Music 26AC /

quiz1.md

1. Debunking Master Narratives - Lecture Highlights

Music and Culture Music cultures are characterized by preferences, sound quality, and performance practices - all of which are aesthetic discriminations. This means that what we consider "good" or "appropriate" music is not universal but culturally determined.

Music is Not a Given

  • Music derives its meaning from culture
  • Culture consists of shared beliefs and practices of specific groups of people
  • Culture is passed down from generation to generation but constantly changes
  • Musical meaning rests on an agreement among composer, performer, and listener

What is Music? Music is defined differently across cultures. Two important perspectives:

  • John Blacking (1974): "Music is a product of the behavior of human groups...it is humanly organized sound." Different societies have different ideas about what constitutes music, but all definitions are based on cultural consensus.

  • Christopher Small (1998): "There is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do." The meaning lies in the action and participation, not in the musical object itself.

Key Point: Not all cultures even have a word for what we call "music" - having an aesthetic category for organized sound is not universal.

People Make Music Meaningful

  • The understanding of music's meaning and aesthetics are culturally specific
  • Meaning is not found in music - it is produced by people within their cultural context

Takaki and Multiculturalism

  • Master Narrative Concept

    • Master Narrative: The dominant story that Americans are of European ancestry
    • This raises the critical question: Who gets to be seen as "American"?
    • U.S. history has always included many people of non-European origin, despite the master narrative

  • Multiculturalism Defined Refers to policies, structures, institutions, and representational practices that acknowledge a society as inclusive of multiple racial or cultural groups.

  • Takaki's Key Points

    • Encourages thinking about race beyond just Black and White categories
    • Recognizes that the dominant narrative doesn't account for different experiences of other groups
    • A more comprehensive picture of U.S. history and interconnections helps us understand one another better

Important reminder: The telling of history is subjective

Identity and Music

  • Understanding Identity

    • Identity is who a person is in relation to the broader world
    • We all hold multiple identities: race, gender, religion, nationality, political affiliation, etc.
    • Identity requires markers - tangible things people use to signal difference such as flags, music, labels, clothes
    • Markers can be replaced and can come to mean different things
    • We tend to think of these markers as being reflections of culture/identity. Rather, they are shaping and creating identities

  • Critical Examination We must question how we come to know what we know in order to understand how narratives are shaped and perpetuated. This requires paying careful attention to how topics are constructed and represented across different contexts:

    • How do popular media, textbooks, informal and scholarly discourse frame and present information? What perspectives are included or excluded?
    • Visual representations carry powerful messages about value, hierarchy, and belonging and contribute to construct and perpetuate assumptions
    • This analytical approach helps us move toward a deeper understanding of how power, culture, and meaning intersect in musical contexts

2. Thinking Musically - Lecture Highlights

ORGANIZING TIME

Core Concepts

  • Rhythm: Duration of sonic events in time – any succession of durations
  • Pulse/Beat: Equal-length duration providing regular division of time
  • Meter: Regular groupings of beats organized into patterns of strong and weak beats
  • Measure/Bar: Each grouping within a meter constitutes one measure or bar

Types of Meter

  • Duple Meter: 2 beats per measure with the first beat stressed
  • Triple Meter: 3 beats per measure
  • Quadruple Meter: 4 beats per measure

ORGANIZING PITCH

Individual Pitch Elements

  • Pitch: A single tone resulting from a sound-producing body vibrating at a particular frequency
  • Scale: Pitch sets organized in ascending or descending order
  • Melody: A particular succession of pitches
  • Tonic: In European tradition, the fundamental tone

Simultaneous Pitch Elements

  • Chord: 3 or more notes played simultaneously
  • Chord Progression: A sequence of chords
  • Harmony: Pitches heard together
  • Functional Harmony: Chords as used in the Western tonal system

ADDITIONAL MUSICAL ELEMENTS

  • Timbre: The particular quality of sound; tone color. What distinguishes one instrument from another (e.g., violin vs. trumpet)
  • Texture: Refers to how strands of music fit together at any given moment
    • Single Melody
    • Many singers, one shared melody, performed identically by all.
    • Multiple people, one melody, with slight variations from singer to singer
    • Melody and accompaniment
    • Two or more melodies simultaneously
  • Form: The shape of a musical composition. Listen for:
    • Sections within larger works
    • Repetition of melodic material
    • Structure of text
    • Examples: Sonata form, concerto, symphony, 12-Bar Blues, strophic form)

3. Sound Recording Technology History - Lecture Highlights

ACOUSTIC ERA (1877 – 1925)

Core Innovation: Understanding that the ear could be used as a model for sound transduction – converting sound from an acoustic medium into a different medium.

Early Devices:

  • 1857: Édouard-Leon Scott de Martinville patents the "Phonautograph"
  • 1877: Charles Cros files patent for the "Paleophone"
  • Dec 6, 1877: Thomas Edison makes famous "Mary had a Little Lamb" recording on "Phonograph" prototype
    • Patent for phonograph coincided with the introduction of preserving food through canning; embalming practices at funerals = cultural fascination with the idea of preservation. Phonograph could preserve the voices of ancestors.
  • 1885: Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter patent the "Graphophone"
  • 1887: Emile Berliner's "Gramophone" establishes foundations of recorded music industry

Commercial Possibilities

  • First phonographs regarded as devices to preserve voice.
  • Commercial possibilities realized after the recordings of Enrico Caruso in London in 1902
  • Between 1915 and 1920 the Edison company sponsored over four thousand tone tests. The test groups toured towns, large and small, all across America to tout the wonders of the Edison Diamond Disc. In many cases, this was the only live professional music performance that members of the audience in smaller towns and rural areas had ever had the opportunity to attend.

Characteristics of Acoustic Recording

  • Limited dynamic range (volume)
  • Limited frequency range (high/low)
  • Limited length (duration)

ELECTRICAL ERA (1925 – 1945)

Revolutionary Technology: 1924 Western Electric patents electric sound recording microphones Process: Microphone → amplifier → electromagnetic cutting head

Key Improvements

  • Improved frequency range
  • More realistic sound image
  • Better dynamic control
  • "Faithful" documentation emphasis

New Performance Practices

  • Dynamic Balance: Softer instruments could now be heard alongside louder instruments
  • Crooning Style: New vocal technique emerges taking advantage of microphone sensitivity
  • Recording Philosophy: Focus on creating "faithful" documentation and transmission

MAGNETIC ERA (1945 – 1980)

Origins: German magnetic sound recording technology, closely guarded WWII secret, brought to US by soldiers in 1945 Significance: Music recorded onto tape became malleable, mutable, cuttable, and reversible

Revolutionary Techniques

  • Cut and Paste Editing: Musicians record individual phrases, physically splice acceptable takes together
  • Multi-track Recording: Individual instruments recorded on separate channels (1 to 64 tracks)
  • Stereo Imaging: Positioning sounds across left-to-right axis with sense of depth
  • The Soundstage: Imaginary 3D space allowing listeners to hear instrument locations

Impact on Music Production

  • No perfect beginning-to-end performance required
  • Musicians needn't play simultaneously
  • Different recording locations possible
  • Reconstructed sonic "reality"

DIGITAL ERA (1970s – PRESENT)

Core Process: Audio signal transformed into binary code patterns → stored in device → retrieved and converted back to audio signal

Analog vs. Digital

  • Analog: Continuous signal that mimics the shape of an acoustic signal
  • Digital: Stream of samples representing amplitude across equally spaced points in time

Digital Advantages

  • Higher-fidelity reproduction
  • No residual noise/distortion
  • Easy editing and manipulation
  • Non-linear editing capabilities
  • High portability
  • Unlimited creative control

Key Digital Technologies

  • Digital Audio Workstations: Software facilitating entire music production process (recording, arranging, mixing, mastering) with hundreds of tracks
  • Plug-ins: Software extensions providing audio effects, virtual instruments, and utilities
  • Autotune: Digital processing as musical aesthetic, not just correction tool

4. Anglo-American Ballads - Lecture Highlights

In this unit we'll be exploring how human migrations have over the course of history brought music traditions to the United States.

  • People move for very different reasons. Understanding these different migration experiences is important because the reasons for which people migrate can be significant in the ways they react to their new environment—in the way they may shelter or share their culture, the social relations they forge, and the various ways they adapt to a new home.

MIGRATION AND MUSIC CONNECTION Music is closely connected to the migration process for several reasons:

  • Portability and Transmission: Music travels easily through oral tradition
  • Identity and Homeland Connection: Links past and present cultural experiences
  • Community Building: Creates networks among diaspora populations

BRITISH IMMIGRATION TO NORTH AMERICA

Timeline:

  • 1607: Jamestown, Virginia - first permanent British settlement
  • 1619: First enslaved Africans brought to North America
  • 1620: Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock
  • 1776: Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary War begins
  • 1787: Constitution was written

Primary Groups: English, Scots Irish, and German immigrants dominated the 13 British colonies, with limited contact between ethnic groups but united by adaptation to the New World.

BALLAD DEFINITION AND CHARACTERISTICS

  • What is a Ballad? Song that tells a story with emphasis on action, transmitted through oral tradition.

Narrative Structure:

  • Sung in 3rd person
  • Describes dramatic, tragic events
  • Provides little background information
  • Leap and Lingering: Jumps from high point to high point, skipping connecting passages

Musical Structure:

  • Metrical Pattern: Usually, 4 lines per stanza in rhymed quatrains (abcb)
  • Syllabic Text Setting: Each syllable sung to one pitch
  • Strophic Form: Same music repeated for each successive stanza
  • Performance Style: Delivered in matter-of-fact manner

Texture and Instrumentation:

  • Monophonic: Single melodic line performed alone or in unison
  • Homophonic: Melody supported by accompaniment

Common Instruments: Guitar, banjo, mountain dulcimer

BARBARA ALLEN CASE STUDY

  • As of 1962, Library of Congress had recorded 243 versions across 27 states.

Reasons for Variants (Daniel Kingman):

  • Forgetfulness
  • Tendency to localize place names and character names
  • Misunderstanding of older words
  • Conscious or unconscious censorship

SCHOLARLY COLLECTION AND PRESERVATION

  • LATE 19TH CENTURY - CHILD'S BALLADS:

    • Francis James Child systematically collected 305 ballads
    • Published between 1882-1898 in "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads"
    • Classified ballads by type and assigned numbers
    • Child saw ballads as pre-modern products

  • 20TH CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS:

    • Olive Dame Campbell & Cecil Sharp collected ballads from Appalachian Mountains
    • Bertrand Bronson (1940s) collected tunes associated with Child's Ballads from Library of Congress wax recordings

FOLK AS A DESIGNATION

  • Popular, folk are interesting constructs.

Academic Framework:

  • American Folklore Society established 1888
  • Folk = Authenticity
  • Anglo-American ballads flourished in isolated eastern U.S. Mountain ranges
  • Strong oral tradition due to isolation and high illiteracy rates
  • Promoted the study of Folk Ballads, rather than Broadside (printed ballads)
  • The concept of "folk" referred to an idealized vision of people from a distant past and place, separate from today's world, and this idea helps establish what we considered authentic. Folk culture was (is) presented as the antithesis of our current society and its technology. The belief that folk music captured a nation's genuine musical essence emerged alongside the development of modern nation-states, as people sought to define what made their cultures distinctly national. Therefore, gathering folk songs served a dual purpose: preserving remnants of traditional life threatened by industrial progress while also uncovering and sharing the unique cultural identity of one's nation.

Impact of Acoustic Recording

  • Changes in Transmission: From purely oral to recorded preservation
  • Professionalism: Shift toward professional performers
  • Mass Audiences: Expansion beyond local communities

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

  • Theories and Stereotypes: Folk isolation and primitivism theories intertwined with politics of the time. Folklorists took in the common stereotypes of southern culture. They also fed an appetite for works that could locate an American identity.
  • Cultural Function: Ballads served to pass on traditions and cultural values, validating religious, social, political, and economic practices across generations while shaping community thought and behavior.

5. Corridos - Lecture Highlights

What are Corridos?

  • Mexican ballads that tell stories through song

Historical Roots:

  • Derived from Spanish epic ballads (Romances) from the Middle Ages
  • Fixed structure developed during Mexican Revolution (1910-1917)
  • Performed wherever Mexicans and Mexican Americans reside, especially in U.S.-Mexico border region

Historical Context: The Border Key Dates:

  • 1821: Mexico gains independence from Spain
  • 1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo establishes current U.S.-Mexico border

Border Significance:

  • Shifts from separating line → area of contention → welcoming portal
  • Articulates power struggles between cultures
  • Creates unique bicultural identity space

Classic Corrido Structure

  • Saludo - Formal greeting to audience
  • Scene Setting - Establish time, place, context
  • Character Introduction - Present main protagonists
  • Story Development - Narrative unfolds over several verses
  • Pivotal Action - "The chase" or climactic moment
  • Moral Lesson - What the story teaches
  • Despedida - Formal farewell/thank audience for listening

Musical Characteristics

Text Structure

  • Narrative Style: Usually 3rd person perspective
  • Verse Format: 4 lines per verse, Octosyllabic (8 syllables per line)
  • Rhyme Scheme: abcb pattern
  • Language: Everyday, accessible Spanish

Musical Features

  • Duple or triple meter
  • Strophic Form
  • Singing Style: Clear, direct, "matter-of-fact" delivery
  • Harmony: Two voices in parallel thirds
  • Key: Usually major
  • Vocal Range: Limited/narrow
  • Chord Progressions: Simple (I-IV-V)
  • Composition: Pre-composed, not improvised
  • Text Setting: Syllabic (one note per syllable)

Performance Ensembles

  • Vocal Duets with Guitar Accompaniment

    • Cost-effective for recording

  • Conjunto Norteño

    • Instrumentation: Voice, Accordion, Bajo sexto (12-string guitar in 6 double courses), Bass, Drums (optional)
    • Examples: "Gregorio Cortez" by Los Pinguinos del Norte, "Los dos Hermanos"

  • Mariachi

    • Instrumentation: Voice, Trumpet, Violin, Vihuela (5-string guitar with convex back), Standard guitar, Guitarrón (6-string large bass guitar)
    • Example: "El Caballo Blanco"

Impact of Recording Technology

  • Early Period (Late 1920s - Early 1930s):

    • Stories issued in two parts (up to 6 minutes total)
    • National record companies made field trips to San Antonio
    • Guitar and voice popular due to lower recording costs

  • Radio/Jukebox Era:

    • Recordings shortened to 3 minutes
    • Changed narrative structure and complexity
    • Increased commercial distribution

Primary Source Analysis Framework

  • When studying corrido texts, consider:
    • Who: Character identification and historical context
    • What: Events depicted and their significance
    • Why: Reasons this story merited preservation in song
    • Audience: Who was meant to hear this message Communication: Strengths and limitations as historical record

Cultural and Political Significance

  • Historical Documentation:

    • Corridos serve as alternative historical records
    • Preserve community perspective on events
    • Document experiences often excluded from official histories

  • Community Agency:

    • Mexican Americans as active agents in shaping their own narrative
    • Not passive victims but active resistors and storytellers

  • Counternarratives:

    • Symbolic forms of cultural and political resistance
    • Challenge dominant Anglo-American historical narratives
    • Provide voice for marginalized communities

  • Identity Maintenance:

    • Reinforce community bonds through shared stories
    • Preserve cultural memory across generations
    • Maintain connection to Mexican heritage while adapting to American context

6. African Conceptual Approaches to Music Making - Lecture Highlights

Historical Context: Forced Migration

  • Enslaved Africans began arriving in the Americas in 1619
  • An estimated 10-15 million Africans were enslaved in the New World
  • Despite being separated from families and unable to bring material possessions, enslaved Africans retained and passed down memories of cultural traditions, particularly musical approaches

Olly Wilson's Framework (1937-2018)

  • Wilson argued that African musical traditions in America represent "a conceptual approach" rather than static cultural elements.
  • These approaches represent collective cultural values of peoples of African descent that have profoundly influenced American music across genres.

The Six Conceptual Approaches A distinct set of musical qualities that are expressions of the collective cultural values of peoples of African descent.

  1. Rhythmic Clashes

    • Creating musical structures where rhythmic conflict or disagreement of accents is the ideal
    • Syncopation: Shifting accent to normally weak beats
    • Listen for the "attack" of a note - when each note begins
    • In this second example, listen for the accents on beats 2 and 4

  2. Percussive Approach to Singing/Playing

    • Treating melodic instruments and voices with percussive techniques

  3. Call and Response

    • Musical statement followed by another statement
    • The second statement serves as direct commentary or response to the first

  4. Filling Up the Musical Space

    • Creating high density of musical events within relatively short time frames

  5. Heterogeneous Sound Ideal

    • Favoring contrasting qualities of sound (timbre)
    • Manifested through:
      • Instruments with very different timbres playing together
      • Wide range of vocal techniques: moans, groans, yells, screams, shouts, speech-to-song transitions, falsetto

  6. Physical Body Motion as Integral Part of Music Making

    • Movement and dance are not separate from but essential to the musical experience
    • Music and movement are conceived as unified artistic expression