Jim Samson

Music in the Balkans

This book investigates multiple musical traditions in South East Europe, crossing conventional borders between musicology and ethnomusicology in an attempt to elucidate how music has contributed to the definition of national, regional and social identities in the region.

An introduction to music studies

Features of this book: a guide Introduction J. P. E. Harper-Scott Part I. Disciplines: 1. Music history Jim Samson 2. Music theory and analysis Rachel Beckles Willson 3. The sociology of music Katharine Ellis 4. The psychology of music John Rink 5. Music aesthetics and critical theory Andrew Bowie Part II. Approaches to Repertoire: 6. World musics Henry Stobart 7. Early music Stephen Rose 8. Opera David Charlton 9. Concert music Erik Levi 10. Jazz Andrew Bowie 11. Popular music Elizabeth Eva Leach 12. Music in film and television Julie Brown Part III. Music in Practice: 13. Musical performance Tina K. Ramnarine 14. Composition Julian Johnson 15. Music technology Brian Lock 16. The economics and business of music Nicholas Cook.

The profession of music

This chapter explores a rich seam within music’s economic and social history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Successive political and economic developments and demographic responses to them impacted heavily on musical culture, causing an exponential increase in the number of public concerts as well as rapid expansion in the worlds of music publishing, music journalism, music teaching, and instrument manufacture and sales. New musical professions sprang up as a largely urban music-consuming public voracious in appetite but variably refined in taste exerted growing financial power. Established professions either evolved in reaction to intense market pressures or disappeared entirely. Certain obstacles make it difficult to chart the profession of music – or, more accurately, the professions of music – from 1800 to 1850. One is the sheer diversity of professional activities, which prohibits detailed investigation and watertight conclusions across the board. Another is the diversity of centres in which they were practised, ranging from capital cities to provincial locations in any number of different countries. A third is the diversity of consumers at the time – above all, the ‘middle class’, a socially disparate group with complex hierarchies of status and taste that defy concise summary. My approach is therefore highly selective, offering case-study illustrations drawn from a broad spectrum of professions, geographic locations and consumers, rather than a comprehensive coverage doomed from the start. Although eclectic, my strategy at least reflects the lack of cohesion within the profession of music itself during this period.

The great composer

On canons and spearheads A focus on greatness is one of the markers of nineteenth-century culture. Indeed it was the nineteenth century that fostered and nurtured that fetishism of greatness – of the great artist, the great work – so familiar to us today. The language of music criticism in the early nineteenth century tells part of that story, registering a subtle shift from the acknowledgement of excellence to the recognition of greatness. This shading of meaning is worth elaborating. Excellence suggests pre-eminence in an enterprise whose terms of reference have been validated by convention. Greatness, on the other hand, implies an achievement or an aptitude so far beyond the ordinary that it is capable of remaking the conventions – resetting the terms on which future evaluations might be made. Excellence carries with it the sense of an object well made, a task well done. Greatness transcends the making, as also the function. It imposes itself on the world. It goes without saying that the nineteenth century did not initiate the concept of greatness. It flourished in the ancient world, and it was reinvented (partly through the mediation of Islamic culture) for the thinkers and makers of Renaissance humanism. And humanism is to the point, for it is the purely human that is honoured in a project of greatness, that capacity of the exceptional mind to speak for all, to celebrate our potencies, to express our emotions through the mystery of creative genius. It was above all during the Renaissance that creativity took on something of its modern, elevated, sense, not least through a swerve towards secular themes, which proved no less susceptible to the aura of creative genius than their sacred counterparts.

Music and Society

1848 Music has a double history, social and stylistic. A sociology of musical language might hope to reveal that at very deep levels they are tightly meshed, even that they make a single statement. Yet that is far from obvious. This book is cautious about any assumptions of a closed and unified cultural field, in which all opposing tendencies would be related dialectically. Its authors have been content to outline areas of interaction between musical life and musical language without adopting at the outset any single explanatory theory. Such at least is our starting-point. At the same time we recognize that areas of interaction have a way of generating patterns and, as the patterns multiply, some tentative notion of a deeper unity may present itself after all — not a single statement, perhaps, but an intricate web of intersecting causal threads.

Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile by Sylvia Angelique Alajaji (review)

in community work. It is a credit to the editors that they have included Ruth Nicole Brown’s experimental and pioneering reflections on methodological practice in her chapter: ‘Performative Account of Black Girlhood’ (ch. 12). Brown provides a first-person narrative of a performance she delivered at a conferenceçwhich encompassed a poem, singing, PowerPoint, and actingçabout the murder of 15-year-old African-American Sakia Gunn in 2003. Although there is always something lost in the transition from performance to printed word, the rawness and honesty of Brown’s narrative captures the theatrical nature of her presentation and its emotional impact. The chapter offers a unique and affective way of inviting reflection on complex questions of race, gender, and sexuality, and our complicity in these issues. It is through interventions such as Brown’s that we can approach long-standing issues with fresh eyes to stimulate dialogue. Michael P. Jeffries explores authenticity in language and social performance in chapter 13. The chapter addresses ‘the imperatives and implications of code switching and/or style switchingçmoving between different languages and styles of self-presentation’ (p. 244). Jeffries argues that Obama’s blackness allows him to code-switch his racial identity, class, and gender according to his audience, which is essential in electoral politics to engage voters. Using Obama and Jay Z as case studies, Jeffries highlights the manufactured strategies both politicians and hip-hop artists engage in to present a coherent, symbolic, and accessible persona. The key argument of the chapter, an analysis of race as something performed and changeable rather than fixed, acts as a useful blueprint for students of hip-hop studies wanting to explore similar racial themes. The downfall of an edited volume on a narrow area is that there is some repetition of the ideas put forward and even the use of specific quotes, lyrics, and anecdotes. This was most notable in discussions about the relationship between Obama and Jay Z (introduction, chapters 6, 7, 13, and 14), and analyses of code and style switching (chapters 5, 6, and 13). However, if students were to dip into the volume for specific chapters, this would not present a serious drawback. Another shortcoming of the book from an international perspective is that aside from two chapters on global hip-hop (ch. 4) and Arab rap (ch. 5), the volume is very American-centric, which although it is to be expected when discussing the US president, may put off global hip-hop scholars. However, chapters such as Harrison’s discussion of race and Jeffries’s analysis of code-switching each provide valuable theoretical insights that can be applied to hiphop sites across the world, or deployed in comparative studies. A welcome addition would have been a glossary defining key terms. This could have helped explain to (non-US) readers the differences between, for example, ‘community organizing’, ‘hip-hop organizing’, and ‘hiphop activism’, as this was sometimes unclear. Overall, the Hip-Hop and Obama Reader is a solid introduction to American politics contra hip-hop, and the thorny issues of democracy, race, and power relations. Despite the uneven quality of the contributions, the range of voices and diverse style of the chapters create an original edited volume which undergraduates, postgraduates, and fans of hip-hop will find both interesting and useful. By calling attention to the potential of hip-hop as a grassroots movement and positive means of civic engagement, the book makes a valuable contribution to an emerging area worthy of much more consideration and, ideally, action. LAURA SPEERS King’s College London

Borders and bridges: Preliminary thoughts on Balkan music

The author discusses methodological questions concerning his broad research project on music in the Balkans. He raises a number of questions related to defining national, cultural, and other identities in this region. The text is organized into four sections: 1. An ecumene, 2. Culture as appropriation 3. Centers and peripheries, and 4. Music gets its own back.

Nations and nationalism

Nationalisms The French Revolution brought into sharp focus a cluster of ideas about freedom and rights that had been bred in seventeenth-century England and nurtured in eighteenth-century France. Unsurprisingly, it is far from easy to disentangle these ideas – to be clear about causes and effects. Notions of freedom and rights were no doubt promoted by the mode of production of an emergent capitalism in the seventeenth century. But they were promoted too by the Protestant reformation and its influential ethos; and by the philosophical empiricism cultivated by English thinkers. How is one to define a relation between these levels? A (broadly) Marxist position claims that changes in the polity, as also in the cultural and intellectual domains, are invariably motivated by changes in the socio-economic base. Yet this is in competition with the claim (by, for example, Max Weber) that ideas can change the world. Then again, more recent critical theory takes refuge in dialectics, a seductive solution to the chicken and egg problem, but one that may on occasion amount to a failure of nerve. Whatever the underlying causality, it is clear that on a political level strengthening notions of popular sovereignty were given practical meaning and propaganda by the Revolution in France, as earlier by the American War of Independence. These events effectively inaugurated an age of revolution and of liberalism, though it should be noted that from the start liberalism involved a dimension of contractualism as well as of freedom.

Eastern Europe, 1918–45

During the period of Communist rule in eastern Europe it was easy to consider the region as a coherent though diverse area where rather domesticated groups of Slavs, Magyars and gypsies lived together in some semblance of harmony. Recent events, though, have reminded us of the tumultuous differences in history, religion and culture which exist between the various nation states and the ethnic groups which inhabit them. Yugoslavia is in the midst of one of the worst bloodbaths of human history, while the Czech lands are independent for the first time since 1621, and seem well on the way to peace and prosperity. Romania may be worse off now than it was under Ceaucescu and the ethnic hostility between Hungarians and Slovaks has never been worse. The Polish economy is a shambles and over a million gypsies are treated as scapegoats. Gone is any lingering sense that eastern European nationalism is something arcane to be studied in a musty textbook. In the last three years the continuing drama of the region has often been horrifyingly re-enacted before our very eyes as the unresolved conflicts of the past have tainted the present with blood and confusion.

East Central Europe: the Struggle for National Identity

The revolutions of 1848 had no single underlying meaning. Even within the Habsburg Empire quite separate discontents were interleaved. There was a struggle for social justice, as powerful in Vienna as it was in Paris. There was a struggle for constitutional rights, exercising the liberal intelligentsia in Prague as it did in the German cities. And there was a struggle for national self-determination, impelling Hungary, as it did northern Italy, towards a wholesale war of liberation. Primary causes are difficult to disentangle, but in the eastern empire at least the political issues acquired a particular immediacy, ultimately absorbing the social issues into all-embracing nationalist programmes. It was national rather than class interests which were most obviously at stake in risings against the Habsburgs, not least in their eastern territories.