Flexible labor in the classical music world

The shady world of low-cost, foreign-guest-worker-staffed, traveling orchestras, like the Dublin Philharmonic, mostly staffed by Bulgarians: here.
And, of course, the City Opera took a step in that direction (not quite there yet) by leaving Lincoln Center - future home or destination unknown...

RIP Milton Babbit QEPD

Composer Milton Babbitt has died.

El compositor Milton Babbitt ha muerto.

Obituaries below, here's his in/famous essay "Who Cares if You Listen?"

From The Times:

January 29, 2011

Milton Babbitt, Composer, Dies at 94

By ALLAN KOZINN

Milton Babbitt, an influential composer, theorist and teacher who wrote music that was intensely rational and for many listeners impenetrably abstruse, died on Saturday. He was 94 and lived in Princeton, N.J.

Paul Lansky, a composer who studied with Mr. Babbitt and was a colleague at Princeton University, where Mr. Babbitt remained an emeritus professor of composition, said that Mr. Babbitt died at a hospital in Princeton.

Mr. Babbitt, who had a lively sense of humor despite the reputation for severity that his music fostered, sometimes referred to himself as a maximalist to stress the musical and philosophical distance between his style and the simpler, more direct style of younger contemporaries like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other Minimalist composers. It was an apt description.

Although he dabbled early in his career with theater music, his Composition for Orchestra (1940) ushered in a structurally complex, profoundly organized style that was rooted in Arnold Schoenberg’s serial method.

But Mr. Babbitt expanded on Mr. Schoenberg’s approach. In Mr. Schoenberg’s system, a composer begins by arranging the 12 notes of the Western scale in a particular order called a tone row, or series, on which the work is based. Mr. Babbitt was the first to use this serial ordering not only with pitches but also with dynamics, timbre, duration, registration and other elements. His methods became the basis of the “total serialism” championed in the 1950s by Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and other European composers.

Mr. Babbitt began exploring this path in Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four Instruments (1948), and adhered to it through his entire career. He composed prolifically for chamber ensembles and instrumental soloists and created a substantial and varied catalog of vocal works. He also composed a compact but vital group of orchestral pieces and an enduring series of works for synthesizer, often in combination with voices or acoustic instruments.

Mr. Babbitt liked to give his pieces colorful titles, often with puns (“The Joy of More Sextets,” for example), and said that in selecting titles he tried to avoid both the stale and the obscure. Yet when Mr. Babbitt explained his compositional approach in essays, lectures and program notes, they could be as difficult to understand as his music. In one program note, he spoke of “models of similar, interval-preserving, registrally uninterpreted pitch-class and metrically durationally uninterpreted time-point aggregate arrays.”

He often said in interviews that every note in a contemporary composition should be so thoroughly justified that the alteration of a tone color or a dynamic would ruin the work’s structure. And although colleagues who worked in atonal music objected when their music was described as cerebral or academic, Mr. Babbitt embraced both terms and came to be regarded as the standard-bearer of the ultrarational extreme in American composition.

That reputation was based in part on an article published by High Fidelity magazine in February 1958 under the title “Who Cares if You Listen?” The headline was often cited as evidence of contemporary composers’ disregard for the public’s sensibilities, and Mr. Babbitt objected that it had been added by an editor, without his permission. But whatever his objections, the article did argue that contemporary composition was a business for specialists, on both the composing and listening end of the transaction, and that the general public’s objections were irrelevant.

“Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity?” Mr. Babbitt wrote. “The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.”

Listeners who overlooked Mr. Babbitt’s philosophical abstractions and thorny analyses — who simply sat back and listened, rather than trying to understand his harmonies and structural processes — often discovered works of great expressive variety.

These range from the intense emotionality of “A Solo Requiem” (1976) to the shimmering surfaces and eerie pictorialism of “Philomel” (1964) and the poetic flow of some of the solo piano works, which have the spirit of advanced jazz improvisations. Indeed, in his “All Set for Jazz” (1957), for winds, brasses and percussion, he achieved a freely improvisatory feeling within an atonal harmonic context.

Milton Byron Babbitt was born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1916, and grew up in Jackson, Miss. He began studying the violin when he was 4 but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Early in his life he was attracted to jazz and theater music.

He was making his own arrangements of popular songs at 7, and when he was 13, he won a local songwriting contest.

Although the music he went on to write rejected the easily assimilated tonal language of popular music, Mr. Babbitt retained a fondness for theater songs all his life and was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the style.

“If you know anybody who knows more popular music of the ’20s or ’30s than I do, I want to know who it is,” he said in an Internet interview with the New Music Box in 2001. “I grew up playing every kind of music in the world, and I know more pop music from the ’20s and ’30s, it’s because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down their arrangements; we stole their arrangements; we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next.”

In 1946, Mr. Babbitt tried his hand at a musical, a collaboration with Richard Koch and Richard S. Childs called “Fabulous Voyage.” The work was not produced, but in 1982 Mr. Babbitt published three of its songs, which showed a firm command of the idiom and considerable charm.

But Mr. Babbitt set his course toward serious avant-garde composition in 1932, when he played through the scores of some Schoenberg piano music that an uncle had brought home from Europe. At the time, Mr. Babbitt was a 16-year-old philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania. The next year he became a composition student of Marion Bauer and Philip James atNew York University, and in 1935 he began studying privately with Roger Sessions.

In 1938, Sessions invited Mr. Babbitt to join the Princeton composition faculty, and Mr. Babbitt succeeded him as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music in 1965. Mr. Babbitt was also on the faculty of the Juilliard School, where he began teaching in 1973, as well as at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies; the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood; the new-music academy at Darmstadt, Germany; and the New England Conservatory in Boston. A series of six lectures he gave at theUniversity of Wisconsin was published as “Words About Music” in 1987. Mr. Babbitt’s articles about music were published as“The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt” by Princeton University Press in 2003.

His students included Mario Davidovsky and John Eaton, who have followed essentially in Mr. Babbitt’s atonal path (although Mr. Eaton later broke away), and the theater composer Stephen Sondheim.

During World War II, Mr. Babbitt taught mathematics at Princeton and undertook secret research in Washington. He also evolved his extended form of serialism during these years. But immediately after the war he pursued a split musical path, exploring his rigorous serial style in his abstract concert works, on one hand, and completing “Fabulous Voyage” and a film score, “Into the Ground” (1949).

In the 1950s Mr. Babbitt was hired as a consultant by RCA, which was developing the most sophisticated electronic-music instrument of the time, the Mark II synthesizer. The Mark II became the centerpiece of the new Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959. Mr. Babbitt was one of the center’s first directors, along with Sessions, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening.

Mr. Babbitt’s earliest electronic pieces, Composition for Synthesizer (1961) and Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), were as intensely organized as his instrumental music had been. Indeed, he saw the synthesizer as a kind of liberation from the physical limitations of living performers.

“The medium provides a kind of full satisfaction for the composer,” he said in a 1969 interview with The New York Times. “I love going to the studio with my work in my head, realizing it while I am there and walking out with the tape under my arm. I can then send it anywhere in the world, knowing exactly how it will sound.”

The early synthesizer pieces have become classics, but Mr. Babbitt quickly moved forward, writing works in which electronic soundtracks accompanied live performers. Particularly striking are the vocal works “Vision and Prayer” (1961) and “Philomel,” and “Reflections” (1975) for piano and tape. He stopped composing music with an electronic component in 1976, when the Columbia-Princeton studio was vandalized, and it was decided that restoring it would be too expensive.

Many of Mr. Babbitt’s works have been recorded, and he has always had the loyalty of performers willing to devote the effort required to render his music sensibly. Among his earliest champions were the soprano Bethany Beardslee, for whom he wrote many of his vocal works (“A Solo Requiem” was written in memory of her husband, Godfrey Winham); the Juilliard String Quartet; the pianists Robert Miller and Robert Helps; the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble; and the Group of Contemporary Music.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of young instrumentalists inured to the complexities of contemporary music became eloquent champions of Mr. Babbitt’s music . Among them are the pianists Robert Taub and the guitarist David Starobin, who have commissioned and recorded Mr. Babbitt’s works.

Mr. Babbitt’s orchestral music is so exceedingly complex that both the New York Philharmonic, in 1969, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1989, postponed premieres when the available rehearsal time proved insufficient. He did, however, have champions among top-flight conductors, the most notable being James Levine, who in 1967, as a 24-year-old fledgling conductor, led the premiere of Mr. Babbitt’s “Correspondences.” Mr. Levine later recorded Mr. Babbitt’s music with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and commissioned his Second Piano Concerto for the Met Orchestra and Mr. Taub in 1998. He regularly included Mr. Babbitt’s chamber works on his Met Chamber Ensemble programs, and in 2004 Mr. Babbitt dedicated his Concerti for Orchestra to Mr. Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned it.

Mr. Babbitt received a special Pulitzer citation for his life’s work in 1982, and in 1986 he was awarded a $300,000 MacArthur Fellowship. His earlier awards included the Joseph Bearns Prize from Columbia University, for his “Music for the Mass” in 1941; the New York Music Critics Circle Awards, for Composition for Four Instruments in 1949 and for “Philomel” in 1964; and the Creative Arts Award from Brandeis University in 1970. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1965.

Mr. Babbitt’s wife, Sylvia, died in 2005. He is survived by a daughter, Betty Anne Duggan, and two grandchildren, Julie and Adam.

De Radio Beethoven FM:

El músico dejó de existir a los 94 años tras una larga enfermedad. Babbitt compuso numerosas obras para medios electrónicos, mixtos e instrumentales. Entre sus composiciones más destacadas se cuenta “Philomel” para soprano y cinta magnética.

Desde hace varios años que Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) se veía aquejado en su salud. Luego de componer su última obra en el año 2006 (“An Encore” para violín y piano), el prestigioso compositor norteamericano dejó la vida activa en su arte, por problemas de salud derivados de su avanzada edad. Babbitt finalmente dejó de existir en la mañana del sábado 29 de enero del año 2011.

Procedente de Jackson, Mississippi, en sus inicios estudió clarinete, violín y saxofón, y desarrolló una fuerte pasión por el jazz, que lo acompañaría toda la vida. Hijo de un matemático, originalmente siguió los pasos de su progenitor para luego optar por la composición. Su profundo interés por los autores de la Segunda Escuela de Viena abrió sus ojos a las posibilidades que le ofrecía el serialismo.

Fue así que luego de estudiar con Roger Sessions, Babbitt empezó a aplicar sus conocimientos matemáticos en la composición. Esta exploración tuvo un breve paréntesis en 1946, cuando el joven compositor escribió un musical para Broadway, titulado “Fabolous Voyage”. Cabe decir, que Babbitt siempre se consideró un gran admirador del mundo de los musicales estadounidenses, y que fue mentor de Stephen Sondheim, uno de los principales autores del género.

En 1947 compusó “Three Compositions for Piano”, uno de los ejemplos más tempranos de lo que después se denominaría “serialismo total”. En los años '50, su ya mencionada pasión por el jazz lo llevó a colaborar con el movimiento denominado “Third Stream”, que aunaba este mundo musical junto con las técnicas de composición modernas. El aporte de Babbitt se llamó “All Set”, y bien podríamos hablar de esta pieza como “jazz serial”.

En 1961 Babbitt fue contratado por la RCA la como compositor consultor para trabajar con su RCA Mark II Synthesizer, lo que dio pie a su primera obra para el medio electrónico, titulada “Composition for Synthesizer”. El músico se fascinó por la infinita gama de timbres novedosos que el naciente medio de la música electrónica ofrecía a su disposición. El hito en esta dirección, sin embargo, fue la obra “Philomel” de 1964, en donde a la rigidez de los sonidos en cinta magnética, Babbitt agrega una voz solista (una soprano) en vivo, lo que sería un paso gigantezco a lo que hoy denominamos “música para medios mixtos”.

A contar de los años ’80, el interés de Babbitt por la electrónica se redujo considerablemente, prefiriendo los medios instrumentales para sus partituras. Es así como surgen gran cantidad de piezas orquestales, vocales y de cámara, incluyendo una numerosa cantidad de obras para instrumentos solos.

En 1982 Babbitt recibió una mención especial del prestigioso Premio Pulitzer, como “un distinguido y pionero compositor estadounidense”. En las últimas décadas, diversos honores enriquecieron su notable currículum y su catálogo de obras se engrosó con encargos provenientes de los más renombrados artistas del medio musical.

Nos ha dejado un pionero. Un artista que aportó de manera significativa a dos de los lenguajes musicales más determinantes de los últimos cien años: el serialismo y la música electroacústica.

Por Álvaro Gallegos M.

29/01/2011

Omar Hernández Hidalgo, 1971-2010

Segun el blog Odesis, el destacado violista mexicano Omar Hernández Hidalgo, figura destacada en el mundo de la musica clasica contemporanea, fue encontrado muerto en su ciudad natal de Tijuana, poco despues de haber sido secuestrado. Nuestros pesames a su familia y sus amigos por la perdida de este talento musical.

According to Sequenza 21, one of the finest violists in Mexico and the world, Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, was found dead in his hometown of Tijuana, four days after apparently being kidnapped. Our thoughts are with his family and friends at the moment of the loss of this musical talent.

This guy hates the American Musicological Society

This from the Chronicle, by a guy who clearly loathes AMS - of which he is a member. I don´t really know enough about AMS, and have (thank God) thusfar avoided the position of the patronized ethno in a room full of musicologists to be this pissed off at musicologists or to have much of a position at all on AMS, but for the pleasure of those who are and do, you might enjoy the following.

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i35/35b01001.htm
From the issue dated May 8, 2009
Composed in Hypocrisy. Music, torture, and the drama of American musicology
By ILIAS CHRISSOCHOIDIS

In a rare display of social awareness, the American Musicological Society has publicly denounced the use of music in physical and psychological torture. The core of the March 2008 statement reads, "We, as scholars and musicians who devote our lives to sustaining musical cultures throughout the world, protest the contamination of our cultures by the misappropriation of music as a weapon of psychological torture."

The resolution brings into shocking alignment two unrelated groups, prisoners detained abroad and students of music at home. The former may soon be protected from aural torture now that the American musicology lobby has taken up their cause (albeit with no instrumental accompaniment). More important, American students now have a precedent to decry 20th-century music surveys — with their compulsory exposure to headache-inducing cacophony and traumatic collisions of sonic debris — as academic torture. Assuming that the AMS is serious about banning all forms of music torture, we may soon hear about class-action lawsuits against music departments for aurally abusing our youth.
Before Slavoj Zizek discovers (and critically devours) this tasty nugget of baby-boomer touchiness, let me raise a few points. At first reading, I thought the AMS was defending the integrity of the Western musical canon from evil cultural forces in a continent far, far away. I began to imagine the endless repetition of the opening dissonance in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" followed by the agonized screams of prisoners: "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!" ("O friends, not these tones!"). But no. Music-torturers have little use for our beloved German masters, preferring instead vulgar rock 'n' roll and other low types of pop music. (Admit it: Drowning Pool's "Bodies" is superior to Handel's Water Music, Schubert's The Trout, and Ravel's Jeux
d'eau as accompaniment for waterboarding.) I fail to see, then, why the AMS, guardian of highbrow music, and not the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, a royalties collector, should protest this scandalous abuse of copyrighted material. And it is scandalous. Of all evildoers in the world, American defense agencies appear to favor this practice
the most. According to the Society for Ethnomusicology, "The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies have used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror." The SEM statement not only preceded that of the AMS by more than a year, but also had the courage to actually point a finger at someone. Nay, it openly demands "that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture." Such a clear position reduces the AMS announcement — which is written as though music, not human rights, were the chief subject of abuse here — to a humanistic spoof, a platitude masking critical impotence.
Furthermore, the AMS's jurisdiction on this matter is undermined by a sad reality: American musicology today is less entitled than ever to defend music. Envious of her elder sister, literary studies, she has done everything to appear sophisticated and "Freudly" in the past 20 years. The society's annual meetings feel more and more like territory occupied by foreign disciplines. Derrida, Bakhtin, and Adorno are topics more welcome than composers and their work. "Politics," "gender," "sexuality," and related tags are used as rhetorical steroids to boost one's "innovative" profile. You can more easily land a professorship by adopting the latest hermeneutic vogue than by making a discovery or editing a neglected masterpiece. It is a mystery how scholars who push music to the periphery of their discipline pose as agents "sustaining musical cultures throughout the world."
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the AMS's noble gesture. To the contrary, I marvel that its busy leaders found the time to pontificate on an issue that is, at best, tangentially related to the society's mission.
But since they have taken the path of moral uprightness, I would have expected them to start a bit lower, like with the little academic tortures their young and vulnerable colleagues experience daily. By torture I mean "trivial" forms of academic distress, like applying for a job or fellowship in full suspicion that it has already been promised to someone else. Or witnessing protégés gather around the new "star" professor in their department until faculty diversity and independent viewpoints become almost impossible.
Or competing in the publication market with the Doktorkinder of editorial-board members, whose submissions are destined for magnanimous treatment. I also think of the eerie silence that greets complaints or reports of abusive behavior — board members' overriding the will of selection committees to promote their own students, senior professors' attacking the work of young scholars who compete with their protégés — or even the AMS's practice of bombarding low-income members (read: unemployed) with gift requests for up to $500, if you please.
Little "tortures" such as those may hardly register in the stratosphere of six-figure tenured salaries, but they have a truly liberating effect on their victims, who begin to recognize the ugly face of a capitalist academy: not a forum of discussion but a supreme court; not a community of peers but a House of Lords; not a space for independent thinking but a training ground for submission to professorial gurus, all sustained by a tenure system that allows political operatives to elbow out original scholars and refashion history according to personal desires.
No doubt this describes academic life in general. But it is felt much more acutely among American musicologists. As a small discipline with minimal influence on the national discourse, musicology is conditioned by a double-edged inferiority complex about European intellectual traditions and larger, more respected disciplines. To prove its upscale intellectuality and academic prestige, the AMS imposes a fixed 25-percent acceptance rate for submissions to its annual meeting and limits each issue of its triannual publication, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, to only three articles — around 150 conference papers and nine articles a year for a 3,600-member society.
Such limited opportunities for professional exposure generate enormous competition and nasty partisanship. Only a few big departments and the occasional network of cultlike warriors can withstand the pressure. Musicologists outside such elite circles can hope to present at their society's national meeting once or twice a decade. Their chances of publishing in the JAMS over the course of their entire careers are next to zero.
Some membership. Some group.
You can see, then, why I find the AMS resolution so pompous. The society condemns outlandish abuses of music and people in remote prisons while it undermines the role of its membership at home. In doing so, the AMS parades in lockstep with other contemporary institutions, for which Enlightenment rhetoric masks the disfigurations of capitalism, and big, idealistic statements muffle the groans of social division and injustice. Still, it's worth asking how people who teach, perform, and study the most harmonious of arts can generate so much discord and hidden resentment among their younger colleagues, who are expected to lick their wounds in dark corners and forever remain silent, because torture, abuse, and violence, in whatever form
and dosage, exist only elsewhere.

Ilias Chrissochoidis is a member of the American Musicological Society.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 35, Page B10

Music that makes you dumb

I'd rather be dumb...

From the New Yorker

From the New Yorker

A recent study by a Ph.D. student at CalTech suggests that different pop artists have different audiences. That’s not surprising. But it also suggests that musical taste is linked to intelligence. According to Virgil Griffith’s research, students who listened to pop stars like Beyonce and Lil Wayne are stupider than students who listen to Bob Dylan, Counting Crows, or Beethoven. The Griffith methodology is somewhat sketchy, to say the least: he determined the favorite bands of college students via facebook networks and then compared each college population’s musical preferences with its average S.A.T. scores. The results are one hundred and thirty-three artists and genres connected to average test scores.

What this proves, of course, is next to nothing: scraping student-volunteered favorite bands is not exactly a scientifically valid way of associating individuals and music tastes. Students who are rewarded for academic performance may like to associate themselves with music that’s perceived as brainier. Peer pressure to like more popular music may be stronger at schools that don’t emphasize academics. Plus, S.A.T.’s measure only one kind of intelligence. Still, the list is an excellent instrument of provocation, especially because it seems a little, well, racist, or at least classist: classic rock and alternative rock tend to occupy the upper half, while country and hip-hop acts take up the bottom half.

Interestingly enough, Billy Joel has the fifteenth-smartest preference population (average S.A.T. score of 1147), while jazz (that’s right — the entire genre) has the one-hundred-and-twenty-seventh (average S.A.T. score of 946). Led Zeppelin beats Weezer, and Weezer beats Ben Harper. The top three: Beethoven, Sufjan Stevens, and Counting Crows (hey, no one ever said that intelligence was the same thing as good taste). The bottom three: Beyonce, T.I., and Lil Wayne (hey, no one ever said intelligence was the same as popular success). Read the list. Gnash your teeth. E-mail people about how manifestly foolish the study is. Enjoy. Let us know what you think — T.I. fans, remember to use spell-check.

Posted by Ben Greenman

Arpa vallenata

CONCIERTO DIDÁCTICO

ANÁLISIS MORFOLÓGICO DE LA MÚSICA VALLENATA

Amigas y amigos

Cordial saludo

La llamada “Música de acordeón” o también “Música Vallenata”, es quizá una de las representaciones sonoras colombianas con mayor auge, difusión, consumo y aceptación en las últimas décadas tanto a nivel Nacional como internacional.

Con el propósito de socializar investigaciones musicológicas en torno a la cultura musical vallenata, hemos invitado en esta oportunidad al espacio “Los Martes Musicales” al músico y psicólogo ROGER BERMUDEZ VILLAMIZAR Contactos: (arpa.vallenata@gmail.com Cel: 301 768 77 27), natural de Riohacha (Guajira), experto en asuntos de la música provinciana, quien durante su trayectoria artística se ha desempeñado como asesor del Plan Nacional de Música para la convivencia del Ministerio de Cultura, gerente del Fondo Mixto de la Guajira, jurado en distintos festivales de música vallenata, productor musical y maestro en arpa.

Durante su intervención, el maestro Bermúdez compartirá con los asistentes un análisis estructural de las formas, géneros y estilos tradicionales del vallenato (paseo, son, merengue y puya), además de una contextualización de referencias bibliográficas en torno a esta cultura.

Será esta, la oportunidad para promover su más reciente producción discográfica titulada “ARPA VALLENATA”, una interesante y particular propuesta de música vallenata en formato Arpa, caja, guacharaca y bajo. Acompañado con músicos amigos, interpretará en el arpa algunas obras de su repertorio.

FECHA: Martes 1O de Marzo de 2009

HORA: 5:45 p.m.

LUGAR: Universidad Santo Tomás. Carrera 9 No 51-11

Aula Fundadores. Bogotá- Colombia.

MODALIDAD: Abierto a todo el público interesado en la cultura musical popular.

ENTRADA LIBRE

Duración aproximada: tres horas

Coordinación general:

Profesor: Manuel Antonio Rodríguez

Asistente: Ing. Cristina Martínez

Invita Bienestar Universitario de la Universidad Santo Tomás

Más información en www.musicalafrolatino.com

www.youtube.com/musicalafrolatino

CFP: Musical Heritage: Movement and Contacts, in Montréal

The Laboratoire de recherche sur les musiques du monde (LRMM - OICCM) in association with the Canadian Society for Traditional Music (CSTM) invites you to its international conference, Musical Heritage: Movement and Contacts, in Montréal (Canada) from October 29th to November 1st 2009. Abstract submissions are now accepted. Please find attached to this message the French and English call for papers as well as a poster. Please pass on this information to anyone wishing to submit a proposal.

lrmm.musique.umontreal.ca

NYC Music Grads Unite!

CFP: Sound in Circulation:

Technologies, histories, methods, and practices

The Columbia Music Scholarship Conference invites graduate students to submit abstracts to be selected for presentation at our sixth annual meeting, which will take place on March 7, 2009 at Columbia University. We are soliciting proposals from scholars active in all music disciplines, as well as those in related fields (for example media studies, communications, cultural studies, history, anthropology, area studies, law) to submit abstracts.

Music has been the leading form of creative work circulated through internet networks and as such has enjoyed broad scholarly and public debate in the last few years. The questions of sound in circulation – how authors prepare sound to travel in time and space, how those sounds move through time and space, and how listeners interact with those sounds – are much broader than that of file-sharing or digital media. For this conference we would like to broaden the question about sound in circulation to include many technologies, methods, and practices of circulating sound among specific historical, geographic, and/or cultural groups.

How do people of each time and context decide what is the mode of representation for sound in transport? What factors influence this thinking? How do economics, politics, traditions, laws, beliefs, and technologies shape and get shaped by people’s desire to circulate sound? How do musicians, composers, improvisers, and sound engineers act as nodes in musical circulation?

We welcome a broad response to questions such as these and suggest topics such as the following: orality and literacy; music in the oral tradition; transmission, learning, and memory; bodily techniques of transmission and circulation; music flows in diasporic communities; transnational music flows; the history of musical transcription, notation, and arranging; music publishing, printing, and sales; public or private concert histories; the social history of phonography; norms, rules, and laws of music circulation; public access to circulated sound technologies; changing sound circulation networks; grey or black market circulation; sounds in archives; musicians and works on tour, and so on.

Abstracts of 250 words plus title should be submitted by December 1, 2008 to CMSC 09’s email address: soundincirculation@gmail.com . Please include your name and contact information in your email only, and attach the abstract as a Word, text, or .pdf file. The committee will select papers anonymously. All scholars who submit abstracts will be notified of the committee’s decision by December 12, 2008.

If you have questions, please visit our website at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cmsc/ or email to soundincirculation@gmail.com.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cmsc/

¡Que Viva la Montaña! - Documentary at Berkeley

¡Que Viva la Montaña! at La Peña Cultural Center, Berkeley, October 10 Documentary Film & Concert/Dance

http://www.lapena. org/event/ 881
¡Que Viva la Montaña!
Friday October 10, 2008
$15-$25 Sliding scale - 7:30pm

Premiere of ¡Que Viva la Montaña! (Long Live the Mountains!), a film that follows communities in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, in their struggles to organize sustainable development after a major flood takes their homes. Discussion with the directors & live Colombian music by Aluna. Benefits grassroots organizations in Colombia.

CFP: IASPM Canada - "Peripheries and Centres in Popular Music"

Call for Papers
International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Canada
Presents:
Going Coastal: Peripheries and Centres in Popular Music
Dalhousie University, Halifax
June 12-14, 2009

IASPM-CA is pleased to call for proposals, panels and roundtables for this
special interdisciplinary conference on the theme of "Peripheries and
Centres." We also welcome submissions on any aspect of popular music.

We are aiming for as broad a representation of disciplinary and
interdisciplinary perspectives as possible and hope for a conference that
will provide perspectives on and (re)evaluations of the periphery/centre
relationship as it relates to popular music. What changes are affecting the
concepts of centre and periphery and related notions like mainstream and
fringe, heartland and hinterland, privileged and marginal, mass culture and
subculture? How should they be rethought? Is there still a "centre"
(generically, geographically, economically, ideologically) in popular music
in the 21st century? We would be especially interested in proposals that
deal with issues such as:

*Questioning centre-periphery models
*Shifting centres (in terms of styles, genres, markets, geographies, social
identities)
*Centres and peripheries as they structure artistic labour (stars vs. backup
performers; engineers; producers; videographers; road personnel, etc.)
*Centres and peripheries in digital and web-based music cultures
*Ways in which centre-periphery models entrench or challenge dominant
formations of popular music canons, histories, genres, pedagogies
*Centres and peripheries in our academic work (in our choices of
methodologies, research topics, ideologies)
*Centres and peripheries in the ways of disseminating our work (journals,
books, on-line publishing, blogs, etc.), and in the communication between
'scholarly' and 'non-scholarly' audiences
*The excluded middle: how well have we gotten over the taboo of studying
"mainstream music?"
*How fringes become centres (country, reggae, punk, rap, etc.); how centres
become fringes (heavy metal, disco, kitsch/camp, etc.)

We would especially encourage papers, panels and roundtables dealing with
Canadian popular music scenes that are regionally specific, including those
of Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, the West Coast and
Northern regions.

Proposals may be submitted by email to iaspm-halifax@hotmail.com
iaspm-halifax@hotmail.com> . They will be read blind by the program
committee. Abstracts for individual papers and roundtables should be no
longer than 300 words; proposals for panels should include an abstract of
no more than 300 words for the panel as a whole, as well as abstracts of no
more than 300 words for each paper proposed for the panel. The program
committee reserves the right to accept a panel but reject an individual
paper on that panel.

For questions about the conference, contact conference chair Jacqueline
Warwick at jwarwick@dal.ca jwarwick@dal.ca> or programme chair
Chris McDonald at chris_mcdonald@cbu.ca chris_mcdonald@cbu.ca> .

Submission deadlines:
October 8, 2008 (for consideration for travel reimbursement)
November 15, 2008 (final deadline for all others)

"Cuantas personas mataban, tocaban los tambores" / "Every time they killed someone, they played drums"

Testimonio horroroso del masacre de unas 40 personas de febrero 2000 in El Salado, Bolívar, no tan lejos de Cartagena. A los 2:39 cuentan que los victimarios tocaban gaita con los instrumentos del group de la Casa de la Cultura del pueblo cada vez que mataban. Un escalofriante revés de la idea de la música para la paz.

Horrific testimony of the massacre of some 40 people in Febrary 2000 in El Salado, Bolívar, Colombia, not afar from Cartagena. At 2:39, a woman recalls that the murderers played traditional gaita music with the instruments of the town folkloric group as they killed. A chilling reversal of the idea of music for peace. English transcript below the video.

Questioner: How did the massacre happen here?

Witness: They took everyone out here to this soccer field. By the church were some bleachers, that is where they made everyone sit. They would point to people there and take them away. They took them to be killed right here [pointing]. Those whom they hacked to death, those whom they killed with lead [shot], were taken from there. Some bodies were taken to the church and laid out on tables. After there was no room, the rest of the bodies were left here in the open, out in the sun. Later, the smell was unbearable. So they had us dig a common grave, there, where the monument is. They were thrown in there in sheets, wrapped in sheets.

Q: In one grave, there was room for 3 or 4 people?

W: In the same grave, yes. And they were unrecognizable. We recognized them only from the clothes they were wearing. And we didn’t know, because the families had fled from the town, where there was anyone who could identify the body from the clothes, some sweater or something. They were unrecognizable. When we brought them over there, we nearly fainted because the smell was so strong. We used alcohol, cologne, soaked in cloths over our faces, but it just wasn’t enough.

Q: How many days did this take?

W: This began… it lasted three days … part of four.

Q: With El Salado so close to El Carmen, why was there no reaction from the security forces?

W: That is what we all ask ourselves. I fled to El Carmen del Bolívar, to ask for help. The mayor wouldn’t listen to us. I called the national and international Red Cross, everything I could. I was already desperate when the people arrived from Bogotá, from Venezuela, from everywhere, and they asked me, “you escaped?” I said yes. And I told them about everyone they had killed. … But by then, the deed was done, by then it was the fourth day. They had already gone, by that night.

Q: One question - It has been said that in the video that the Prosecutor-General’s office has, that they talk about drums, that they were playing music.

Second Witness: Yes, that is true. The drums were kept there, in the Casa del Pueblo. That was [the instruments] of some gaita [traditional music, related to cumbia] thet we had here., that were donated. I can tell you because I saw it. Everytime they killed someone, they played the drums, the flutes. That was true.

Q: They were sober, or were they drunk?

SW: Well, some seemed sober, but others appeared to be on drugs, because of the way they acted, the way they killed people, and played music. A few seemed well, but the others, yes, must have been on something.

Q: How did they kill people? With bullets?

SW: Yes, some with bullets. Some were hung, one was beaten to death. Some they tortured, ears cut off while still alive, fingers from hands, later they put a garbage bag over their heads, still alive and screaming for help. But we were just a few people, what could we do.

Q: You all saw this?

SW: I did. I saw the whole thing from the beginning until they left the town.

Q: And why did they torture those people so much?

SW: Well, what I heard, they were saying that they were guerrillas. That’s what they explained to us.

Q: Those paramilitaries, were they known, had you seen them here before?

SW: No, I never had.

From Semana.com via CIP
De Semana.com por CIP

Ana María Arango: "El Petronio y los multicultis: ¿La música del Pacífico le pertenece a la gente del Pacífico?"

Ana María Arango, de Chocó 7 Días:
"Al parecer hace mucho tiempo la música de los pobladores del Litoral dejó de ser exclusivamente de ellos y el Festival de Música del Pacífico Petronio Álvarez es una muestra de esto. "

Enlace

Artículo sobre la fusión colombiana en Revista Cambio

Villa-Lobos, Piazzola...Arnedo.
Los "highlights" del artículo (para mí):

"Se toman las bases rítmicas de la chirimía del Pacífico o del bullerengue del Atlántico, y le ponemos un pasaje de la dodecafonía de Schoenberg o alguna técnica del contrapunto de Bach", indica Alejandro Escallón, compositor clásico y director de la banda Jaranatambó.
y
"Ya los he oído y me aburren -dice Egberto Bermúdez, musicólogo del King's College de la Universidad de Londres-. "Hay una gran diferencia entre lo popular y lo erudito y esta nueva música colombiana no puede ponerse en la misma categoría del trabajo de Piazzolla, Villa-Lobos o Bartók."

No sé si está muy buena que la polémica gire alrededor de comparaciones con Bartók (aunque sí mencionan a figuras como Hugo Candelario, y sí entrevistan a gente de Curupira), pero que los medios por fin estén parando bolas a la fusíon, pues sí. Ahora que la gente empiece a comprar, y que el mercado también beneficie a los músicos tradicionales y lugareños...

Enlace

Global

A Korean ensemble with Pachelbel's canon on gayageum, beatboxing, a DJ, and breakdancing. Good for ethno classes?

Enlace/Link

Un conjunto koreano toca el Canon de Pachelbel en gayageum con beatbox, DJ y breakdance. Bueno para las clases de etnomusicología?

Classical music scandal / Escándalo en la música clásica

Something's fishy ...
Link
and
Link

Algo huele mal...
Enlace (traducido)
y otro
enlace (traducido).