Abstract:The art of signed music involves the use of rhythmicized signs from a signed language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in a musical context. Signed music encompasses a variety of subgenres, including ASL hip hop or “dip hop.” A typical dip hop performance involves a Deaf or hard-of-hearing artist simultaneously performing vocalized and signed rapping over a looped background beat. Although dip hop emerged as a grassroots movement in the early 1990s, it has received little analytical attention in the scholarly literature on hip hop. In this paper, the authors combine techniques adapted from analyzing rhythm in non-signed rap music with techniques adapted from analyzing non-rapped signed music to analyze the rhythmic flow of tracks by dip hop artists Sean Forbes, Wawa, and Signmark. The authors demonstrate that dip hop artists have developed genre-specific rhythmic paradigms and tropes to convey the periodicity and rhyme that are fundamental to rap music. Specifically, we address the alignment of rhythm and meter in signed and vocal rap and the conveyance of a repeated “beat” through rhythmic signing. The analyses of dip hop tracks reveal important differences between dip hop and vocal rap, as well as differences between the conventions of dip hop and ASL poetry.
Abstract: Thanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information. Yet how did information become so central to our everyday lives, and how did its processing and storage make our data-driven era possible? This volume is the first to consider these questions in comprehensive detail, tracing the global emergence of information practices, technologies, and more, from the premodern era to the present. With entries spanning archivists to algorithms and scribes to surveilling, this is the ultimate reference on how information has shaped and been shaped by societies.
Written by an international team of experts, the book’s inspired and original long- and short-form contributions reconstruct the rise of human approaches to creating, managing, and sharing facts and knowledge. Thirteen full-length chapters discuss the role of information in pivotal epochs and regions, with chief emphasis on Europe and North America, but also substantive treatment of other parts of the world as well as current global interconnections. More than 100 alphabetical entries follow, focusing on specific tools, methods, and concepts—from ancient coins to the office memo, and censorship to plagiarism. The result is a wide-ranging, deeply immersive collection that will appeal to anyone drawn to the story behind our modern mania for an informed existence.
Publication details: Musikleben in der Renaissance. Zwischen Alltag und Fest. Teilband II: Räume der Musik, edited by Wolfgang Fuhrmann, 131-42. Lilienthal: Laaber, 2021
Abstract: Frederic Rzewski composed Coming Together and Attica in response to the 1971 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. The texts for the works draw upon testimonies of two men who participated in the riot: Samuel Melville and Richard X. Clark, respectively. Rzewski condemns the government crackdown on the uprising through representations of both prisoners and prison. In these and other works, the prisoner is a figure of suffering. Both Melville and Clark suffer through efforts to raise a voice about the hardships of incarceration only to have that voice break apart into fragments and silence. Prison emerges as a space of increasing confinement, conveyed by rigorous compositional schemes that tightly link individual sections and close them off in a larger sealed structure. The musical evocation of confinement along with the expression of psychological distress in the texts creates scenes of suffering. Through these scenes, Rzewski brings out the infliction of pain that scholars have viewed as a fundamental aspect of incarceration. The interaction between the critiques of incarceration and the compositional schemes in Coming Together and Attica is an example of how artists at the time (Steve Reich and sculptor Melvin Edwards) drew upon abstract idioms and materials in works that comment on contemporary political developments.
Abstract: In this article, I argue that pitch plays an important role in the structure and delivery of rap flows. I demonstrate the ways in which rappers manipulate pitch to create a structural parameter that can operate independently from or in tandem with rhythm and rhyme. Furthermore, I argue that pitched vocals take a wider array of forms in rap music than in other genres of popular music, ranging from carefully-pitched singing of modern rap flows to the imprecise and exaggerated declamatory features of speech that distinguished rap from other genres during its formative years. I assert that all rap flows can be classified as using pitch in one of five different ways, with each technique carrying its own unique set of analytical implications.
Score: Lacrumae Divae Virginis et Joannis in Christum a cruce depositum (Tears of the Blessed Virgin and John at the Deposition of Christ from the Cross) by Gregor Aichinger
Abstract: The Lacrumae Divae Virginis et Joannis in Christum a cruce depositum (Tears of the Blessed Virgin and John at the Deposition of Christ from the Cross) is a cycle of eight motets composed by Gregor Aichinger (1564–1628) and published at Augsburg in 1604. Setting the Latin poetry of the Augsburg patrician and humanist Marcus Welser, Aichinger composed these dialogues between Mary and John the Evangelist in the expressive language of the late Renaissance motet for an ensemble of five and six voices. The cycle is remarkable for its connection to a bronze sculptural group depicting Mary, John, and Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, executed by Hans Reichle and erected in the Benedictine basilica of SS. Ulrich and Afra—where Aichinger served as organist—in 1605, creating an aural-visual complex that encouraged viewers and listeners to meditate on the mysteries of the Crucifixion.
Performers: UBC Symphony Orchestra, UBC Opera Ensemble, Scott Rumble (MMus’18) and Elana Razlog (DMPS’16, MMus’17) Conductor: Jonathan Girard Music: Emmerich Kálmán and Charles Kálmán Recording details: Operetta Archives, November 2020 Link
Composer: Jeffrey Ryan Featured UBC faculty performers: Adjunct Professor of Oboe Beth Orson, saxophonist and sessional lecturer Dr. Julia Nolan, and Professor of Piano Dr. Corey Hamm Featured tracks:
Beth Orson (oboe & English horn) in Quince
Corey Hamm (piano) in Arbutus Julia Nolan (alto saxophone) in Luminous Blue Recording details: Redshift Records, released October 30, 2020 Link
