The end of 2020 presents a crucial time to reflect on the challenges that lie ahead for decolonizing and disrupting musicology. While many have flocked to what I call here the “presumed innocence of musical truth” during the time of Covid-19, any move to disaggregate music from political realities—both the contexts within which it was first created, and those that have upheld the musical traditions that are now in place—carries the risk of perpetuating the destructive possibility that loving the canon can also be our alibi for (or, as I propose here, our “claim to innocence” about) why the discipline of musicology has been so slow to engage with antiracist and decolonial debates in a sustained way. Thinking critically about systemic racism at the end of a particularly challenging year, the time is ripe for interrogating how the institutional structures that uphold western art music are still tied to values about aesthetic truths that have yet to be decolonized. In this article I respond to critical race and Indigenous studies theorists Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their renowned 2012 article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” by outlining three “moves to innocence” that are prevalent in music academia, followed by a proposed “move to disruption” about musical value that contributes to an actively “decolonizing” musicology. Focusing on the themes of truth and value, I argue that the next decade holds an opportunity to engage with the ideas that might productively disrupt our discipline the most.
The commercialized nineteenth century lyceum circuit provided the vehicle for Camilla Urso (1840-1902) to become America's first celebrity female violinist. Vizualizing six seasons between 1873-83 where Urso toured under lyceum bureau management in digital maps of my own creation, I argue industrialized transportation networks combined with the commercialized advertising and publicity of the lyceum circuit created a popular concert model that expanded Urso's audience and raised her concert fees. Urso's time on the lyceum circuit laid the foundation for her transnational career. Urso was never solely a lyceum musician, though exploring the role of lyceums and their bureaus in her career plays a key role in determining how she rose to fame and became America's most celebrated female violinist. Futhermore, Urso's lyceum career argues for classical music as a rural and commercial phenomenon of American popular culture in the nineteenth century.
Drake's music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and conflicted to listeners. Sometimes these multilayered harmonies are created through what I call "reverse extensions," where the bass line moves one or more thirds below the root of the chord in a fixed harmonic loop. These reverse extensions can sometimes be heard as a "harmonic-bass divorce" (de Clercq 2019) in which the bass line moves independently from the harmonic layer. However, I argue that they often can also be heard as single integrated harmonies, and that these plural hearings draw on intra- and inter-textual memory to create multilayered harmonic experiences which help evoke the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that Drake's lyrics are famous for. The plural identities of these chords can be understood by adapting elementary concepts from jazz theory, in which extended chords can be mimicked by or substituted with "slash chords" that add a bass note below the base triad; for example, G/A (G major triad with A in the bass, or AGBD) sounds like Am11 (ACEGBD). This chord sometimes seems to convey a double function of both G and Am. Relationships like this create an "extension-related family" of chords which often easily substitute for one another in chord progressions. I argue that by enumerating possibilities for chord substitutions, and plural hearings of extended chords, reverse extensions are an “enactive music theory” which frames chord identity as a structure subjectively enacted by an individual, rather than an objective property inherent “the music itself.”
This listening journal is about grief and family, the way sounds interweaves with text and realms of communication, how to ask for instructions to lay to rest the remains of the dead. An observer creates credibility for the doer, which in turn gives importance to the observer. The thread of the sound practice is trust. Who lets me hold space for them, who I let hold space for me. In recording this journey of Amma's death, I thought a lot about how my practice with the listening journals influenced my speaking, my performance practice, my listening to people speak. I noticed that when I listen to my recording, I had a lot of umm’s, as if there was a hum in the middle of my speech, but it also created a hesitancy and pause to the authority of speech. Perhaps my listening practice is to create a habitat to experience, to move, to listen, to think.
This article serves to further the conceptual and musical analysis of guarapachangueo, a key influence in the contemporary style of the percussion in Havana-style rumba. I follow Turino’s (2009) lead in distinguishing between improvisation and formulaic performance in analyzing the rhythmic vocabulary of guarapachangueo as a set of related formulas and variations. In doing so, I expand upon and refine some of the characteristics of guarapachangeuo described by Bodenheimer (2015), particularly the common and yet nebulous idea that the style entails increased improvisation in the lower register of the percussion. As an active performer of the style who specializes in the lower register percussion, I will draw upon my experiences and those of fellow rumberos, as well as commercial recordings and online videos of rumba in highlighting the structural formulas used in rumba’s contemporary rhythmic vocabulary. I argue that rather than increased improvisation, guarapachangueo comprises an aesthetic approach to playing rumba in which unique formulas are employed, representing a break with the standardized formulas of traditional rumba from the second half of the 20th century. These formulas produce a heightened sense of tension and release in which increased space and the interactive exchange of percussive phrases are central. Internalized by drummers, these formulas and variations become part of the performer’s musical habitus and are drawn upon—often unconsciously—by the musicians in the form of musical decisions that “say something” in the flow of a rumba performance.
