Current Musicology

Dub Writing in Marcia Douglas’ The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim

Treviene A. Harris — 2023-07-25

Formal experimentation allows writers to critique long-standing notions of tradition and propriety. Within Caribbean literary discourse formal interventions are used to assert Caribbean life, art, and history as its own distinct expression. Particularly in relation to history and origin, or the history of our origins, Caribbean writers have experimented with literary form to articulate the region’s own peculiar understanding of its place within a time/space continuum as outside of conventional structures of knowledge. In this essay, I explore the adaptation of form across creative, artistic genres. Specifically, I look at how writing leverages sound in ways that disturb the belief that writing is a singularly privileged form in which knowledge circulates. Looking at the musical form of Jamaican Dub Music, I consider how the structural features of the sound such as fragmentation, reverb, and echo play out on the pages and in the story of Marcia Douglas’ Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim. I argue that Douglas’ novel enacts what I term “dub writing” that draws on the structure of dub music and that the novel suggests how we can imagine new ways to interpret and re/present histories. These new ways—creative interventions—effectively yield versions of history in much the same way that dub music results from the versioning of an orginary text or record. Further, versions are aspirations towards destabilizing the rigid nature of linearity that sustain our conception of time and how it structures history.

I misunderstand you

Rajnesh Chakrapani — 2023-07-25

This listening journal is about grief and family, the way sounds interweaves with text and realms of communication, how to ask for instructions to lay to rest the remains of the dead. An observer creates credibility for the doer, which in turn gives importance to the observer. The thread of the sound practice is trust. Who lets me hold space for them, who I let hold space for me. In recording this journey of Amma's death, I thought a lot about how my practice with the listening journals influenced my speaking, my performance practice, my listening to people speak. I noticed that when I listen to my recording, I had a lot of umm’s, as if there was a hum in the middle of my speech, but it also created a hesitancy and pause to the authority of speech. Perhaps my listening practice is to create a habitat to experience, to move, to listen, to think.

Transitional Functions: The Emergence of the Anticipatory Transition in Nineteenth-Century Sonatas

Luis Matos-Tovar — 2023-07-25

In sonata form, the transition module has specific primary functions and labels any other uncommon ones as deformations or, rather, idiosyncrasies. Considering the difference in compositional styles and techniques used between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the latter undergoes a trend explored by some nineteenth-century composers: a development in its transition module, which ostensibly confining it to an idiosyncratic feature or a lower-level default of the transition (Hepokoski and Darcy, 2011). I argue that composers utilized this technique in transitions to foreshadow themes in subsequent modules, yielding an additional function of the transition. This paper examines nineteenth-century sonatas, providing an analytic overview of my findings and introducing a concept I call the “Anticipatory Transition,” offering an additional function to the transition–—distinct from other concepts by previous scholarship.

Building off the work of Schenker's concept of “linkage technique” and its contribution to the development of new themes in subsequent thematic modules (Smith, 2007), as well as Schmalfeldt's adoption of Dahlhaus’s’ “processual” ideas (Schmalfeldt, 2011; Carro, 2020), the anticipatory transition is employed through two avenues: first, a literal “copy-and-paste,” and second, a “spun-out” transition. I analyze four case studies that utilize anticipatory transitions in nineteenth-century sonatas. It is important to examine the function of transitions more deeply and explore other possible outcomes because the material within can inform other thematic modules and contribute to the cohesiveness of the work. My analyses demonstrate that anticipatory transitions—profound than mere deformations and limitations—offer a deeper sense of unity and a broader perspective within sonata form.

Deciphering Guarapachangueo: Formulas and Formulaic Variation in Contemporary Rumba Percussion

Johnny Frías — 2023-07-25

This article serves to further the conceptual and musical analysis of guarapachangueo, a key influence in the contemporary style of the percussion in Havana-style rumba. I follow Turino’s (2009) lead in distinguishing between improvisation and formulaic performance in analyzing the rhythmic vocabulary of guarapachangueo as a set of related formulas and variations. In doing so, I expand upon and refine some of the characteristics of guarapachangeuo described by Bodenheimer (2015), particularly the common and yet nebulous idea that the style entails increased improvisation in the lower register of the percussion. As an active performer of the style who specializes in the lower register percussion, I will draw upon my experiences and those of fellow rumberos, as well as commercial recordings and online videos of rumba in highlighting the structural formulas used in rumba’s contemporary rhythmic vocabulary. I argue that rather than increased improvisation, guarapachangueo comprises an aesthetic approach to playing rumba in which unique formulas are employed, representing a break with the standardized formulas of traditional rumba from the second half of the 20^th century. These formulas produce a heightened sense of tension and release in which increased space and the interactive exchange of percussive phrases are central. Internalized by drummers, these formulas and variations become part of the performer’s musical habitus and are drawn upon—often unconsciously—by the musicians in the form of musical decisions that “say something” in the flow of a rumba performance.

There goes the Berimbau: An Africa-Brazil-Germany Musician-Body Trajectory

Simone Grundner — 2023-07-25

This article presents the partial results of a dissertation entitled The role of music in the internationalization of capoeira: Flows and crossroads Rio-France-Germany (2022). Documents prepared by practitioners of the N'Zinga Capoeira School in Hanover, Germany, published on a platform called Yumpu, provide information on how musical-cultural knowledge of capoeira is understood and passed down in this context. Through the translation of songs and the study of informational texts written by German instructors about capoeira, I observe that musicality (and, by extension, corporeality) are fundamenatal to the consolidation of capoeira culture in Germany. This analysis is influenced by Leda Martins' Performances da Oralitura (2003), which highlights the enduring African root in Afro-diasporic cultural activities, transmitting africanidades ("Africanities") beyond the performance itself. Paul Gilroy's The Black Alantic (1993) also informed my understanding of the relevance of Black culture in critiques of European democracy. German capoeira practitioners gain a deeper understanding of the structural differences imposed on racialized people when they coexist with their mestres and learn of oppression and social difference through the art of capoeira.

Fake Radiolab: Audio and Ideology

Akiva Zamcheck — 2023-07-25

Fake Radiolab is the name of an ongoing duo performance project in which we interrogate mediated “facts” through explorations in the podcast media form. We adopt the mannerisms and mania of radiophonic personalities and a variety of media genres (e.g., podcasts, YouTube rants, ASMR sessions, self-help narrations, dream sequences, radio plays, nature documentaries) to playfully/seriously jar the clarity and authority imparted to “content” by contemporary audio production. Acting as (unreliable) hosts of a live podcast, we present a kind of musicalized speech performance that juxtaposes multiple modes of audio narration against live synths, processed violin, and sampled audio fragments. During live performance, the opening narration, which is pre-recorded, presents an acousmatic pun to the audience who sees us on stage in front of our microphones; instead, our improvised performance inserts other manipulated material in counterpoint to the pre-recorded “backing-track.”

Our project self-consciously addresses radiophonic matter as both our subject and form. The result is a technologically and culturally hybridized discourse in which power-symbols presented as performative utterances are subsumed within an assault of genres. In particular, we use audio production to highlight and amplify the transformation of text into performance, and performance into text, powerful manipulations which we see as ubiquitous and scarily efficient throughout contemporary media culture(s). Through all the surface misdirection and dislocation, there remains a through-line in the narration of the title track which offers an analysis of the history and present presence of the radiophonic voice.

Simon, Andrew. 2022. Media of The Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Jessie Rubin — 2023-07-25

Dal Bon, Bruno. 2020. La Gioia Sovrana: Nietzsche e la Musica come Filosofia. Milano: Mimesis Edizioni.

Pietro Molteni — 2023-07-25

La Gioia Sovrana, Nietzsche e la Musica come Filosofia is a book written by the Italian conductor and philosopher Bruno Dal Bon. It demonstrates that music is one of the fundamental driving forces that moved Nietzsche in his philosophical activity.