Friday: Session 4, 3:30-5
Session 4A: Roles of Music on Stage and Screen
Moderator: Christina Baade
Room 409, Arts Centre
Janice Esther Tulk, Cape Breton University, “Converging Peripheries: Musical Exoticism and the Aesthetic of Ambiguity in Walt Disney’s Brother Bear”
Since the advent of moving picture technology, indigenous peoples and their cultures have served as source material for films. For almost as long, the misrepresentation of indigenous peoples has been criticized. This paper examines the musical representation of indigenous peoples in Walt Disney’s Brother Bear (2003) and the decisions made by composers while “scoring the Indian” (Gorbman 2000). I discuss notions of expectation (Deloria 2004) and the commodification of children’s culture as it relates to the musical representation employed in this film, while also annotating the narrative itself to trace analogous stories and their origins.
By comparing musical gestures employed in Pocahontas (1995), I demonstrate a shift from using the stereotyped gestures of exoticism in Western Art music (Pisani’s [1998] “tool-box of exotica”) to a new exoticism that features a variety of world musics: the “mysterious” sound of the Bulgarian Women’s Choir in relation to the supernatural, Motown-style music by the Blind Boys of Alabama to represent a family of bears, and the sound of a Japanese taiko drum during a diegetic scene that visually features Inuit hand-drums. My research explores the audience’s response to these diverse sonic expressions brought forth from the periphery to facilitate the telling of an ‘indigenous’ story to mainstream North America. By reviewing the film and bonus material with focus groups, I begin to map how audiences make sense of ambiguous sonic and visual elements. I conclude that incongruous imagery and sonic elements are a feature of an “aesthetic of ambiguity” employed as a musical and narrative device to transport the viewer to a different time and space.
Lauren Acton, York University, “Middlebrow Entertainment? Broadway, Hollywood and the Musicalization of Popular Films”
Over the years, there have been numerous eulogies written for the death of musical theatre, yet the genre keeps being reincarnated. Not only revived by revivals, musicals have drawn new audiences to theatres by turning popular movies into musicals. The flow of material from Broadway to Hollywood has become a two-way flood in the past decade or so. Disney discovered a gold mine in translating their films to the stage, and other producers soon followed suit with musicals such as Dirty Dancing, Legally Blonde and Evil Dead. The musicals based on popular films in particular have the unique appeal of being both new and familiar. Audiences are expecting to see the story they know, but with the addition of music and production numbers. Furthermore, audiences pay up to ten times more for a theatre ticket than they would to see the film; this change in cost alone, elevates the musical version above mass culture to the middlebrow.
This paper will explore how the change in medium from film to stage affects the show, the message and the audience. It will question how space and place impart meaning within the hierarchy of the musical theatre community. For example, I will examine how Evil Dead might hold up for posterity when it was staged in Toronto (a centre for musical theatre in Canada) but was staged off-Broadway in New York City and has not yet been produced in the West End (therefore bypassing the undisputed centres of musical theatre in the Western world). I will also question how off and off-off-Broadway shows alter when they make it to the Great White Way. Drawing on mass culture for material, but not quite a part of mass culture themselves, musicals are still very much alive – and worth exploring.
Emily Gale, University of Virginia, “Yacht Rock and the ‘Raw Power of Really Smooth Music’”
Between June 2005 and June 2006, Channel 101 – an internet television network – aired ten short episodes of the mockumentary series, Yacht Rock. In the pilot episode, host Hollywood Steve Huey introduces an ex post facto-coined genre of music: “From 1976 to 1984 the radio airwaves were dominated by really smooth music, also known as ‘yacht rock.’” Combining fictional elements with verifiable facts, the series presents an alternative musical historicization of this era. This paper aims to tease out the distinctions between yacht rock, as presented in the series, and yacht rock, as a real musical phenomenon. Each episode of the series tells the supposed tale of a yacht rock song. The tales revolve around processes of song writing and seek to demonstrate unity in the so-called smooth music of this era. Geography, musical characteristics, and lyrical themes form the basis for the posited generic unity; these offer compelling reasons to understand yacht rock as a musical genre. In addition to offering an argument about genre formation, the tales of the series afford a cultural significance not often ascribed to the music of bands such as The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and Toto, and musicians including Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, and Michael McDonald. I chart the ways in which the Yacht Rock series highlights the conspicuous absence of this music in popular music scholarship, and investigate what this exclusion suggests about the project of popular music studies, about mainstream tastes, and about rock historiography, in general. I conclude by offering several possible reasons for this conspicuous absence of the smooth music of the late 1970s and early 1980s in histories of popular music and in cultural memory.
Session 4B: European Centres, European Peripheries
Moderator: Cory Thorne
Room 2016, McCain Building
Renata Pasternak-Mazur, Rutgers University, “Hiphopolo or Silencing through Mainstreaming: Shifting Centers in Polish Hip-Hop”
Unlike American hip-hop, Polish hip-hop cannot be traced back to a particular geographic location and particular time. It appeared simultaneously in a few Polish cities and was linked with a type of settlement called blokowisko (an agglomeration of apartment buildings) that is not exclusive to large industrial cities but can be found all through the urban-rural continuum. Its history is closely related to rapid socio-economic changes resulting from the transformation from socialism to capitalism that began in 1989. Against the background of socio-economic changes, the paper will trace shifts in discourses within and about the genre. It will present hip-hop’s route from party music that existed in isolation from hip-hop culture to the voice of “others” of the new (capitalist) system, then to commercial hiphopolo that, as mainstream fashion statement, dominated popular culture in Poland for a few years, and, finally, to yet another music genre struggling for its public recognition. In particular, the paper will focus on processes in which phenomenon marked hiphopolo and discourse it represents are being silenced.
In post-socialist Poland the suffix –polo became a marker of musical “badness”. It stems from disco polo, the first genre that came to prominence after socialism collapsed and – as the first genre that experienced commercialization – that soon became synonymous with poor taste and a business-inspired esthetic compromise, undergoing more severe criticism, especially from the intelligentsia, than any other aspect of mass culture. The paper will investigate how the identification of some Polish hip-hop as –polo and discourses about (not by) associated audiences arise, and how such discourses are used to construct these entities as silenceable. Methodologically, the paper will be situated within discourse concerning silencing (which is understood here as a process that leads to limiting, removing or undermining the legitimacy of some forms of musical expression).
Chris McDonald, Cape Breton University, “Celtic Fringes, Oriental Sojourns: Searching for the Elemental in Celtic Pop”
Popular Canadian Celtic performer Loreena McKennitt’s CD Book of Secrets (1997) might be seen as an attempt to delve into Celtic-World Beat fusion, a niche musical genre that was very much in vogue when McKennitt released the album. Celtic harps and uillean pipes joined with Central Asian zithers, Turkish ney flutes and Indian tabla on Book of Secrets to weave a musical tapestry in which East meets West. But McKennitt explains in the liner notes that this journey into Eastern soundscapes was a search for roots, not Orientalist exotica. Because some historians hypothesize that the Celts moved into Europe from the Caucasus and other points east, McKennitt believed the roots of her art were as likely to be found in Samarkand as on the shores of Skye, Donegal or Nova Scotia. This notion linking Celtic singing and melody to musical traditions in India, Central Asia and the Middle East is not a new one; for example, Fanny Feehan wrote a series of comparisons between the ornamental practices of Irish singing and those of India, Byzantium and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe in the conference proceedings The Celtic Consciousness (1981), suggesting some kind of common, prehistoric ancestry shared by these cultures. This paper investigates this peculiar practice of seeking “primal” or “elemental” links between one of Western Europe’s most peripheral cultures (the Celts) and Eastern musics. This practice has the effect of further de-centring the Celtic, an ethnic identity which popular culture has already plumbed for primal or exotic significations. A number of performers – including McKennitt, the House Band, Sheila Chandra and Mairead Sullivan – have used this linkage as a way of justifying their eclectic repertoires: rather than producing musical collages and blank parodies, these artists see shifting between Celtic and Eastern musics as a way of discovering highly rooted connections between cultures. This paper explores what lies beneath this rhetoric of Celtic music as evidence of “Eastern survivals” in Western Europe.
Session 4C: New Centres, New Peripheries?: The Roles for Digital Technology & Cyberspace
Moderator: Charity Marsh
Room 406, Arts Centre
Jeremy Morris, McGill University, “Making Technology Behave: Music and Metadata”
The transition from music on CDs to music as a digital file on computers and other digital devices presents challenges for the presentation and management of music as a commodity. Information about music plays a significant role in our experience of music and, traditionally, this information has come from the packaging on CDs or albums. On the computer, the part is played by metadata. Known colloquially as data about data, metadata tells us basic attributes such as what song we are listening to, which album it is from, and the name of the artist who is singing or playing it. More importantly, it facilitates the ability to sort, catalogue, present and access music. Loaded with cultural cues, marketing messages and aesthetic statements, metadata mediates a listener’s experience with the music commodity. It is the wrapper in which the artist/music in question comes to the listener.
Accordingly, this paper considers the development of metadata as music on computers moved (is moving) from a peripheral activity to a central mode of consuming music. In particular, I detail the cases of the Compact Disc Database (CDDB) and ID3 tags, two instrumental metadata technologies that helped users recognize music in its digital form and that continue to structure the way we interact with music as a digital file. Both initiatives grew out of programmers’ desire to solve a specific technical problem. Originally, digital music files were nearly naked versions of their physical counterparts, emptied of many of the signifiers the packaging of other formats provided. If digital files were to be music’s future format, they needed new clothes. Re-dressing them, however, ultimately contributed to the commodification of digital music. Metadata, through The CDDB and ID3 tags, brought order to misbehaving music files, files that were challenging previous conceptions of the music commodity. In other words, metadata helped digital files behave like commodities.
Barbara Ching, University of Memphis, “Songcatching, Cyberspace, and the Point of Purchase”
Songcatching, or ballad collecting, appears (and reappears) to offer an experience of popular music outside of the marketplace even as its discoveries often end up there. In other words, songcatching brings music from the periphery into the center. The term “songcatcher,” first applied to the scholars and amateurs who combed the Appalachian countryside in search of ballads, implies that songs are living creatures, flourishing in nature, that need to be captured before they can be experienced. Indeed, the first American ballad collectors presented their discoveries to the public as historical and aesthetic life forms in contrast to the concoctions of Tin Pan Alley. Nevertheless, like commercial popular music, songcatching relies on mass media technology and music consumers to achieve its ends. As Mickey Hart, ethnomusicologist and former drummer for the Grateful Dead, writes in his introduction to his Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music (National Geographic: 2003), “Songcatching . . . takes artists who create music . . . . It takes listeners who appreciate and support music. It takes technology to record and preserve that music.” In this paper, I argue that internet technology, particularly web 2.0 configurations, simulates the experience of catching songs and curating a collection, offering the possibility of a new form of cultural participation, one less shaped by the genre categories used by music marketing and more open to music of diverse origins. Like the unfettered music sought by songcatchers, internet music sources such as Pandora.com and music blogs allow sound files to be “shared,” songs to “stream,” and fans/consumers to become collectors who shape their discoveries. Drawing on the legal and creativity theories of Lawrence Lessig as well as musicological approaches to technology such as Timothy Taylor’s, I argue that cyberspace songcatching, like its ethnomusicological predecessor, alters and disrupts the music marketplace, reversing the center/periphery logic of commercial mass media.
Tom Artiss, Memorial University of Newfoundland, “‘We Learned Our Throat Songs from YouTube’: Tracing the Cybernetic Journey of an Inuit Throat Song”
It is no longer a given that oral traditions are transmitted diachronically from one generation to the next, face-to-face. Beginning well over a century ago, audio recording technology made it possible to share a song or a story by other means. However, making sound recordings has usually required expertise and resources and, when finished, access is often limited (especially in small and/or remote communities). The internet, easy and inexpensive to use, has quickly become a popular medium for the transmission of culture and, as such, adds a new dimension to questions about tradition, folklore, authenticity, etc.
Kilautiup Songulinga is a twenty-something Inuit drum-dancing/throat singing group based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, that represents a new generation of Aboriginal peoples who make use of modern internet technology to both acquire and disseminate culture. They use YouTube to learn much of their material as well as to display it for others to view. This paper traces the cybernetic journey of one throat song, “Ah Ee Oo,” first downloaded from YouTube by group members, learned, video-recorded, and then posted back on YouTube. I will try to show how this literal journey (of sent and received chunks of information) is also a metaphorical journey that reflects many of the complex issues surrounding the relationship between Inuit peoples and their lived culture. When considered in terms of Beaudrillard’s “simulacra” and Derrida’s “de-centered center,” “Ah Ee Oo” appears less as a cultural artifact belonging either inside or outside generic parameters than as an emergent, fluid instantiation of Inuit musical expression. It appears to us seamlessly alternating back and forth between city and community, old and new, popular and traditional, local and global, whether face-to-face or on YouTube.
