From the 1960s, in several Western European countries folk music revivals took place. In The Netherlands, the folk music revival was heavily inspired by the folk music revival movements in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and later by the revivals in France and Flanders (Belgium) as well. Initially the repertoire played was mainly American, Anglo-Saxon and Irish, and only gradually attention turned to attempts of reviving Dutch song repertoire (see Koning 1975 for a contemporary analysis).An interesting part of the Dutch folk music revival was the Frisian folk music revival. In the province of Friesland the folk music movement was widespread and active, and at the same time immensely varied concerning repertoires used and meanings conveyed. The presentation will focus on the work of the Frisian-language folk group Irolt, active from 1975 to 1983 and at the time considered the leading Frisian folk group. Through studying their recordings, contemporary documents, and interviews carried out with the leader of the group years after the group disbanded, I try to gain insight in Irolt’s attempt at the – paradoxical – revival of a non-existing repertoire of folk-songs. I will combine Koning’s (1975) idea of `communality’ in folk revival movements combined with Hobsbawm’s (1983) concept of the invention of tradition and ideas about identity constructing going back to Barth (1969, 1994) to shed light on the processes at work and the resulting products, unveiling the hidden meanings of Irolt’s work in terms of a particular construction of Frisian identity.Paper presented at the 42nd ICTM World Conference, 11-17 July 2013, Shanghai, China
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Sacred Harp komt voort uit de Amerikaanse protestants-christelijke koormuziek en beleeft sinds enige decennia een revival buiten de kerk om. Levin Stein onderzocht bij zanggroepen in Amsterdam en Bremen wat mensen beweegt om zich over te geven aan deze muziek. Zijn conclusie is dat ze in de muziek een tegenwicht vinden voor de geprofessionaliseerde, vervreemde, op het individu gerichte en seculiere westerse cultuur. Sacred Harp biedt hun een alternatief: gelijkwaardigheid, authenticiteit, gemeenschap en spiritualiteit. Sacred Harp is geen expliciete protestcultuur, maar creëert een van de dominante cultuur losstaande plek waar mensen elkaar ontmoeten die zich herkennen in alternatieven zonder dat ze de dominante cultuur expliciet bestrijden. Dit wordt vooral duidelijk in de ontwikkeling van een interessante relatie tot geïnstitutionaliseerde religiositeit door het zoeken naar een onafhankelijke spiritualiteit.
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Using fMRI, cerebral activations were studied in 24 classically-trained keyboard performers and 12 musically unskilled control subjects. Two groups of musicians were recruited: improvising (n=12) and score-dependent (non-improvising) musicians (n=12). While listening to both familiar and unfamiliar music, subjects either (covertly) appraised the presented music performance or imagined they were playing the music themselves. We hypothesized that improvising musicians would exhibit enhanced efficiency of audiomotor transformation reflected by stronger ventral premotor activation. Statistical Parametric Mapping revealed that, while virtually 'playing along' with the music, improvising musicians exhibited activation of a right-hemisphere distribution of cerebral areas including posterior-superior parietal and dorsal premotor cortex. Involvement of these right-hemisphere dorsal stream areas suggests that improvising musicians recruited an amodal spatial processing system subserving pitch-to-space transformations to facilitate their virtual motor performance. Score-dependent musicians recruited a primarily left-hemisphere pattern of motor areas together with the posterior part of the right superior temporal sulcus, suggesting a relationship between aural discrimination and symbolic representation. Activations in bilateral auditory cortex were significantly larger for improvising musicians than for score-dependent musicians, suggesting enhanced top-down effects on aural perception. Our results suggest that learning to play a music instrument primarily from notation predisposes musicians toward aural identification and discrimination, while learning by improvisation involves audio-spatial-motor transformations, not only during performance, but also perception.
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