Digital Commons Network^™

Resource Ecologies, Political Economies And The Ethics Of Audio Technologies In The Anthropocene, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Understanding how recorded and amplified stage musics contribute towards producing the Anthropocene necessitates attending to complex transnational flows of material, capital and labor, and how they coalesce into technological objects. This is complicated by the wide array of sites, practices and knowledges involved during various stages of the production process, from initial resource extraction, to smelting, component manufacturing, technology assembly, and distribution. To develop a suitable technological ethics, and to understand what happens to environments and to human, animal and plant lifeworlds, requires one to resist abstraction and undertake a global accounting of resource ecologies with recourse to planetary-scale political …

Fusiones Y Confusiones Del Concierto De Aranjuez En El Jazz: Reflexiones De Un Oyente, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Este artículo lo conforman una serie de reflexiones sobre Sketches of Spain (1960) de Miles Davis y Gil Evans, centrándose en su versión del Concierto de Aranjuez de Joaquín Rodrigo (1940). Inspirándose en los escritos de Edward Said y Homi K. Bhabha, el autor analiza la grabación como un artefacto cultural caracterizado por su “inestabilidad formal” y su “indefinición” o “condición intermedia” (in-betweenness) convirtiéndolo en un álbum que no es ni clásico ni jazz; ni español ni no-español; ni tradicionalista ni moderno, entre otras dualidades. Sketches es una obra de arte que desafía categorías y habita los intersticios de las …

The Fusions And Confusions Of The Concierto De Aranjuez In Jazz: A Listener’S Musings, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Reflections on Sketches of Spain (1960) by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, focusing on their jazz version of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1940). Motivated by Edward Said’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s writings, the recording is analyzed as a cultural artifact characterized by its “formal instability” and its typological “inbetweenness,” rendering it neither classical nor jazz; neither Spanish nor non-Spanish; and neither traditional nor modern, among other dualities. Sketches is an artwork that defies categories and inhabits the interstices of cultural expectations.

Vinyl As Event: Record Store Day And The Value-Vibrant Matter Nexus, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Why would anyone purchase expensive, natural resource-intensive, and seemingly obsolete material carriers of music when streaming providers provide unlimited access to over 40 million songs for a small monthly fee? As I will show, we can no longer assume that contemporary interest is driven solely by a collector’s market or because of the audible qualities of the vinyl listening experience, and must attend to the many ways people engage with record objects today – and by extension, the vinyl record as an ontological multiple. Through an analysis of Record Store Day 2015 and affiliated phenomena including YouTube unboxing videos, other …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 5.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Kathleen Offenholley, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm, Anders A. Wallace

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. The CUNY Games Conference distills its best cutting-edge interactive presentations into a two-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities that faculty can use in the classroom every day. The conference will include workshops lead by CUNY Games Organizers on …

Cultural Transmission Modes Of Music Sampling Traditions Remain Stable Despite Delocalization In The Digital Age, Mason Youngblood

Publications and Research

Music sampling is a common practice among hip-hop and electronic producers that has played a critical role in the development of particular subgenres. Artists preferentially sample drum breaks, and previous studies have suggested that these may be culturally transmitted. With the advent of digital sampling technologies and social media the modes of cultural transmission may have shifted, and music communities may have become decoupled from geography. The aim of the current study was to determine whether drum breaks are culturally transmitted through musical collaboration networks, and to identify the factors driving the evolution of these networks. Using network-based diffusion analysis …

Fragments D'Un Diari Musical, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Vetllada musical al pis d'Ursula Oppens. A pesar de les connotacions vuitcentistes que pugui tenir qualsevol saló musical, Ursula no és ni una Guermantes ni una Verdurin, sinó una defensora tenaç dels segles XX i XXI. Elliott Carter, John Adams, Lutoslawski, Ligetic, etc., tots els grans compositors des segles XX i XXI li han dedicat obres, i ella, amb els seus enregistraments, alguns amb nominacions als Grammys, ha estat la gran advocada del pianisme contemporani als EUA.

Among The Palms1, Lee Haring

Publications and Research

Born out of the convergence of intellectual traditions and owning a borrowing capacity analogous to the one that engenders creole languages, the study of folklore, or folkloristics, claims the right to adapt and remodel political, psychological, and anthropological insights, not only for itself but for the humanities disciplines of philosophy, art, literature, and music (the “PALM” disciplines). Performance-based folkloristics looks like a new blend, or network, of elements from several of those. What looks like poaching, which is a common practice for folksong and folk narrative, can be examined in the PALM disciplines under names like intertextuality and plagiarism. Nation-oriented …

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

Religion On The Dance Floor: Afro-Dominican Music And Ritual From Altars To Clubs, Angelina M. Tallaj

Publications and Research

In this essay, I examine the current New York scene and the emerging discourses surrounding the recent visibility of Dominican Voodoo (Vudú) and its music. When Dominicans migrated, they brought with them these marginalized genres of music including the music of Vudú, and, since the 2000s, this music (palo) has moved from the religious arena to the popular music world, in turn changing the nature of the religious rituals. In New York City, Vudú ceremonies can now publicly feature drumming and possession and are practiced in commercial venues rather than in private homes and altar spaces. While this move of …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 4.0: The Interactive Course, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm, Anders A. Wallace, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 22-23, 2018, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Critical Play with History (Panel) - Composition & Storytelling - Health & Cognitive Sciences - Gaming Anthropology: Teaching Culture and Power Through Games and Design (Panel) - Twine & Writing Games - Easy Ideas II - STEM Games - Global Games for Change Catalog (Panel) - Comics & Active Learning - Fact Checking & Research - Computer Science & Game Design - SimGlobal: Building a Serious Roleplay Course for the Social Sciences (Panel) - Role Playing Games, Narrative, …

Wollman Studies, Teaches The Magical World Of Broadway Musicals., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“My father is from Brooklyn, so we have family

here. We came in frequently from my native Pittsburgh,

and my parents always took us to theater. So

that was a long interest, and then I was a performer

as a child and in high school, came to New York,

sort of lost the performance thread, and in college

became interested in academia, which has always

struck me as a kind of performance. Teaching is a

kind of performance as well.”

That is how Dr. Elizabeth Wollman explains

the evolution of her interest in the performing arts.

She obtained her bachelor’s …

Dominican Migrants, Plural Identities, And Popular Music, Angelina Tallaj

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

World Music And Activism Since The End Of History (Sic), Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

While the decline of protest music in the USA has often been noted, a global perspective reveals that progressive, activist protest musics occupied lively niches in many music cultures worldwide (e.g., of Jamaica, India, Spain, Latin America) during similar periods, roughly the 1950s-80s. While on one level these music movements were embedded in particular socio-political movements, on a broader level they reflected an ardent commitment to the secular universalist ideals of the Enlightenment. The subsequent dramatic decline of all these protest musics—roughly since Fukuyama’s much-debated “end of history”—reflects a broader transformation of the global political climate. This transformation has both …

Flamenco Jazz: An Analytical Study, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Fandango Complex In The Spanish Atlantic: A Panoramic View, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

While the Andalusian and best-known forms of fandango share certain distinctive musical features, these same features can be seen to link these subgenres, historically and structurally, to much broader sets of transatlantic musical families, older genres like the zarabanda and chacona, a wide family of Caribbean-Basin ternary forms, as well as Andean and South American relatives. At the same time, clear distinctions can be made between genres related to this fandango complex and other major musical families in the Spanish Atlantic.

The Evolution Of Modern Thumri, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This essay outlines the evolution of thumri, tracing its development from pre-modern references through the bandish thumri of the mid-nineteenth century Lucknow, and the bol banao thumri of the courtesan era to its modern status as a light closing itme in classical concerts.

El Murciano's "Rondeña" And Early Flamenco Guitar Music: New Findings And Perspectives, Mª Luisa Martínez Martínez, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

The "Rondeña" of guitarist Francisco Rodríguez Murciano (El Murciano, 1795-1848) of Granada--as documented in a notation made by his son--has been a subject of considerable interest among scholars interested in the evolution of flamenco guitar playing (toque). Such authors as Eusebio Rioja (2008, 2013), Javier Suárez Pajares (2003), Guillermo Castro Buendía (2014), and Norberto Torres Cortés (2010) have recognized the importance of this piece in the attempted reconstruction, however hypothetical, of the development of the art of flamenco guitar. These authors have raised various questions about the piece, involving the date and circumstances of its preparation and the …

Teaching Music History With Your Mouth Shut, Anne Stone

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Hathrasi Rasiya: An Intermediate Song Genre Of North India, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Hathrasi rasiya is a traditional song genre of North India’s Braj region, performed by semi-professional members of music clubs (akhār.ās) and informed by a complex set of prosodic schemes, with secondary melodic aspects. As these schemes involve, however tangentially, a kind of music theory, and the genre is patronized by local elites and enjoyed by connoisseurs, it constitutes a member of the “intermediate sphere” of regional genres that share features of both classical and folk musics. Although currently in a state of decline, Hathrasi rasiya flourished vigorously in the twentieth century. This article surveys its formal features and its place …

The Intermediate Sphere In North Indian Music Culture: Between And Beyond ‘Folk’ And ‘Classical’, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

If in discourse about traditional music in North India, the notions of “folk” and “classical” continue to be widely used, in this essay I posit the existence of an “intermediate sphere,” comprising a heterogeneous set of traditional music genres that, in different ways, shares features with both folk and classical realms. I suggest five categories in this socio-musical stratum and provide brief glimpses of some of their constituents and distinguishing features, including the distinctive sorts of theory they embody and elite patronage that sustains them. I conclude with observations about historical changes in the status of this sphere in general.

The Regional North Indian Popular Music Industry In 2014: From Cassette Culture To Cyberculture, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This article explores the current state of the regional vernacular popular music industry in North India, assessing the changes that have occurred since around 2000 with the advent of digital technologies, including DVD format, and especially the Internet, cellphones and ‘pen-drives’. It provides a cursory overview of the regional music scene as a whole, and then focuses, as a case study, on a particular genre, namely the languriya songs of the Braj region, south of Delhi. It discusses how commercial music production is adapting, or failing to adapt, to recent technological developments, and it notes the vigorous and persistent flowering …

Juan Luis Guerra And The Merengue: Toward A New Dominican National Identity, Raymond Torres-Santos, Cuny Dominican Studies Institute

Publications and Research

This research monograph offers a historical account about the development of merengue in the Dominican Republic from the late 1800’s to the present.

Democratizing Indian Popular Music: From Cassette Culture To The Digital Era, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

The history of Indian popular music constitutes in itself a significant development in modern culture, as this set of genres—especially but not only in their Bollywood forms—have been cherished by hundreds of millions of listeners not only in South Asia but internationally as well. At the same time, the trajectory of Indian popular music represents a dramatic case study of media culture as well, as its patterns of ownership, consumption, and even musical structures themselves have been conditioned by technological changes. Most striking is the way that a highly monopolized, streamlined, and homogeneous popular music culture dominated for several decades …

Retention And Invention In Bhojpuri Diasporic Music Culture: Perspectives From The Caribbean, India, And Fiji, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Music Cultures Of Mechanical Reproduction, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Popular musics arc best understood as comprising those genres whose styles have evolved in an inextricable relation with their dissemination via the mass media and their marketing and sale on a mass-commodity basis. While much popular-music activity takes place independently of the mass media, other essential aspects of popular-music production and marketing arc inevitably inseparable from technologies of mechanical reproduction, which perforce condition aspects of music culture in general. Hence, just as one could speak of military cultures based around the stirrup, or later the firearm, or agrarian cultures based on the hoe, the ox, or the tractor, so do …

Popular Music Studies And The Problems Of Sound, Society And Method, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Building on Philip Tagg’s timely intervention (2011), I investigate four things in relation to three dominant Anglophone popular music studies journals (Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies): 1) what interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity means within popular music studies, with a particular focus on the sites of research and the place of ethnographic and/or anthropological approaches; 2) the extent to which popular music studies has developed canonic scholarship, and the citation tendencies present within scholarship on both Western and non-Western popular musics; 3) the motivations for two scholarly groups, Dancecult and ASARP, to breakaway from …

The Trajectories Of Transplants: Singing Alha, Birha, And The Ramayan In The Indic Caribbean, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Indo-Caribbean music culture includes a stratum of traditional genres derived from North India’s Bhojpuri region. This article discusses three such genres: Alhâ-singing, an archaic form of birhâ, and an antiphonal style of singing the Tulsidas Râmâyan. Despite the lack of supportive contact with the Bhojpuri region after 1917, these genres flourished until the 1960s, after which the decline of Bhojpuri as a spoken language in Trinidad and Guyana, together with the impact of modernity in general, undermined their vitality. A comparative perspective with North Indian counterparts reveals illuminating parallels and contrasts.

The Social Life Of Musical Instruments, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Accordion Crimes, a novel by E. Annie Proulx, traces the life of and routes travelled by a green diatonic button accordion: its birth in Sicily in the workshop of “The Accordion Maker,” its numerous changes of ownership in the Americas during encounters between various immigrant communities, and its death when it finally falls into disrepair in the town of Old Glory, Minnesota. There are other accordions in the book, and many temporary human owners, but it is one particular green accordion that is the book’s protagonist. We meet and experience other characters largely through their interactions with the green accordion, …

"India", In "Classical Aesthetic Traditions Of India, China, And The Middle East", Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.