Saturday: Session 2, 11am-12:30pm
Session 2A: Centres and Peripheries in Mediation and Dissemination
Moderator: Jacqueline WarwickRoom 2016, McCain Building
Cory Thorne, Memorial University of Newfoundland, “Street Vendors, Music Piracy, and the Embargo: CD culture in Cuba”
Salsa, rumba, mambo, latin jazz, son, toques and cantos: these are styles of music that we commonly associate with Cuba. On my first visit to Havana, however, I was quickly introduced to a greater diversity of sound – one that went well beyond the popular and traditional styles of Irakere, Los Van Van, and Los Muñequitos. While escaping the heat at a café near the University of Havana, I discovered the informal distribution scene for music in Cuba – home mixed CDs and DVDs. After asking the barrista about the music he was playing, I was introduced to a group of students, eager to sell me as many pirated discs as I desired.
Over the next two weeks, I discovered that wherever I traveled in Cuba, somebody was selling pirated CDs and mixed-CDs/DVDs. Street vendors travel between restaurants and cafeterias with large boxes of discs, carrying everything from mainstream American pop and folk music, to Spanish and Mexican singers, movie sound tracks, Puerto Rican hip-hop, American funk and rap, and uniquely Cuban popular styles such as timba, a blending of salsa, rumba, and a variety of forms of black popular music from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. While the disks were clearly homemade, they were often professionally done with typed track lists and photocopied artwork.
This paper will consist of a survey of mix-CDs, music DVDs, and pirated collections for sale on the street in Havana, music that stands on the periphery through either its illegal copying and distribution, and/or its localization of style through mixing of mainstream, Latin, and traditional Cuban musics and texts. Drawing on Peter Maunel’s work on cassette culture in India (1993), Vincenzo Perna on timba (2005), and Robin Moore on nueva trova, popular protest music (2003), I will examine CD culture in Cuba under the theme of shifting centres.
Gillian Turnbull, York University, “$10K, No Strings Attached: Controlling the Marginal on Commercial Radio”
Within contemporary popular culture, increasing importance is placed on those with subcultural capital, that is, those who possess insider knowledge of small or independent music scenes. The privileging of esoteric trivia, artistic freedom, and a lack of connection to the mainstream has fostered the notion that “indie” music rests on a particularly constructed ideology. For a genre such as alternative country, these characteristics are compounded by the necessity of adhering to predetermined stylistic parameters, garnered from previous country artists or associated genres like punk, rock, folk, and jazz. This collection of diverse influences, combined with a desire for the authenticity bestowed on the most “natural”-seeming and autonomous indie performers has produced tight restrictions for artists in alt-country. These artists are typically featured on community radio stations and rarely venture beyond their immediate region when touring, reinforcing their marginal appeal.
However, in Calgary, Alberta, the alt-country scene is growing, thanks in part to the sponsorship from a local radio station. 97.7 FM began operations in 2007, featuring an typical mix of classic rock, pop, and mainstream country. Faced with substantial competition from similar stations in the area, 97.7 secured their CRTC license by both promising to play “alternative” (that is, local roots and country) music in non-primetime hours and pledging $1.4 million in local recording grants over seven years ($10,000 per artist; 20 artists per year). Artists have eagerly applied for grants, producing records that are not owned by the station. In this paper, I question how Calgarian artists reconcile their indie identity with mainstream radio funding and promotion. How does this identity shift with corporate sponsorship? What does this mean for the perception and consumption of marginal music scenes in general? How might commercial radio’s impending control of indie music link to similar cycles seen in the past?
Sandria P. Bouliane, Université Laval, “From New York City à la ville de Montréal : Behind the translation, le « making of » d’une appropriation musicale”
Au cours de la première moitié du XXe siècle, les chansons populaires de la Tin Pan Alley sont diffusées partout aux États-Unis et au Canada au moyen de la musique en feuilles, puis de la radio. Ces chansons franchissent la frontière de la langue pour trouver un public canadien-français séduit par la popularité et la nouveauté d’un genre musical plus urbain. Pour contrer l’envahissement de la musique anglophone tout en tirant profit de sa présence, Roméo Beaudry (1882-1932) traduit, ou plutôt adapte, près de 150 chansons étatsuniennes. De 1915 à 1932, Beaudry compose plus de 150 autres chansons originales (en français) en s’appropriant des éléments du style de la Tin Pan Alley qui semble correspondre aux attentes d’une culture de masse émergente dans les milieux urbains québécois. On peut alors poser l’hypothèse selon laquelle les chansons à succès de la Tin Pan Alley auraient joué un rôle dans l’établissement d’une chanson populaire canadienne-française.
Les chansons traduites et enregistrées à Montréal par Beaudry obtiennent un vif succès et génèrent une production de disques sans précédent. Dans cette présentation, il sera d’abord question d’établir les principaux facteurs culturels, sociologiques et technologiques ayant encouragé la production et la traduction de chansons populaires au cours des trois premières décennies du XXe siècle. Nous verrons ensuite plus précisément le parcours géographique et esthétique d’une sélection de chansons, des bureaux newyorkais de la Tin Pan Alley aux mains de la Compo Company.
Session 2B: Jazz and Pop: Shifting Relationships
Moderator: Paul Aitken
Room 409, Arts Centre
Michael Jarrett, Pennsylvania State University, “Choragraphy: A Better Metaphor (and the Case of Mainstream vs. Avant-Garde Jazz)”
To speak of centres and peripheries is, as Nietzsche would remind us, to subscribe to a metaphorics that derives from a historically situated regime of knowledge or truth. Can we conceptualize popular music through such metaphors? Yes … but. Though centre/periphery metaphors might still (be made to) function as vehicles of thought, they now feel inadequate. Their explanatory value no longer holds. We need better metaphors. My presentation-which I hope to deliver in the form of a video essay-takes up this challenge. It focuses on an opposition that has structured jazz: mainstream vs. avant-garde. First, it examines the historical situation that led critics to conceptualize jazz through a discourse organized by this binary opposition. Second, it deconstructs this jazz version of centre/periphery oppositions. Building on Walter Benjamin, I argue that metaphors of centre and periphery depend upon a “metaphysics of presence” associated with artforms presumably untouched by the logic of mechanical (or electronic) reproduction. Jazz gained coherence (as a territory with a centre and periphery) precisely to the extent that it suppressed its dependence upon the very conditions that enabled it, gave it materiality. Third, my presentation suggests that the regime of knowledge or truth that once enabled a metaphorics of centres and peripheries is inadequate. We are beginning-and only beginning-to sense the possibilities of a new regime announced in mid-1800s. Gregory Ulmer labels this emergent episteme “electracy.” The challenge, then, is to devise a metaphorics supporting (and supported by) electracy, to rethink popular music. Following Ulmer and Heidegger, I suggest a reinvestigation of Plato’s chora. In Plato’s cosmology chora referred to the sorting operation that took place on a threshing floor. It was also a musical metaphor, referring to “the tuning of a lute.”
Peter Johnston, York University, “From Mainstream to Downstream: Jimmy Giuffre and the Deconstruction of the Jazz Art World”
In this paper I will present an analysis of the Jimmy Giuffre 3’s role in the development of a post-jazz conception of improvisation, towards contextualizing their importance to the establishment of the marginalized field of cultural production that has grown around the practice of free improvisation. Active from approximately 1960-62, the Jimmy Giuffre 3 consisted of Giuffre on clarinet, Steve Swallow on double bass, and Canadian pianist Paul Bley. The divisive nature of this trio’s music, in terms of its position in the jazz canon, is visible through an analysis of Giuffre’s pattern of work. Giuffre was a well-known participant in the mainstream jazz scene in the US, beginning in the late 1940s with his hit composition “Four Brothers” for the Woody Herman Band. He achieved further commercial success with a trio including guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Ralph Pena, which had a hit for Atlantic Records in 1957 with the folk-influenced piece “The Train and the River”. After this initial trio disbanded in the late 1950s, Giuffre formed the much less mainstream group with Bley and Swallow. Based on his earlier commercial success, Giuffre had contracts with Verve Records and Columbia Records, two of the most prominent mainstream jazz labels of the time. The adventurous recordings this new trio made sold poorly and went out of print almost immediately, yet many European musicians, including early free improvisers such as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Stevens, heard these recordings and went on to develop approaches to improvisation that had little to do with the mainstream jazz practices. My analysis of this under-documented trio will position them as foundational to the development of a peripheral improvised music field, which is characterized by do-it-yourself labels and recordings, alternative spaces for music presentation, and a reevaluation of ideas of professionalism.
Alan Stanbridge, University of Toronto, “Setting Standards: Hybridity and Synthesis in Contemporary Music”
Following the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s, and several decades after the genuinely mainstream popularity that jazz had enjoyed during the Swing Era, the relationship between popular music and jazz became somewhat problematic. From its earliest incarnations, jazz had drawn upon the songs of the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway traditions – the popular music of the day – for much of its raw material, and this established repertoire of ‘standards’ remains central to contemporary jazz practice. Indeed, the recent release of a three-CD, 25th anniversary retrospective of early recordings by Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, somewhat modestly entitled Setting Standards (ECM, 2008), simply serves to highlight the continuing ubiquity of the products of the Golden Age of American popular song, including veritable warhorses such as Kern and Hammerstein’s ‘All the Things You Are’ and Cahn and Styne’s ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily.’
From the 1960s onwards, however, and in addition to the primarily instrumental, original compositions that fuelled jazz-rock fusion, a number of musicians have attempted to extend the jazz repertoire by drawing on contemporaneous rock and popular music. In some cases, especially those with a deliberate, if perhaps somewhat misguided, eye to mainstream commerciality and ‘relevance,’ the results have been decidedly mixed. In other cases, the synthesis of popular music and jazz has been arguably more successful, although seldom to the satisfaction of jazz purists, as indicated by the negative critical reaction to such musical hybrids, from Miles Davis’s covers of Cyndi Lauper and Scritti Politti, to Bill Frisell’s versions of Dylan and Madonna, to Brad Mehldau’s readings of the Beatles and Radiohead. In this paper, I explore the contemporary relationship of popular music and jazz, with a particular focus on recent work – and critical responses to this work – by The Bad Plus, the acoustic piano trio whose repertoire, in addition to a significant body of original compositions, includes pieces by Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Tears For Fears, Neil Young, Rush, and Aphex Twin.
Session 2C: Interactive Media and Performance: Reflections on IMP Research
No moderator
Room 406, Arts Centre
Charity Marsh, University of Regina, “Masculinity, Indigeneity, and Media Representations of (Gangsta’ Rap in) Regina”
Regina is burdened with a highly contentious reputation as one of Canada’s most notoriously violent and socially impoverished cities. This reputation is mapped on to the neighbourhood known as ‘North Central’ through a discourse of both ‘true’ accounts and sensationalized racialized narratives presented by multiple media sources, and subsequently, often re-produced by marginalized young people who adopt cultural signifiers, tropes, and practices associated with mythologized gang lifestyles represented in mainstream hip hop and gangsta’ rap cultures. For Aboriginal youth living within the borders of these neighbourhoods living life as a gangsta’ can represent a reclamation of territory, creation of ‘family’, belonging, safety, accumulation of social status, and a means to cope with poverty and racism. Involvement in gang culture can also mean violence, crime, death, and an internalized hierarchy which only mimics the patriarchal and racist structures of the colonialist society.
In the case of Regina gangsta’ rapper Robin Favel, both the typical American gangsta’ rapper archetype and his experiences of living in Regina’s notorious ‘hood, play significant roles in the creation of his music. Favel performs many of the stereotypes associated with gangsta rap culture, and he embodies the crisis that is North Central and more generally, Regina. For Favel and media sources who re-present his ‘hood, gangsta rap culture provides a framework, an almost cookie-cutter approach to a complicated and colonialist narrative. In this paper I build on Forman’s argument that the city shapes rap music to theorize how gangsta’ rapper Robin Favel and Regina’s ‘North Central’ are represented in the media. Integral to my analysis is an understanding of how masculinity and Indigeneity are signified and mapped onto these places, the bodies that inhabit them, and the cultural practices attributed to them by the media and surrounding communities.
Marcia Ostashewski, University of Regina, “Mixed Music: Cultural Production of Canada’s Aboriginal-Ukrainians”
Though intercultural relationships have long been the subject of fear, fascination, regulation and prohibition in Canada, popular interest in them currently seems to be growing, along with the numbers of Canadians who claim such ancestry. Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal intermarriages, often described as “mixed-race,” have been the focus of historians and anthropologists (Perry 2001, Brown 1980, Van Kirk 1980), and represent an important legacy of Canada’s colonial past and present which require further investigation (Van Kirk 2002). Ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture, however, have insufficiently theorized these relationships. Aboriginal-Ukrainianness, in particular, is a hybridity which has not been addressed in any scholarship, museums or public memory—despite the fact that histories and experiences of Ukrainians in Canada are extensively addressed in popular and scholarly literature. This raises questions about the perceptions (as well as nomenclature) of “mixed-race” relationships and their place within Ukrainian and Aboriginal cultures in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In my paper, I share some of my early research on this topic, conducted during my first months as a post-doctoral research fellow in “Interactive Media and Performance” at U Regina. As an ethnomusicologist, my research interests focus on the legacy of Aboriginal/Ukrainian relationships and their impact on music, dance and related expressive arts. I have been investigating the histories of the individuals, families and communities between and among whom Ukrainian-Aboriginal marriages have taken place. I have also begun to examine the ways in which expressive culture articulates this particular fusion of ethnicities, the possible synthesis of values, symbols, and expressive forms (music, dance, visual and performance art, theatre, film, print and other media). My research provides new perspectives on the histories, experiences and cultural practices of Aboriginal-Ukrainian individuals and their communities, especially musicians who embrace both Aboriginal—Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq, Cree, Dene—and Ukrainian identities.
Graham St John, University of Regina, “Fear and Raving: Panic and Desire in Electronic Dance Music Culture”
On August 20 2005, in Spanish Fork Canyon south of Salt Lake City, Utah, a combined police operation was mounted to disperse a large rave called “Versus II”. There were many arrests and widespread reports of civil rights violations in a nation where legislation (dubbed the ‘RAVE Act’) effectively outlaws forms of dancing. In July of the same year, over 1000 riot police routed the CzechTek “teknival” in the Czech Republic. In these and subsequent years the global Trance community has endured police repression through a variety of ordinances following a brutal raid on Greece’s Samothraki Trance Festival in 2003 prior to the Athens Olympic Games. These campaigns followed a host of measures undertaken by state authorities to govern the proliferation of electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs) over the previous decade, control strategies which continue into the present.
Flourishing in popularity globally since the 1980s, EDMCs are marked by controversy around the world. While psytrance, techno and other EDMCs are reported by participants to be repositories of pleasure, meaningful experience, belonging and purpose, media panics, regulatory campaigns, repressive penalties and brutal paramilitary interventions attempt to contain the flourishing. But EDMCs respond with growing sophistication in efforts to optimise the conditions of dance in the face of its unprecedented criminalization. Drawing on ethnographic and comparative investigations, this paper explores this tension unfolding among the contemporary adversaries of dance.
