0-8262-0483-X: $20.00. (shrink)

In this examination of the relation of thought to sound, David Burrows offers the thesis that sound has played a liberating role in human evolution.

ABSTRACTCover versions form a loose but identifiable category of tracks and performances. We distinguish four kinds of covers and argue that they mark important differences in the modes of evaluation that are possible or appropriate for each: mimic covers, which aim merely to echo the canonical track; rendition covers, which change the sound of the canonical track; transformative covers, which diverge so much as to instantiate a distinct, albeit derivative song; and referential covers, which not only instantiate a distinct song, (...) but for which the new song is in part about the original song. In order to allow for the very possibility of transformative and referential covers, we argue that a cover is characterized by relation to a canonical track rather than merely by being a new instance of a song that had been recorded previously. (shrink)