(Download) "All Music is Popular Music?(Essay)" by Arena Journal * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: All Music is Popular Music?(Essay)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 183 KB
Description
The relationship between sound and power is as old as recorded history. From the location of ancient cave paintings at sites of intensified acoustics to the destructive power of the Sirens or Joshua's trumpets at Jericho, sound has defined territory and 'zones of contestation'. Livy attached great significance to the cohesive war cries of the Romans in their victory over Hannibal, with his more heterogeneous sonorities, at Zama in 202 BC--anticipating a similar observation about the difference in morale between Russia's First and Second Armies in 1812.1 But 'earshot' marked the radius of the power of sound, exceeded immeasurably by that of the printed text, until the advent of such sonic information technologies as morse code, the telephone, and above all, the sound recording (patented in 1877), followed by electrical amplification, the microphone, and the radio. The increased range and volume of sound made it a key to power in the 20th century, as Hitler and Goebbels notably understood. Their insights survive in modified form in the use of amplified music for interrogation and torture in such troubled regions as Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. In our everyday lives, sound defines and contests, often violently, personal and collective boundaries. If we are trying to make any predictive sense of the (post)modern era, we have to recognize that absolutely distinctive to it is the amount, diversity and density of sonic information. As one of the most finely articulated forms of human sound, music is central, not just incidental, to an understanding of the emergence of the modern. Music aesthetics do not help us here/hear while they persist in the fastidious fiction of autonomy, denying precisely the source of their immense power. It is as a resonator of both social meanings and material culture that music becomes a key to modernity. Even the unusual mobility that for centuries characterized elements of the music community made it a harbinger of the dynamics of the modern world. The peripatetic careers of 19th-century musicians in the Baltic region, documented by Hannu Salmi, marks them as conspicuous agents of cultural diaspora, assisted by early channels of 20th-century mass circulation such as the telegraph, steam ships and railway systems. (2) Salmi is the current head of the pioneering Department of Cultural History at Finland's University of Turku, and his study of Wagnerism is one of three recent books that remind us how music intervenes in relations of power. One of the great attractions of Finnish scholarship is that it provides entry into a polyglot academic community, simply because all Finnish scholars are necessarily multilingual. Salmi draws on sources otherwise inaccessible to me, not only linguistically, but also logistically. This is evident in his study of the reception and social meanings of Wagner and his music. An illustration of the author's ingenuity and thoroughness is his examination of the visitor lists to Bayreuth, the records of the Wagner societies, reviews, correspondence, distribution records for what we would now think of as fanzines--Bayreuther Blatter--music catalogues, shops and libraries. From these Salmi forms rigorously tentative speculations about the gender, class and professional profiles of regional audiences, with extrapolations elegantly exemplified in conjunction with his analyses of equivalent national figures, as in the case of Riga. (3)
 "All Music is Popular Music?(Essay)" by Arena Journal * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}