Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in B... more Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in Britain. This groundbreaking book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. More than this, though, the chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. Decades before Steel Pulse, Soul II Soul, or Dizzee Rascal pushed their way into the mainstream, black British musicians were playing jazz in venues up and down the country from dance halls to tiny clubs. In an important sense, then, black British jazz demonstrates the crucial importance of musical migration in the musical history of the nation, and the links between popular and avant-garde forms. But the volume also provides a case study in how music of the African diaspora reverberates around the world, beyond the shores of the USA - the engine-house of global black music. As such it will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.
This chapter argues that to understand the distributed nature of musical creativity we need to ex... more This chapter argues that to understand the distributed nature of musical creativity we need to examine its connection to large-scale social structure and to capitalist relations of labour. These relations have a ‘downward’ causal impact on creative acts. Firstly, this is through the division of labour, which plays out in different ways across genres from classical to pop. Secondly, creative musical labour involves engagement with the concrete, material world. The distributed nature of creativity is determined not only by the drive to divide or consolidate music-making tasks but also depends on the nature of the musical materials to hand, and methods of dealing with them. Two methods are described in this chapter: translation and intensification. Each (sometimes they are combined) entails the making of relatively autonomous creative choices which are emergent from the structural and material conditions of musical labour.
Increasingly, music is being studied as it relates to specific cultures -- not only by ethnomusic... more Increasingly, music is being studied as it relates to specific cultures -- not only by ethnomusicologists, but by traditional musicologists as well. This book is an anthology of new writings that serves as a basic text on music and culture. Drawing on writers from music, anthropology, sociology, and the related fields, the book both defines the field -- that is, What is the relation between music and culture? -- and presents case studies of particular issues in world musics. Book jacket.
12 Continuing the Struggle in Hard Times Jason Toynbee I take a grey October walk through a slice... more 12 Continuing the Struggle in Hard Times Jason Toynbee I take a grey October walk through a slice of the city near my home. There are Edwardian brick terraces and, further out, semis from between the wars. On the footprint of a factory I see a clump of freshly built, toy town ...
Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation Cultural expression, creativity and innovation
Copyright, the main form of intellectual property in cultural production, has played a key part i... more Copyright, the main form of intellectual property in cultural production, has played a key part in globalization. Although it is presented as an unalloyed good by its powerful defenders in corporations and states, this chapter argues to the contrary that copyright is of dubious value. For in ...
Shaped by a combination of romantic aesthetics and capitalist economics in the 19th century, the ... more Shaped by a combination of romantic aesthetics and capitalist economics in the 19th century, the musical work was only enshrined in copyright law at the beginning of the 20th. However, even as the distinctiveness of the work was being legally inscribed, there emerged a new form of popular music making based on iteration. The recorded blues depended on continuity with other record-songs rather than the uniqueness of the individual work. Significantly, the phonographic orality at stake here was effectively unregulated, with ‘plagiarism’ being tolerated. The contrast is then with the hip hop genre. This has the same iterative mode as the blues, yet with the later style rights owners have become quite litigious, and now guard their symbolic property jealously. Focusing on the USA this article examines the differences between the two moments of blues and hip hop by analysing some key music copyright cases. It argues that despite stronger legal scrutiny of phonographic oral production in ...
common sense as a tool for analysis and site for future inquiry, is overdue. But perhaps even mor... more common sense as a tool for analysis and site for future inquiry, is overdue. But perhaps even more valuable is how this historically informed analysis of the politics of consumption invites within the field of globalization studies a robust follow-up conversation about the limits of a market-driven social imagination and its implications for responsible resource control and environmental stewardship.
Jason Toynbee www. openDemocracy. net 2 general public'. This is an idealised view of histor... more Jason Toynbee www. openDemocracy. net 2 general public'. This is an idealised view of history. From the Statute of Anne to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), cultural capitalism has driven the growth of copyright, always luring creators with the promise of ...
... we are" is highly questionable; in any case, that "wisdom" makes little sense ... more ... we are" is highly questionable; in any case, that "wisdom" makes little sense in historicalmusicological terms (see ... the Khoi-San and Arabic areas of the same continent, was in some sense not equally African. ... "Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music." Semiotica 66, nos ...
Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of... more Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, we argue in this discussion piece for the need to pick up the tools of ideology critique once again. Quite simply, the contemporary moment where accelerating inequality is masked by blame of the poor and of migrants demands it. The case is made first through a critique of ideological responses to the economic crisis after 2008. Then in the final section we examine advocacy of ‘social mobility’ in the public sphere, an ideological project if ever there was one.
Market - the selling of souls making up and showing off - what musicians do technology - the inst... more Market - the selling of souls making up and showing off - what musicians do technology - the instrumental instrument genre culture dance music - business as usual or heaven on earth.
A collection of classic and contemporary essays organised by the themes of sound and text, music ... more A collection of classic and contemporary essays organised by the themes of sound and text, music making, subcultures and scenes, popular music and everyday life, musical diasporas, music industry, technology, music media, gender and sexuality.
Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in B... more Black British musicians have been making jazz since around 1920 when the genre first arrived in Britain. This groundbreaking book reveals their hidden history and major contribution to the development of jazz in the UK. More than this, though, the chapters show the importance of black British jazz in terms of musical hybridity and the cultural significance of race. Decades before Steel Pulse, Soul II Soul, or Dizzee Rascal pushed their way into the mainstream, black British musicians were playing jazz in venues up and down the country from dance halls to tiny clubs. In an important sense, then, black British jazz demonstrates the crucial importance of musical migration in the musical history of the nation, and the links between popular and avant-garde forms. But the volume also provides a case study in how music of the African diaspora reverberates around the world, beyond the shores of the USA - the engine-house of global black music. As such it will engage scholars of music and cultural studies not only in Britain, but across the world.
This chapter argues that to understand the distributed nature of musical creativity we need to ex... more This chapter argues that to understand the distributed nature of musical creativity we need to examine its connection to large-scale social structure and to capitalist relations of labour. These relations have a ‘downward’ causal impact on creative acts. Firstly, this is through the division of labour, which plays out in different ways across genres from classical to pop. Secondly, creative musical labour involves engagement with the concrete, material world. The distributed nature of creativity is determined not only by the drive to divide or consolidate music-making tasks but also depends on the nature of the musical materials to hand, and methods of dealing with them. Two methods are described in this chapter: translation and intensification. Each (sometimes they are combined) entails the making of relatively autonomous creative choices which are emergent from the structural and material conditions of musical labour.
Increasingly, music is being studied as it relates to specific cultures -- not only by ethnomusic... more Increasingly, music is being studied as it relates to specific cultures -- not only by ethnomusicologists, but by traditional musicologists as well. This book is an anthology of new writings that serves as a basic text on music and culture. Drawing on writers from music, anthropology, sociology, and the related fields, the book both defines the field -- that is, What is the relation between music and culture? -- and presents case studies of particular issues in world musics. Book jacket.
12 Continuing the Struggle in Hard Times Jason Toynbee I take a grey October walk through a slice... more 12 Continuing the Struggle in Hard Times Jason Toynbee I take a grey October walk through a slice of the city near my home. There are Edwardian brick terraces and, further out, semis from between the wars. On the footprint of a factory I see a clump of freshly built, toy town ...
Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation Cultural expression, creativity and innovation
Copyright, the main form of intellectual property in cultural production, has played a key part i... more Copyright, the main form of intellectual property in cultural production, has played a key part in globalization. Although it is presented as an unalloyed good by its powerful defenders in corporations and states, this chapter argues to the contrary that copyright is of dubious value. For in ...
Shaped by a combination of romantic aesthetics and capitalist economics in the 19th century, the ... more Shaped by a combination of romantic aesthetics and capitalist economics in the 19th century, the musical work was only enshrined in copyright law at the beginning of the 20th. However, even as the distinctiveness of the work was being legally inscribed, there emerged a new form of popular music making based on iteration. The recorded blues depended on continuity with other record-songs rather than the uniqueness of the individual work. Significantly, the phonographic orality at stake here was effectively unregulated, with ‘plagiarism’ being tolerated. The contrast is then with the hip hop genre. This has the same iterative mode as the blues, yet with the later style rights owners have become quite litigious, and now guard their symbolic property jealously. Focusing on the USA this article examines the differences between the two moments of blues and hip hop by analysing some key music copyright cases. It argues that despite stronger legal scrutiny of phonographic oral production in ...
common sense as a tool for analysis and site for future inquiry, is overdue. But perhaps even mor... more common sense as a tool for analysis and site for future inquiry, is overdue. But perhaps even more valuable is how this historically informed analysis of the politics of consumption invites within the field of globalization studies a robust follow-up conversation about the limits of a market-driven social imagination and its implications for responsible resource control and environmental stewardship.
Jason Toynbee www. openDemocracy. net 2 general public'. This is an idealised view of histor... more Jason Toynbee www. openDemocracy. net 2 general public'. This is an idealised view of history. From the Statute of Anne to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), cultural capitalism has driven the growth of copyright, always luring creators with the promise of ...
... we are" is highly questionable; in any case, that "wisdom" makes little sense ... more ... we are" is highly questionable; in any case, that "wisdom" makes little sense in historicalmusicological terms (see ... the Khoi-San and Arabic areas of the same continent, was in some sense not equally African. ... "Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music." Semiotica 66, nos ...
Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of... more Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, we argue in this discussion piece for the need to pick up the tools of ideology critique once again. Quite simply, the contemporary moment where accelerating inequality is masked by blame of the poor and of migrants demands it. The case is made first through a critique of ideological responses to the economic crisis after 2008. Then in the final section we examine advocacy of ‘social mobility’ in the public sphere, an ideological project if ever there was one.
Market - the selling of souls making up and showing off - what musicians do technology - the inst... more Market - the selling of souls making up and showing off - what musicians do technology - the instrumental instrument genre culture dance music - business as usual or heaven on earth.
A collection of classic and contemporary essays organised by the themes of sound and text, music ... more A collection of classic and contemporary essays organised by the themes of sound and text, music making, subcultures and scenes, popular music and everyday life, musical diasporas, music industry, technology, music media, gender and sexuality.
His thesis is that while "pop-rock" emerged first in the US and Britain from the 1950s onwards, i... more His thesis is that while "pop-rock" emerged first in the US and Britain from the 1950s onwards, it has subsequently spread around the world, being adopted with local inflections almost everywhere. In diverse locations, then, pop-rock has come to express a new kind of national identity which is particular to each of its locations, yet also cosmopolitan and world embracing. In this way, Regev decentres Anglo-American popular music while at the same time posing the centrality of pop-rock in the shared, global experience of the late modern world. What's more, to support his case he discusses a huge range of examples of music from around the world, with a special emphasis on Argentina and Israel, two countries which Regev knows well.
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