Murakami and music in "Sputnik sweetheart"

The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami is renowned for his unexpected mystical stories that contained within them many symbols and musical references. His writings are well-known to be influenced by his affection for every genre of music, jazz and classical in particular, and partly due to his once owning a jazz bar named Peter Cat and collecting over 10,000 records of various musical genres that helped to sustain and deepen his musical tastes. Murakami himself believes that rhythm has a significant influence on literature, whether from music or fictions. He always artfully and blatantly applies his knowledge and preoccupation in music, accumulated from years of passions in his writings.

The Politics of Music Piracy in Bolivia

The government of indigenous Bolivian president Evo Morales, which was inaugurated in January 2006 and has huge popular support (gaining over 64% of the vote when re-elected in December 2009), has made no significant attempt to confront music, software or book piracy to date. However, the rise of piracy and collapse of the large-scale music industry date from well before Morales' tenure and need to be viewed in broader historical context. In particular, the various phases of neo-liberal policies since the mid-1980s have been seen to have exacerbated inequality, favoured foreign interests, reduced state legitimacy, and ultimately ignited the social movements that swept Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) Government to Power. Thus, the growth of piracy may, in part, be seen to reflect social conditions that denied majority access to knowledge and cultural resources and a political climate in which many Bolivians came to feel that laws were unjust and favoured the rich.

A Celebratory Event in Muslim Culture

The mawlid is a celebratory event and genre to be found in Muslim lands from the Atlantic coast of Africa all the way to Indonesia and the southern islands of the Philippines. Many spellings and pronunciations have been given to the title of this religious literary form and its various embellishments--mevlit, mevlut, maulud, malid, milad, molid, mulid and moulid being but a partial listing. These terms and the varying phenomena to which they are applied have been utilized in non-Arabic-speaking as well as Arabic-speaking regions of the Muslim world. All variants are colloquializations of the Arabic word, mawlid, which for purposes of consistency will be used throughout this article. The term mawlid has carried many different meanings. Derived from the Arabic root verb wulida ('to be born'), mawlid means 'the event of birth' or 'the place of birth.' In these literal senses, it applies to any birth. More specifically, however, it has denoted the birth, the birthday or the birthplace of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam, and with this meaning it is also rendered as mawlid al-nabi, i.e., 'Birthday of the Prophet.'

Traditional Music of Southern Laos

Between the time when French musicologist Jacques Brunet recorded the music of Southern Laos in the early 1970s and the re-issue of these recordings on CD in 1992, Laos (by that time having become the People's Democratic Republic of Laos) had experienced war trauma, the flight of great numbers of people, isolation, and the beginning of healing. During the Vietnam war the United States dropped unimaginable quantities of bombs throughout the south (along the so-called 'Ho Chi Minh Trail') and in much of the northeast. In some provinces, virtually every town and sizable village were destroyed. Economic and social development were also stopped or rolled back. Provinces which once had running water and electricity, at least in the main town, ceased to have either. Where tourists formerly visited (e.g., Vat Phu near Champassak), there were only abandoned restaurants and a little-used hotel. In 1991 modern tourist hotels remained under construction just as they had been when workers walked off the job in 1975. Travel within Laos by both Lao and non-Lao was strictly regulated by the government; consequently, few were able to visit formerly familiar sites such as Luang Phabang, Vat Phu, or the Bolovens Plateau. Therefore, this set of recordings has a strange air of nostalgia, especially since it had been re-issued with the same notes used in the original Phillips recording of 1973.

Mass Media and the Emergence of Salsa

The music which came to be called salsa developed out of Cuban dance genres--especially the son, 'guaracha' and 'rumba'--which had evolved into a cohesive set of commercial popular styles by the 1920s. By the 1940ss, these genres, as promoted by RCA Victor (which monopolized the record industry in Cuba) enjoyed considerable international appeal, and Latino communities in New York had come to play an important role in the evolution of Cuban music. Puerto Ricans had so eagerly adopted Cuban music for decades (especially since the introduction of radio in 1922) that they had come to regard such genres as the 'son' and 'guaracha' more or less as their own (generally at the expense of indigenous genres like 'plena' and 'bomba'). Meanwhile, since the 1920s, New York City had become the scene of a lively dialectic blending and competition of diverse grassroots Latin American musics and commercialized version thereof. Many Cuban musicians had come to base themselves in New York City, where, together with Puerto Rican bandleaders like Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez, they established New York as a center for the music that would eventually come to be labelled 'salsa' by the record industry.

Two Ethnographic Films on Muslim Music

Ethnomusicologist John Baily researched, directed and edited two films during a two-year Leverhulme Film Training Fellowship at The National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the United Kingdom. 'Amir: An Afghan Refugee Musician's Life in Peshwar, Pakistan' was made in 1985 (with photography by Wayne Derrick), and 'Lessons from Gulam: Asian Music in Bradford' in 1986 (with photography by Andy Jillings). In each film Baily worked with a student cameraman who was in his last year of studies. The films are very much in the documentary style of the NFTS, forged by its director, Colin Young. The film making process is acknowledged in the films rather than hidden, and the (short) commentaries are spoken by the film maker in the first person. While editing the films, Baily was able to benefit from feedback by other film makers at the NFTS during regular weekly screening of the work in progress.

Reflections on Ethnic Music

This is a brief meditation on ethnicity as a source of all powerful musical styles, as a kind of curse in the contemporary world of nation states, and as an ever more complex puzzle for every student of popular music to solve. Browsing through the Wilfrid Mellers classic, one can browse a long time before finding much on ethnicity  or class as foundations for musicking. Music in a New Found Land simply extends the high culture worldview used in writing about Bach or Beethoven or Orpheus to generously include the best of popular music in a civilization that is ever broader but always universal. Mellers writes from on high, a heavenly perspective, in which sympathetic judgments of everything musical under the sun are dispensed with gusto and St. Peter is encouraged to let all kinds of quality pass the gates, or perhaps we should describe it as an Olympian-situated knowledge that savors the foibles and idiosyncrasies of all the music makers below because the gods and mortals share so many  passions. I know I have enjoyed this recent browsing greatly because I share in almost all the judgments: the appreciation of Thelonius Monk’s fingerings, the disgust with Stan Kenton’s mechanization, the appraisal of Menotti’s emptiness, the disappointments of so many ‘third stream’ syntheses. Mellers gets it right in phrase after phrase, page after page, but almost always by listening intelligently from the top down.

Music and the Media Industrial Complex

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was engaged in a collaborative research project headed by Charles Keil on the question of 'participatory discrepancies' in music. Keil contended that the engaging elements of music were in the subliminal, subsyntactical, micro-timed details, that these minor variations or, as he put it, discrepancies, are evident over the course of a performance in the interactions between players. This offered a new way to think about music that was not tethered to the conventions of Western musicological scholarship and I was thrilled to be involved in a project that was questioning the status quo in academic research on music. Keil asked if I could demonstrate that these 'PDs' existed by using then current analog to digital converter technology to visually observe musical performances on the micro-timed level. The resulting research was published in 1995 in a special issue of the journal 'Ethnomusicology,' for which the editors solicited responses from a number of noted ethnomusicologists and rejoinders from Keil and I to those responses. What follows is my rejoinder, which begins by referring to the responses but then veers in another direction.

Musical Instruments, Culture and Classification

An important aspect of Western music research over the last century has been the creation of classification systems for musical instruments. These systems have been useful for the purposes of cataloguing, especially for information retrieval systems and museum archives. They have also been seen as a means for gaining a conceptual handle on the great variety of musical instruments the world over. However, and just as importantly, instrument classification systems independent of Western scholarship have existed in most of the world's cultures for as long as there have been instruments to classify. By examining systems of classification and their justification, we can therefore learn something about the cultures that produce those systems.

A Film on Music in the Trobriand Islands

The Trobriand Islands are usually assumed to be well known, thanks to the research of Bronislaw Malinowski and numerous subsequent anthropologists. But in spite of the abundant documentation of other cultural components, the music of the area had been little studied and is almost inaccessible aurally to listeners outside of Papua New Guinea. Therefore, the film 'Kama Wosi' ('Our Songs' in Kilivila language), shot in 1975 by Les McLaren and released in 1979, was a very welcome addition to knowledge of this area. What immediately strikes the viewer familiar with Malinowski's photographs of Trobriand life from 1915-1918 is that few things seem to have changed in 65 years. Even traditional music had not been supplanted by string bands, as the opening credits reveal: 'Although some music was performed expressly for the film, it still functions integrally to Trobriand society.'

Old-Time Cuban Music on Film

A friend of mine, a Cuban film director, wrote to me about visiting the Salzburg Festival. After enjoying operas by Berlioz and Mozart, he said, the big surprise was the Festival’s closing event, a concert by the Cuban old-timers La Vieja Trova Santiaguera, chosen by the Festival’s special guest of the year, the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. ‘It was tremendous. Austrians in elegant dresses and tuxedos cutting a caper and going crazy with the rhythm of one of the most traditional of our musical styles. Everyone danced and enjoyed themselves till the early hours. I can only tell you,’ my friend added, ‘that wherever I go I find this incredible popularity of Cuban music.’ The international popularity of Cuban music is not, by any means, a new phenomenon. One need only think of the Latin jazz of the 1940s, when the Cuban drummer Chano Pozo was Dizzy Gillespie’s drummer and George Russell wrote ‘Cubana Be Cubana Bop’ for Gillespie and Charlie Parker; or the rise to fame in the 1970s throughout Latin America of the singers of the Nueva Trova like Silvio Rodrìguez and Pablo Milanès; then of Afro-Cuban jazz groups such as Los Irakere in the 1980s, followed by the salsa boom of the 1990s. But, in the mid to late 1990s a new twist emerged.

Review of 'Dance and Human History'

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist and folklorist known for collecting and bringing to public attention a wide variety of folk music from the United States, Europe and Latin America. He was an early proponent of what is today commonly referred to as 'multiculturalism.' He received numerous awards and honors, including the Library of Congress Living Legends Award in 2000, two years before his death at the age of 87. In addition to his work in music Lomax was interested in dance, for which he developed the theory and method of 'choreometrics,' which was designed to observe and interpret the relationship between dance and social structure. Although the social sciences, particularly anthropology, have moved away from what came to be known as structuralism, Lomax produced a number of enduring works as part of the choreometrics project, including the documentary film 'Dance and Human History.'

End of an Era for Arab Music in the USA

On 26 September 2010, Rashid Sales, the premiere source for Arab music in the US, held its grand closing. Amidst Middle Eastern grocery stores, shops and restaurants, Rashid Sales had been a mainstay of the Atlantic Avenue Arabic cultural scene in Brooklyn, New York, for decades. But due to dwindling sales of CDs and other physical media, which the owners attribute to availability of music on the internet, the shop can no longer make ends meet. They will, however, migrate part of their business to the internet and offer some of their wares for sale online. It was just a few short years ago that the shop was hailed as a 'Musical Oasis' in Brooklyn, and so in honor of that legacy TV Multiversity is reprinting here a 2004 article from the pages of Aramco World magazine. We wish Rashid Sales all the best in their new endeavor and hope that they can continue to bring Arabic music to the masses.