Melbourne (1835–1927): The Birth of a Music City

Music heritage in cities has become a significant area of interest in the twenty-first century because it is linked to profitable music tourism and a growing cultural economy. Melbourne, the Victorian state capital, is used as a case study; in March 2013, the city was unofficially crowned Australia’s music capital because it, at the time, had the most music venues and a vibrant music economy. However, this paper argues that this identification is somewhat ahistorical for two reasons. Firstly, it leaves out the colonial and gold rush prehistory of Melbourne’s music culture. Secondly, it omits the critical recognition of Melbourne’s (and Australia’s) first international music superstar exports, such as opera diva Dame Nellie Melba (nee Helen Porter Mitchell), who was named after her home town of Melbourne, and pianist prodigy and composer Percy (Aldridge) Grainger. Drawing on a textual analysis of government policies, economic reports, and the work of historians, musicologists and journalists, this paper synergises the history of Melbourne’s music culture from its colonial beginnings in 1835, until 1927, when the city was no longer Australia’s political capital. It identifies four early stages of Melbourne’s musical development, which laid the foundations for iconic music venues, Australia’s first opera company, music entrepreneurs, and the initial nurturing of the nation’s first music superstars in Melba and Grainger.     

“Don’t Frack with Our Karoo”: Water,Landscape, and Congregational Song in Kroonvale,South Africa

There is a new environmental threat to the South African Karoo region in the form of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) for natural gas reserves buried deep underground. In this article, I use the issue of fracking in the Karoo to investigate the power of this landscape over its people and focus particularly on the question of how the cultural traditions of the Karoo would be affected. In contrast, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that landscape exerts a relatively weak power over its residents. My work serves as a critique of theories that see landscape as exerting only marginal influence over people. I argue that not only does landscape exert a palpable power over its inhabitants, but also that landscape affects the musical traditions of these residents and, ultimately, the configuration of the Karoo soundscape. To investigate this, I draw on my research of music in three churches with coloured people’s membership in the town of Graaff-Reinet and examine this tradition in the context of its surrounding landscape.     

Music education literature in German-language polyethnic schools in Estonia, 1860–1914

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on music education literature in German-language schools in Estonia from 1860 to 1914. Music education literature in Estonian schools with German as a language of instruction has been an unexplored field of research. As a result of this systematic research, a representative sample of music education literature was formed: 30 German-language editions and 2,330 songs. The songbooks and music textbooks were considered as signs of German culture being dominant. The profound social, economic, and political changes, characteristic for the nineteenth century, caused tensions, which were expressed in the content of music literature.     

A marriage of inconvenience: Miriam Makeba’s relationship with Stokely Carmichael and her music career in the United States

This article analyzes the career of famed South African singer, Miriam Makeba, in the United States. After finding success throughout much of the 1960s, Makeba’s career and public image shifted after her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael, a noted Civil Rights activist and proponent of the Black Power movement. Once Makeba became associated with Carmichael and his reputation as an extremist, the American public, media, and music industry changed their approach to Makeba as an individual and as an artist throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Ultimately, this union caused American audiences to turn on her and her music, and this essay explores how and why this shift occurred.     

“Zimbabwe is Mine”: Mugabe,Murder, and Matabeleland

Searching for Sugar Man, the celebrated 2012 documentary of Sixto Rodriguez’s musical life, opens onto (but does not adequately address) important questions concerning musical circulation and reception. It is a story of two albums, Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971) that traveled in very different ways in the USA and South Africa and of how these travels were shaped by cultural politics and cultural circuits. But, it is also a story about the ways that the music industry complicated these cultural circuits by muddying and interrupting financial pathways—that is, by acting as a circuit breaker. Unfortunately, the film misses an opportunity to explore any of these stories in a sustained manner, crafting instead a narrative that engages them only to the extent that they help the director, Malik Bendjelloul, present a lost-and-found narrative of musical rebirth, featuring South African fans and audiences as the supporting cast. In choosing this entertaining, but myth-making path, the film itself configures new circuits and inaugurates additional circuit breakers that must be disentangled from and read in relation to Rodriguez’s musical life.     

The Baltic states,Finland, and British economic expectations in the early 1920s

Abstract

After the First World War, the Baltic states — not Finland — attracted the British as a bridge to Russian markets. The article deals with the rank of these states in British economic expectations. It is shown that whereas the Baltic states were highly prioritized, in 1920, by 1926 the British preferred Finland as a more trusworthy trading partner than Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The article thus shows how the rank of the Baltic states and Finland changed in British expectations when all of these states were seen as markets in and of themselves.     

理解村上春树的另一种方法——音乐

村上春树童年开始学习钢琴,大学期间与爵壬、摇滚为伍,毕业后经营爵士酒吧,音乐造诣非同一般。村上擅长讲故事,更擅长用音乐渲染气氛。因此,若想深刻理解村上及村上的文学,音乐是必不可少的方法。本文从村上与音乐的关系入手,通过分析《挪威的森林》《国境以南太阳以西》及《奇鸟行状录》等三篇小说的背景音乐,探索用音乐理解村上的可能及音乐在村上文学中的重要作用。     

The Voice of (Which?) Africa: Miriam Makeba in America

Throughout her time as a concert singer in 1960s America Miriam Makeba was promoted as the embodied voice of a sonic, imagined Africa. Where her white audiences were attracted to the complete ‘‘otherness’’ of her African blackness, her black American audiences saw themselves – or imagined versions of themselves – put on stage, and built solidarities between their own struggle and the struggle against apartheid. In this essay, I argue that the discourses that followed Makeba’s voice and body reflected the evolving attitudes of America towards Africa, and, through Africa, its contradictory relationship to its own African American citizens. Makeba played on these discourses to craft a political and musical identity in solidarity with black and diasporic causes. This identity, embodied in the persona of ‘‘Mama Africa,’’ allowed Makeba the flexibility to speak to and for her fellow (South) Africans with cultural authority. By joining the oft-opposed positions of ‘‘Africa’’ and ‘‘The World,’’ Makeba became what I’m calling an African Cosmopolitan.     

Disempowering Music: The Amandla! Documentary and Other Conservative Musical Projects

Scholars of black South African popular music have established important connections between music and society. Lara Allen’s studies of pennywhistle-kwela, Christopher Ballantine’s research on marabi and African jazz/mbaqanga,and David Coplan’s social history of black city music, among others, have underwritten the new literature in South African musicology and cultural studies. Previous neglect of black popular culture has made oral testimony crucial to the writing of these musical pasts. Recent investigations in the field, which are preoccupied with the articulation of black struggle to music, and the expression of struggle through music, have adopted a more popular format. Within these, the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are integral, as is Lee Hirsch’s documentary film, Amandla!. The popularity of these studies and their subjects, and their foregrounded debt to oral testimony and veneration of ‘the Struggle’ has tended to foreclose scrutiny of their representational politics. This article questions whether their homological substitution of music and musicians for anti-apartheid struggles in a postapartheid South Africa enables the radical stories they would tell of that past.     

Todos juntos: hippies,rock music,and the Popular Unity era

Scholars traditionally have characterized the 1960s and early 1970s as an era of political polarization in Chile stemming from an intensifying rift between those who supported the leftist Popular Unity government (1970–1973) and those who opposed it. While there is little question that this division was the fundamental political axis in Chilean society at that time, it was not the only one. This article traces the development of rock music and culture among Chile’s youth to assert that while Chilean society polarized over the Popular Unity government, an additional segment of society emerged as an additional socio-political pole. During the Popular Unity era, a significant number of Chile’s youth rejected both the political right and left by assertively refraining from taking stances in regards to party platforms or candidates, rejecting those sounds, images, and traditions tied to the right and to the left in favor of an alternative political and cultural orientation tied to rock music and hippie counterculture.     

‘Our Culture's Not for Sale!’: Music and the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca in Mexico

The Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), a social movement that emerged in June 2006, was a response to severe government repression of a teachers' strike in Oaxaca, Mexico. This article focuses on the movement participants' involvement with music, and the innovative ways in which songs associated with APPO were shared and circulated during the conflict. APPO's engagement with musical activities created spaces in which the political significance of regional culture was reinterpreted and re-signified. APPO, despite failing in its primary political objectives, thus generated new ways of relating to the performance, representation, politics and consumption of musical traditions.     

Defining Folklore: Mestizo and Indigenous Identities on the Move

This article analyses how the performance of folkloric music and dance defines and redefines ethnic/racial distinctions and identities in the Andes. It focuses on the promotional activities of urban-based institutions in Cusco called instituciones culturales, particularly how these activities have shaped folkloric performance. The article calls attention to the continuing importance of race as a central category of social differentiation, showing how folkloric performances embody ethnic/racial identities.     

铃木镇一“才能教育”的思想与实践

日本的铃木教学法是国际著名的音乐教学法之一，它旨在通过小提琴教学来培养儿童的音乐才能。本文拟从铃木所提倡的教育观点、小提琴才能教学的特点等方面对“才能教育”思想与实践进行深入研究。借此希望能够为相关研究提供新的视角，从而进一步促进人们对铃木教学法的理解。     

Jail-house Rock: Cuba, AIDS, and the Incorporation of Dissent in Bengt Norborg's Socialism or Death

Abstract — The demerits and merits of Cuba's quarantine facilities for AIDS patients and seropositives have been widely debated. This article expands the debate by referring to the phenomenon of HIV self-injection in Cuba, as documented in the 1995 film, Socialism or Death. There is an assessment of the economic, medical, and educational context which informed the events depicted by the film. HIV self-injection is discussed alongside reference to the development in Cuba of a counter-cultural youth movement based around a common interest in rock music. The testimony of self-injected patients and their families, and the reactions of Cuban medical officials are summarised. Comparisons are made between Cuban policy and radical queer theory.     

Negotiating Violence and Creative Agency in Commissioned Mexican Narco Rap

This article explores agency as an ability to act and exert power creatively when failure implies literal death. It draws on interviews with an ex‐narco and rappers who willingly accept narco‐commissions in 2010s Tamaulipas, Mexico, a context where precarity and necropolitical logics prevail. It asserts that many rappers exert power creatively, despite the risks. Rappers shape narco‐aesthetics by determining the lyrical and sonic elements of songs; draw on experiences of narco‐life to contribute to narco‐ethics; and mould narco‐masculinities by encouraging listeners to stay firm. It proposes that prevalent discursive Us–Them dichotomies facilitate Othering and stigmatisation of actors in the narco‐world, and serve to accentuate narco‐power.     

The South African Life and Afterlife of Jim Reeves

This article considers the overwhelming and lasting popularity of the country singer, Jim Reeves, in South Africa. Interpreting the press and radio coverage of his two tours to the country (1962 and 1963) and two recent biographies, it considers the ways in which this representative of the Nashville Sound was constructed to appeal to particular sectors of the South African community. Reeves’s habitus was constructed – despite all evidence and behavior to the contrary – as respectable, devout, and loyal to Afrikaner nationalist ideology. The argument considers the ways in which this conservative demeanor bridged the bucolic imaginary and aspirant modernism of apartheid South Africa.     

The strange case of a national anthem without lyrics: music and political identities in Spain (1785–1913)*

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, between 1785 and 1913, Spain underwent processes of national construction similar to those experienced in other European countries. This phenomenon can be analysed through the crucial aspect of national symbols. Music played a leading role in these processes and engendered two opposing models, the product of internal political divisions. One, influenced by the style of the French Revolution, gave rise to a great many popular songs and was represented most of all by the Himno de Riego or “Riego Hymn,” the preferred anthem of the liberal and democratic left. The other, following a monarchist template inspired by the United Kingdom, was embodied in the Marcha Real or Royal March, a piece of ceremonial music without words that was promoted by conservative sectors opposed to popular political mobilization. The struggle between the two resulted in the adoption of the latter march as Spain’s official national anthem, although its association with the monarchy and the Catholic religion impeded the formation of a broad consensus around it. Contrary to the arguments maintained by many historians until a few years ago, the case of Spain cannot be considered as exceptional, although it did have certain peculiarities deriving from conflicts between different versions of Spanish nationalism and between the nationalism of the state and the sub-state nationalist movements that emerged towards the end of this period.     

Govan Mbeki and The ANC Youth League

The movie Searching for Sugarman, for all its many deficiencies, does raise analytical issues which ought not to be dismissed. It is true that the film presents South African politics in a confusing way and avoids the issue of race. But these failures do not entirely invalidate the film, and they certainly should not lead us to ignore the important sociological questions to which it points. The interaction between South African youth and global Counterculture from the late 1960s through the 1980s was a significant phenomenon, which Searching for Sugarman explores in interesting and suggestive ways.