bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Borrowing, syncretism, hybridisation: the Parisian revue of the 1920s
Authors: Klein Jean-Claude
Published: November 2008

The show (spectacle), in its urbanised, commercial version, is usually cast in the role of soundboard or crucible, where the meeting of an already finished product and its audience is effected. This conception tends to localise creative musical achievements in a prior moment, and can only envisage the relations between manager, producers and performers as unilateral.
Three tributaries of ‘The River’
Authors: Griffiths David
Published: November 2008

Naturally, in appealing to so many consumers, pop music admits of little formal complexity. Whatever a song's concern, it occurs stringently within the demotic constraints of verse, chorus, middle eight and their like. So often is the familiar blast of Bob Dylan's harmonica an end in itself that he is able to contradict this expectation by withholding the true final verse. Describing Handel's practice within the formal convention of recitative and aria in eighteenth-century opera seria, Winton Dean observed: ‘His care for dramatic values led him to modify the formal scheme to express not only states of mind but character in action; and here most of all the stiffness of the convention enabled him to bring off all manner of surprises’ (Dean 1969, p. 171).
Is your love in vain? – dialectical dilemmas in Bob Dylan's recent love songs
Authors: Roos Michael , O'Meara Don
Published: November 2008

In a recent interview, Bob Dylan said that he has learned never to ‘give one hundred per cent’ – a person, particularly a public artist, should always hold something in reserve. Somewhat taken aback, the interviewer pressed for a follow-up to this puzzling statement. Wasn't Dylan giving 100 per cent on those great albums of the 1960s. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on blonde? All right, Dylan finally admitted, maybe he was. The reporter dropped the question and went on to other subjects, leaving the readers, like Mr Jones, wondering just what is going on here. Most people who have followed Dylan's work throughout his career would agree that, in his work of the 1980s, he seems to be holding something back. There are flashes of brilliance, of the old verbal acuity, the ability to come up with the startlingly perfect phrase to fit his needs in a song. There have been truly great songs, like ‘Jokerman’, ‘Dark Eyes’ and ‘Brownsville Girl’. But there have also been embarrassingly awful songs, like ‘Never Gonna Be the Same Again’, lacklustre singing and woefully inconsistent production values on his records. We know what he is capable of – he knows what he is capable of – yet he doesn't give us his best. Why? In our view the answer, like most aspects of Bob Dylan, is not simple but may well involve a complex combination of factors all pertaining to the attempt to balance the dialectical forces pulling upon him from both the public and private areas of his life.
Push-pull for the video clip: a systems approach to the relationship between the phonogram/videogram industry and music television
Authors: Wallis Roger , Malm Krister
Published: November 2008

Using pictures to sell music is hardly a new concept. Examples of pictures being set to pre-recorded music with the aim of producing a piece of audio-visual entertainment can be found as early as the first decade of this century. At the Paris World Fair in 1900, stars of the theatre appeared in short film sketches with synchronised gramophone sound (Olsson 1986). From 1905 through to about 1914 in Sweden, a number of commercially available music recordings were used as the basis of short films which were shown in cinemas with various types of mechanical inventions and much human ingenuity being applied to ensure, though not always achieving, synchronisation. Those portrayed in the films were often actors who mimed the songs (Furhammar 1985, 1988).
Country music video
Authors: Fenster Mark
Published: November 2008

In order to take advantage of the promotional potential of the music video, the country music industry was forced to adapt a medium with conventions and aesthetic elements established by other musical genres – by pop and rock. And to reach its distinct market country music video also had to incorporate country's own established iconographic elements. This iconography is constructed and understood in two ways: through the traditional concerns of country music lyrics; and through the history of visual media based on and developed around the genre. Country music has, in fact, been associated with the screen since movies could first talk, from Jimmie Rodgers' 1929 movie short The Singing Brakeman through thousands of singing cowboy movies to the national television exposure that culminated in Hee Haw.
Analysing performance: narrative and ideology in concerts by ¡Karaxú!
Authors: Fairley Jan
Published: November 2008

In September 1974 a group of musicians came together in Paris to perform at meetings to mark the first anniversary of the 1973 Chileancoup d'état. The group took the name ¡Karaxú! which is variously translated in performance as ‘to go forward’ or as ‘a war cry’. In fact ¡Karaxú! is a Quechuasied version of the spanishcarajowhich colloquially can be loosely translated as ‘bugger off’ but in fact meansgrito de couraje y de rebeldía(a cry of courage and rebellion). This analysis focuses specifically on a set of performances by ¡Karaxú! which took place in the United Kingdom some five years later during 1978 and 1979. It differs from other studies of the music of Chilean exiles and indeed other approaches to modern urban musical concerts by focusing on the concert performance as a whole entity. I analyse the music in performance, providing an analytical framework abstracted from participant observation work with the musicians, and focusing on the negotiation of meaning through the organisation of repertoire into a performance structure.
Key to N'Dour: roots of the Senegalese star
Authors: Duran Lucy
Published: November 2008

Overland travel in Senegal and Gambia is the best introduction to local music. Blaring out from every market stall, taxi radio-cassette and record shop in every town along the trans-Gambian highway, is the music of Youssou N'Dour, Baaba Maal, Ismael Lo, Super Diamono, Toure Kunda or some kora player. The smells of perfumed incense and smoked fish mingle with the rich inflections of Youssou's voice. You stop to buy a piece of tie-dye cloth, or maybe you are waiting at Farafenni to catch the ferry across the river. ‘I like his music too much,’ says a Gambian standing next to you, listening to Youssou's latest cassette, Kocc Barma. ‘I like the tama (drum) with keyboards, it makes me want to dance.’ ‘That's deep Wolof,’ says another; ‘He's singing for Alla Seck who died, Ndyesan (alas).’ The nearby stall-owner disagrees. ‘I prefer his old tapes, like Tabaski,’ he says. ‘That was sayisayi (rascal) music, that was real Wolof music, now he's too toubab (European). Now I listen to Baaba Maal.’ A fourth person joins in. ‘Baaba only sings for his own people, the Tukulor: he doesn't care about anyone else.’
Open letter
Authors: Tagg Philip
Published: November 2008

I have recently found myself reacting with some irritation on meeting such terms as ‘black music’, ‘white music’, ‘Afro-American music’ and ‘European music’. The aim of this letter, written mainly with white European or North American students, friends and colleagues in mind, is to question the validity of these terms, to bring some issues lurking behind their general usage out into the scribal daylight and, hopefully, to provide some ideas for a constructive debate on music, race and ideology.
Canção da América– style and emotion in Brazilian popular song
Authors: de Ulhôa Carvalho Martha
Published: November 2008

During the 1960s bossa nova was the trademark of Brazilian popular music. In the 1980s a second wave of Brazilian popular artists, such as Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Caetano Veloso, has emerged on to the international popular music scene. These artists have been issuing and distributing their records through international labels, and have also had their music recorded by other artists and groups like Pat Metheny and Manhattan Transfer (recipient of a Grammy for their albumBrasil). Milton Nascimento, who since 1968 has been playing in concerts around the world with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Wayne Shorter, also receives good reviews in Europe.The Observerdescribes Milton Nascimento as ‘one of the top musicians in the world’, whose poetry ‘… fuses emotion, feeling, experience, dreams, [and] hopes’ with ‘a burnished voice … tempered with a taut edge at times’, and ‘beautiful melodies which are deceptively intense and powerful even when surrounded by funky keyboards or lush strings’. For the reviewer: ‘His songs have summed up the collective feelings of a nation’. And for Brazilians what is the meaning of Milton Nascimento's music?
From quadrille to stomp: the Creole origins of jazz
Authors: Fiehrer Thomas
Published: November 2008

The purpose here is at once simple and complex – to show that both academic and popular perceptions of the origins of jazz are wide of the mark, though still sustained by both scholarly and musical communities. On a very general level jazz is construed as a quintessentially Afro—American music form that originated in widely disparate locales across the United States at roughly the same time, and perhaps the only indigenous American art form of world significance. My purpose is not to challenge this vague characterisation in all its particulars, but to elaborate upon a query occasionally broached in social history, namely – what kind of society could have produced the phenomenon of pre-recorded jazz music? I shall suggest that in its early stages, during the late nineteenth century, jazz could not be accurately characterised as even ‘American’.
Storm blowing from paradise: social protest and oppositional ideology in popular Hawaiian music
Authors: Lewis George H.
Published: November 2008

In the early 1970s, in the American Island State of Hawaii, popular music began a transformation that was, to some extent, similar in form to what occurred on the American mainland ten to fifteen years earlier, when popular music first merged with the civil rights movement and then with the anti-Vietnam movement. Hawaiian popular musicians, reacting to the commercially slick music of the tourist trade and the Wai Ki Ki nightclubs, reached back to embrace the few ethnic artists still alive and performing. They searched their island past for traditional material and, as the movement consolidated, merged this material with their own pressing social and cultural concerns to create a new type of music – part contemporary, part traditional and all wrapped in a cloak of strong social protest against non-native Hawaiians who they saw as having nearly totally destroyed their culture, their selfidentity, their pride and their sacred land. As Haunai-Kay Trask (1982, p. C2), a spokesperson for the movement, put it:

Any society that has experienced the kind of impact the Hawaiian culture and Hawaiian people have experienced wind up being on the bottom because they are inundated with another culture … High rises, fancy clothes, and freeways – that's what United States culture stands for. It's grotesque. They have no feeling for the fragility of life. Or flora or fauna. Part of me hates the haoles with a passion, but part of me doesn't care. They're just stupid and I want them to stay away.
The jukebox of history: narratives of loss and desire in the discourse of country music
Authors: Fox Aaron A.
Published: November 2008

Is country music for real? This question haunts country's detractors, critics, fans and analysts, as it haunts all students of popular culture. Country music is only an extreme example of the instability, contradiction and ironic reflexivity characteristic of popular cultural forms in general in postmodern, capitalist society. It seems impossible to locate an ‘authentic’ country music text, performance or context, one which represents the ‘real’ life of a ‘real’ community without alienated nostalgia, false consciousness or kitschy commodification. On the other hand, country remains more overtly loyal to the experience, desires and language of a particular class and culture than almost any other major popular musical genre. A unique, if elusive core of ‘authenticity’ tantalises country's supporters and infuriates its critics, but attempts to separate the true from the false in country music, whether at the level of text, context or performance, are bound to fail. Country resists all such attempts; it incorporates and combines the true and the false into a poetic which is explicitly deconstructive of the ideology which these categories encode.
Eruptions: heavy metal appropriations of classical virtuosity
Authors: Walser Robert
Published: November 2008

We have now heard him, the strange wonder, whom the superstition of past ages, possessed by the delusion that such things could never be done without the help of the Evil One, would undoubtedly have condemned to the stake – we have heard him, and seen him too, which, of course, makes a part of the affair. Just look at the pale, slender youth in his clothes that signal the nonconformist; the long, sleek, drooping hair … those features so strongly stamped and full of meaning, in this respect reminding one of Paganini, who, indeed, has been his model of hitherto undreamt-of virtuosity and technical brilliance from the very first moment he heard him and was swept away.
Plugging and programming: pop radio and record promotion in Britain and the United States
Authors: Negus Keith
Published: November 2008

The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed towards one national non-commercial station, Radio 1, which plays an eclectic mixture of musical styles. In the United States radio promotion has been aimed across a complex of commercial stations which broadcast ‘narrowcast’ music very clearly defined according to various ‘formats’. However, the recent re-regulation of the broadcasting system in Britain has resulted in a proliferation of regional commercial stations that are responding to increasing competition by introducing narrowcasting policies similar to those of North America. With Radio 1's share of listeners declining and the prospect of national commercial stations being granted licences and further challenging Radio 1's dominance of pop broadcasting, it seems particularly pertinent to contrast the practices of record companies and radio stations in Britain and North America and highlight how they directly effect the production and consumption of pop music.
Ethnography and popular music studies
Authors: Cohen Sara
Published: November 2008

Simon Frith (1982) once bemoaned the fact that students would rather sit in the library and study popular music (mainly punk) in terms of the appropriate cultural theory, than conduct ethnographic research which would treat popular music as social practice and process. Ten years later the literature on popular music is still lacking in ethnography.
Sampling sexuality: gender, technology and the body in dance music
Authors: Bradby Barbara
Published: November 2008

Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything that needs changing for girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture that excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished to celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw an embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had good reason to be wary of feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography shows the considerable work thathasbeen done by feminists on popular music, and the problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within both feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that the work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in ‘reclaiming’ the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does have parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girl-groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of the mechanisms through which men exclude women from participation in rock bands, while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels other sociological work on how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audience research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women's experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators of meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990).
The scent of Catalan rock: Els Pets' ideology and the rock and roll industry
Authors: Van Liew Maria
Published: November 2008

Since when do Catalans speak Catalan and who are they anyway? Perhaps the 1992 Olympic Games have shed some light on Catalan identity for outsiders, but I believe the idea deserves development with a focus on the recent phenomenon of ‘rock en català’. By focusing on language and Catalan nationalism, by no means driven by a homogeneous ideology, I hope to clarify these questions about Catalan identity and its role in popular culture. In 1985 what would inspire four youths from Spain's north-eastern coastal region to pick up instruments they had never played before, with the exception of the drummer, and start a punk-rock band provocatively named Condons Adulterats (Spoiled Condoms)? What was the impetus behind their first hit ‘Estic penjat’ (I'm Stoned)? Fame? Money? Politics? Sex? I believe with the latter we are getting warmer, but as an original member of the band that sprang from this seedling, I can attest to the fact that we just wanted to have some fun. It was a challenge to have our efforts taken seriously and, while they often were not, our local following grew. If commercial success had been the goal of the band we would have agreed to sing in Spanish with the dream of conquering the Spanish peninsula. But the project began locally in the highly industrialised province of Tarragona where the most natural thing to do was to sing in Catalan.
Writing Jimi: rock guitar pedagogy as postmodern folkloric practice
Authors: Schwartz Jeff
Published: November 2008

Most instruction in electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and electronic keyboards is conducted on a one-to-one basis by uncertified, independent teachers. The lessons are face-to-face, and based on the student's imitation of the teacher's example. Popular music education is a ‘little tradition’ (in comparison to school music departments) and largely an oral one, thus meeting the usual criteria of folk cultures.
Symmetry around a centre: music of an Andean community
Authors: Bradby Barbara
Published: November 2008

Ever since the first systematic study of Peruvian music (d'Harcourts 1925), musicologists have puzzled over the relationship of pentatonic, or five-note music, to other modes of music in the Andes. At that time the enquiry was related to the general musicological debate over whether the pentatonic was the universal form of primitive ‘scale’, from which all other musical scales have evolved. This debate was enmeshed with the hypothesis of nineteenth-century anthropology, that this most basic form of musical system could be derived from a human physiological capacity to distinguish the consonances of the intervals of the fourth, the fifth and the octave. Within this evolutionary paradigm, the accumulation of examples of pentatonic melody from the Peruvian Andes was easily interpreted as further evidence of the universality of this form among primitive people.
‘Not appreciated in Worthing?’ Class expression and popular song texts in mid-nineteenth-century Britain
Authors: Gammon Vic
Published: November 2008

Recent research shows that the English folksong collectors, who were active before the First World War, systematically selected what they took down from rural working-class singers, basing their selection on what they considered to be worth preserving from such singers' repertories. Their work, then, can only give us a biased and highly mediated impression of popular singing traditions (see Harker 1972 and 1982; Gammon 1980). The purpose of this article is to see if it is possible to go beyond the work of the collectors, to try to grasp something of the wholeness of popular nineteenth-century singing traditions, and also to situate those traditions socially.
Popular music in the ‘gilded age’: musicians' gigs in late nineteenth-century Washington DC
Authors: Preston Katherine K.
Published: November 2008

Music is part of everyday life in late twentieth-century America, due primarily to the technology of recorded sound. We are surrounded by it: we have radios to wake us in the morning and to entertain us while we drive our automobiles, background music on television and in movies, ‘atmosphere’ music in elevators and restaurants, and collections of musical recordings in our homes. Because most of the music heard today is recorded, we assume that the pervasiveness of music in our lives is, indeed, a twentieth-century phenomenon. There is evidence to suggest, however, that music was almost as commonplace for late nineteenth-century urban Americans as it is for us today. The popularity of sheet music and of ubiquitous parlour pianos are obvious manifestations of amateur music making by the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Less well known, however, is the fact that Americans of the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially urban Americans, were in frequent contact with professional performing musicians, who played not only at functions where we would expect to find music but also, as a matter of course, at events with which we do not normally associate music and musicians.
Trends and taste in Japanese popular music: a case-study of the 1982 Yamaha World Popular Music Festival
Authors: Herd Judith Ann
Published: November 2008

The contemporary popular music audience in Japan is exposed to a large variety of music, both domestic and imported; tastes are well defined. In particular, such factors as: the singer's ‘image’, what I call maintaining a standard formula, ambiguity and sentimentalism can be pinpointed as important to the music's appeal. In spite of this, the similarities of Japanese popular music to Western musical styles can suggest that a conventional musical analysis will be sufficient for understanding this music. Thus, many critics who evaluate Japanese popular music usually consider it merely a parody of the ‘correct’ styles that they are accustomed to hearing. Concentrating merely on the musical analysis, however, underestimates the cultural factors that give Japanese popular music distinctive characteristics which are highly valued in Japan. To offset the shortcomings of such analysis, this article is an attempt to examine Japanese popular music in terms of those cultural factors most important to popular music genres. The first section is a general review of current trends in popular music in Japan, paying particular attention to the characteristics that make the music uniquely ‘Japanese’.
Pity Peggy Sue
Authors: Bradby Barbara , Torode Brian
Published: November 2008

The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilisation between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth century’, he states that since the Second World War,

It is as dance music that black music has developed its meanings for white users. The most obvious feature of dancing as an activity is its sexuality.… Whereas Western dance forms control sexuality with formal rhythms… black music celebrates sex with a directly physical beat and an intense, emotional sound. It makes obvious the potential anarchy of sexual feeling.

(Frith 1978, p. 180)

Frith appeals to an age-old metaphor: black nature is seen as fundamentally threatening to white culture. In modern popular music, this conflict is played out in terms of the liberation or the repression of sexuality.*
Rock music and politics in Italy
Authors: Fiori Umberto
Published: November 2008

One afternoon in September 1982, at Tirrenia, in the province of Pisa, hundreds of Communist party-workers prepared for the opening concert of an Italian tour by the rock band Genesis. The work took place under the red flags of the National Festival of the Communist Party – L'Unità – and to the sound of traditional songs of political struggle coming from the loudspeakers placed all round the area. These were unpaid workers, highly organised, and they had come from all over Italy.
Music and meaning in the commercials
Authors: Cook Nicholas
Published: November 2008

What does music mean, if anything? The question is one of the hardy perennials of musical aesthetics, and there is no shortage of answers to it. Indeed, there is a plethora of seemingly unrelated answers. We can talk about music's internal structure, about its symmetries and directional motions, about patterns of implication and their realisation or lack of realisation; moving from ‘the music itself’ to listeners' reponses, approaches like this offer a psychological approach to meaning (and the work of Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour provide the best known examples). Or we can approach the music from the opposite direction, talking about the context of its creation, the context of its performance, and the context of its reception; here the assumption is that music acquires meaning through its mediation of society. Or again, we can oscillate between these two viewpoints, on the assumption that meaning arises from the mutual mediation of music and society. That is the central assumption of musical hermeneutics, whether we are applying this term to the work of Hermann Kretzschmar in the 1880s or that of Lawrence Kramer in the 1980s.
Did rock smash the wall? The role of rock in political transition
Authors: Pekacz Jolanta
Published: November 2008

A conviction that rock is the central manifestation of the post-War mass culture and the most common form of mass cultural activity, seems undoubted for rock analysts. The question as to whether rock music is able to play any significant role in a process of political change evokes, however, scepticism rather than endorsement (Rosselson 1979; Hibbard and Kaleialoha 1983; Orman 1984; Pattison 1987; Grossberg 1991).
The flamenco body
Authors: Washabaugh William
Published: November 2008

This article is part of an on-going analysis of a Spanish television documentary series entitledRito y Geografía del Cante. This larger on-going analysis treats the programmes in this series as ‘cultural performances’. The programmes are assumed to model personhood as they go about presenting information about flamenco music. This particular article focuses on the role of the body in these performed models of personhood.
Music, culture and interdisciplinarity: reflections on relationships
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2008

This special issue of Popular Music honours the contribution of a distinguished musicologist to the study of popular music. It was Wilfrid Mellers who, together with Charles Hamm, pioneered the study of popular music as a respectable undertaking within musicology before popular music studies itself began to become a continuing and critical intellectual tradition in the late 1970s. As with Charles Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music has not been restricted to scholarship alone. As founding Chair of the Department of Music at the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers created an intellectual and institutional environment within which it was possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike to undertake the serious academic study of popular music. Without this environment it is possible that the careers both of Richard Middleton and myself would have turned out differently.
The singer, not the song: women singers as composer-poets
Authors: Potter John
Published: November 2008

In his comprehensive celebration of women singers in the twentieth century, Wilfrid Mellers proposed a three-stage socio-musical evolution from the jazz, blues and gospel songs sung by black women, through the black-inspired white singers who followed them, to a new synthesis of singing poet-composers (Mellers 1986). Within this third category, very much the main point of the book, Mellers deals in considerable detail with a range of singer/song writers, from Joni Mitchell and Dory Previn to Rickie Lee Jones and Laurie Anderson. In this article I should like to take this concept of the woman singer/song writer as a point of departure from which to look at two very different kinds of singer: different, that is, both from each other and from any of the singers dealt with in the Mellers book. It has always seemed to me to be characteristic of much of Wilfrid Mellers' writing (and certainly of Angels of the Night) that he never lets his musicological agenda get in the way of his fundamental enjoyment of the music as a fan trying to make sense of his own taste. The reader can accept or reject his thoughts about the significance of it all, and not get so blinded by musicology that you cannot face listening to the songs: that, after all, is in the end what we are supposed to do. In what follows, I, too, write as a fan, but since performers do not often get the chance to bite back at musicologists, I should also like to take the opportunity to question from a singer's point of view a certain kind of performance analysis used by many musicologists. The subject is fraught with ideological booby-traps, so I should confess right away that I am a middle-class, middle-aged English married father.
Yothu Yindi's ‘Treaty’: ganma in music
Authors: Stubington Jill , Dunbar-Hall Peter
Published: November 2008

In north-east Arnhem Land languages, ganma is a word used to describe the place where the fresh water from a river meets the salt water of the sea. For the Yolngu, fresh water and salt water are significant opposites, and the turbulence and fertile potency of their meeting place is a powerful metaphor. The term is used in the Yirrkala community, especially in the school, to refer to the modern attempts to educate Yolngu children in ‘both ways’, that is the Yolngu way and the Balanda way. In this article, it refers to a musical text, the song ‘Treaty’ which, like ganma, represents a mixing of opposites.
Motown crossover hits 1963–1966 and the creative process
Authors: Fitzgerald Jon
Published: November 2008

In recent years there has been a marked resurgence of interest in early Motown songs, many of which have received widespread exposure via successful films such as The Big Chill, My Girl, The Commitments, Father of The Bride and Sister Act. The steady flow of CD re-releases and contemporary ‘covers’ further attests to the continuing appeal and relevance of the music.
Re-examining the concept of the ‘independent’ record company: the case of Wax Trax! records
Authors: Lee Stephen
Published: November 2008

In the American record industry, independent record companies have long held a cultural status that far exceeds the actual economic impact they have in the market-place. Independent record companies, or ‘indies’, have become understood as innovative and creative oases for new or unconventional musicians in the midst of a capital-driven and profit-oriented record business. The development of a wide range of musical genres and styles – from rhythm and blues and soul to punk and industrial – are often attributed to the small companies that operated outside of the control of the larger ‘major’ labels.
The Stax sound: a musicological analysis
Authors: Bowman Rob
Published: November 2008

In recent times there has been an encouraging increase in the musicological study of Western popular music by members of the academy. Both Richard Middleton and Alan Moore have published important books that are emphatic about the need for such study (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Also there have been a number of articles in a variety of journals over the past several years that have either addressed the need for, suggested various approaches to, or actually taken a musicological approach to one or another aspect of popular music (Foret 1991; Brackett 1992; Hawkins 1992; Moore 1992; Taylor 1992; Walser 1992; Middleton 1993). Despite this flurry of activity, as far as this author is aware, there has been no academic musicological work, other than Robert Walser's recent study of heavy metal (Walser 1993), that has attempted to ferret out the component parts of a given genre through an analysis of a sizable body of repertoire. There is an acute need for such work if popular music scholars are going to begin to understand in concrete terms what is meant by terms such as rock, soul, funk, Merseybeat and so on. This essay is an attempt to begin such a study for the genre of southern soul music as it was manifested by Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.
The splintered art world of Contemporary Christian Music
Authors: Howard Jay R. , Streck John M.
Published: November 2008

For many, art is a product: the painting to be observed and contemplated, the concert to be heard and enjoyed. There is, however, another conception of art – art as activity – and it is in this context that Howard Becker (1984) develops his concept of art worlds. Art worlds, Becker argues, include more than the artists who create the work which the public commonly defines as art. Any given art world will consist of the network of people whose co-operative activity produces that art world's certain type of artistic product (Becker 1984, p. x). Organised according to their knowledge of the art world's goals and conventions for achieving those goals, the art world includes five basic categories of people: the artists who actually create and produce the art; the producers who provide the funds and support for the production of the art; the distributors who bring the art to the audience; the audience who purchases and collects the art; and finally, the critics, aestheticians and philosophers who create and maintain the rationales according to which all these other activities make sense and have value. These rationales, however, are not merely descriptive but prescriptive. For despite the efforts of those who would keep an art world static in its products and function, art worlds are dynamic. Changes in the art world are often made in response to changes in the rationales - i.e., the philosophical justifications for an art world's art - which identify the art world's product as ‘good’ art and explain how that art fills a particular need for people and society (Becker 1984, p. 4).
‘Cookin' on the West Coast’: a contribution from the Swedish West Coast to contemporary composition practice
Authors: Edström Olle
Published: November 2008

In recent years, interest within popular music research in describing, analysing and discussing the music itself, the sounding object, has considerably increased. To the English speaking world, the most well known example perhaps is the work of Allan Moore (1993). At my department in Gothenburg, however, by the middle of the 1980s already several dissertations were being written taking the structure of popular music as their starting point to analyse the functions and meaning of popular music in society (Åhlen 1987, Björnberg 1987, Lilliestam 1988). The only problem with these dissertations, as well as with my book on the tin-pan alley tradition in Sweden (1989), is that they are all written in Swedish (although the dissertations have summaries in English or German).
‘Oh boy, you salt of the earth’: outwitting patriarchy in raqs baladi
Authors: Lorius Cassandra
Published: November 2008

The literature on female sexuality in the Middle East has tended to treat sexuality as the product of a homogenous discourse, examining dominant discourses that focus on religious identities, and treating women more as symbols rather than reflecting their actual behaviour or experience. Sexuality is usually essentialised, treated as inherent and fixed, as if it correlates to gender divisions, and is easily separable from them. Following Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994), sexuality may be understood better as a fluid category that can be manipulated and interpreted according to changing social forms and differing perspectives, whether of men or women, dancer or audience, elite or popular. While marriage ceremonials can be seen as key markers of social status and sexual identities, divergent expectations and values associated with gender and sexual relations are also central (Tapper 1991, p. 15). A form of ‘popular’ music and dance, marked by the complex term baladi (see below), is central to the exploration of sexuality at Cairo weddings. Through looking at the ambiguous role of professional dancers (figures who orchestrate, conduct and ‘embody’ baladi musical forms), I have explored the way sexuality is created through performance: the body of the dancer can be seen as the site of multiple discourses on gendered identity, sexuality and power (see also Lorius 1996).
Ethics and aesthetics: the social theory of barbershop harmony
Authors: Garnett Liz
Published: November 2008

Until recently, the world of the British barbershop singer was a self-enclosed community whose existence went largely unrecognised both by musicians involved in other genres and by the public at large. In the last few years this has started to change, chiefly due to the participation of barbershop choruses in the televised competition ‘Sainsbury's Choir of the Year’. Encouraged by the success of Shannon Express in 1994, many other choruses entered the 1996 competition, four of them reaching the televised semi-finals, and two the finals. During this increased exposure, it became apparent that television commentators had little idea of what to make of barbershoppers, indeed regarded them as a peculiar, and perhaps rather trivial, breed of performer. This bafflement is not surprising given the genre's relative paucity of exposure either in the mass media or in the musical and musicological press; the plentiful articles written by barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it into wider musical life. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to follow the theme of these intra-community articles in arguing that barbershop harmony should actually be regarded as a serious and worthy art, or to explain to a bewildered world what this genre is actually about; rather, it aims to explore the way that barbershop singers theorise themselves and their activity to provide a case study in the relationship between social and musical values. That is, I am not writing as an apologist for a hitherto distinctly insular practice, but exploiting that very insularity as a means to pursue a potentially very broad question within a self-limited field of enquiry.
Maternal cereal consumption and adequacy of micronutrient intake in the periconceptional period
Authors: Snook Parrott Meredith , Bodnar Lisa M , Simhan Hyagriv N , Harger Gail , Markovic Nina , Roberts James M
Published: November 2008

Objective

To assess the adequacy of periconceptional intake of key micronutrients for perinatal health in relation to regular cereal consumption of pregnant women.

Design, setting and subjects

Low-income pregnant women (n596) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, who enrolled in a cohort study at <20 weeks’ gestation. These women reported usual dietary intake in the three months around conception on an FFQ. Cereal consumers were women who reported consuming any dry cereal at least three times per week. High risk for nutrient inadequacy was defined as intake less than the Estimated Average Requirement.

Results

About 31 % of the women regularly consumed cereal. After adjusting for energy intake, race/ethnicity, marital status, breakfast consumption and supplement use, cereal eaters had significantly higher intakes of folate, Fe, Zn, Ca, fibre and vitamins A, C, D and E (allP< 0·01) and were approximately two to six times more likely to have intakes in the highest third of the distribution for folate, Fe, Zn, Ca, vitamins A and D, and fibre (allP< 0·01) than cereal non-eaters. Cereal consumption was also associated with reductions of 65–90 % in the risk of nutrient inadequacies compared with non-consumption (allP< 0·01).

Conclusions

Encouraging cereal consumption may be a simple, safe and inexpensive nutrition intervention that could optimize periconceptional intake for successful placental and fetal development.
Transient soil‐moisture dynamics and climate change in Mediterranean ecosystems
Authors: Viola F. , Daly E. , Vico G. , Cannarozzo M. , Porporato A.
Published: November 2008

Plants in Mediterranean ecosystems have developed different strategies to cope with transient soil‐moisture dynamics induced by the markedly out of phase seasonal behavior of rainfall and temperature. Deep‐rooted plants use the soil moisture stored in the wet winter (extensive users), while shallower rooted plants exploit both the wet season storage and the more sporadic growing season rainfall (intensive users). Using stochastic models of soil‐moisture dynamics, we present an analytical and numerical description of the probabilistic structure of the soil‐moisture storage at the beginning of the growing season in relation to the dynamics of the wet season and then study its evolution during the subsequent growing season. Special attention is devoted to plant water stress as a function of the rooting depth and the soil‐moisture storage at the beginning of the growing season. The existence of an optimal rooting depth for Mediterranean climates and its dependence on future hydroclimatic scenarios are discussed with reference to a test case in Sicily, Italy. Our analyses suggest that the forecasted decrease in rainfall for the Mediterranean regions might lead to a considerable increase in plant water stress and favor vegetation with shallower root systems.
Heterogeneous Coulomb stress perturbation during earthquake cycles in a 3D rate‐and‐state fault model
Authors: Gallovič F.
Published: November 2008

We perform a numerical experiment with quasi‐dynamic continuous 3D fault model governed by a laboratory derived rate‐and‐state friction law. We test several cases in which the Coulomb stress (CS) increases either on the whole fault or only on its part. For the partial stressing we find that if the triggering is almost instantaneous (within 1–2 months), the nucleation takes place in the strike extent of the CS increase area. On the contrary, if the earthquake does not occur within these few months, it can nucleate anywhere on the fault, and even later than without the positive CS load. These features represent new findings which are unique for 3D model and cannot be explained by 1D spring‐slider models. The finding might find applications in the aftershock (time‐dependent) seismic hazard assessment.
Fracture Toughness of Human Solid Cancers
Authors: Ragavendra Nagesh , Klug William , Ju J Woody
Published: November 2008

Human solid cancers typically are harder and firmer than surrounding normal tissue upon clinical palpation. This characteristic has been linked to the presence of abundant collagen in the tumor stroma, referred to as the desmoplastic reaction. Recent evidence indicates that tumor-associated desmoplastic stroma is critical to cancer’s growth and progression. However, how best to measure, interpret, and/or model the mechanical attributes of tumor microenvironment in vivo remain unclear. During routine sonographically-guided fine needle biopsy of solid tumors of the human thyroid gland, it was serendipitously observed by the lead author that the nature and strength of the haptic force feedback cues varied among tumors [See Movie:http://www.jbioleng.org/imedia/6538834542236038/supp1.mov]. Note the apparent ease with which the needle travels through a non-cancerous tumor. In contrast, a cancerous tumor offers substantial resistance to needle insertion and penetration. To further investigate this phenomenon and to assess the relationship between tumor hardness and cytological diagnosis, a clinical study was designed and implemented incorporating the principles of fracture mechanics with haptic modality. In this prospective study, 609 solid thyroid gland tumors were percutaneously probed using standard 25-gauge fine needles, their tissue toughness ranked on the basis of the nature and strength of the haptic force feedback cues, and subjected to standard fine needle biopsy. Ranked tumors were placed in one of two groups: Group 1 [N = 134]: tumors exhibiting penetration resistance with a distinctive force-feedback cue, as if cutting through an unripe pear; and Group 2 [N = 475]: tumors exhibiting no resistance, as if cutting through jelly. The results were dramatic: 64% of Group 1 tumors were cancerous while 95% of Group 2 tumors were noncancerous. This qualitative method, though subject to some operator bias, identifies a previously unreported in vivo approach for characterizing the fracture toughness of human solid tumors that can be correlated with malignancy. Our results when validated by quantitative measurement data are likely to provide a new framework for understanding the mechanical attributes of the tumor microenvironment. We anticipate our method to be a starting point for the development of a mechanical device that can quantify a tumor’s toughness in vivo using the principles of fracture mechanics. [Journal of Biological Engineering 2008;2:12 doi:10.1186/1754-1611-2-12]
Mechanisms of nonstoichiometry in Y3Al5O12
Authors: Patel A. P. , Levy M. R. , Grimes R. W. , Gaume R. M. , Feigelson R. S. , McClellan K. J. , Stanek C. R.
Published: November 2008

Currently, Y2O3–Al2O3 phase diagrams do not show the technologically significant yttrium aluminum garnet (Y3Al5O12,YAG) phase as deviating from the stoichiometric ratio, i.e., YAG is always expressed as a line compound. In this paper, we not only report the synthesis of nonstoichiometric YAG, but also the use of atomistic simulation to predict the defect structure associated with the deviation. By comparing the experimental variation in the lattice parameter as a function of deviation from stoichiometry with the defect volume changes predicted by atomistic simulation, we predict that nonstoichiometry in YAG proceeds via cation antisite defects.
The structure of the electron outflow jet in collisionless magnetic reconnection
Authors: Hesse Michael , Zenitani Seiji , Klimas Alex
Published: November 2008

Particle-in-cell simulations and analytic theory are applied to the study of the electron outflow jet in collisionless magnetic reconnection. In these jets, which have also been identified in spacecraft observations, electron flow speeds in thin layers exceed the E×B drift, suggesting that electrons are unmagnetized. In this study, we find the surprising result that the electron flow jets can be explained by a combination of E×B drifts and of diamagnetic effects through the combination of the gradients of particle pressure and of the magnetic field. In a suitably rotated coordinate system, the electron motion is readily decomposed into E×B drift and the motion to support the required current density, consistent with electron gyrotropy. This process appears to be nondissipative.