Search Results (14)

This article presents an introductory historical, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic study of “Wazobia gospel music”, a twenty-first-century Nigerian congregational musical genre. The term ‘Wazobia’ signifies a fusion of the three regionally recognized local languages in Nigeria: Wa (Yorùbá), Zo (Hausa), and Bia (Igbo)—words that mean ‘come’ in the respective languages. In the Nigerian context, the Wazobia concept could also symbolize the inclusion of more than one ethnicity or language. By dissecting three multilingual Nigerian congregational songs, I unveil the diverse perceptions of Wazobia gospel music and the associations of the musical genre in line with the influencing agencies, text, and performance practices. Furthermore, I provide a detailed description and analysis of the textual and sonic contents of Wazobia gospel music, emphasizing its roles, meanings, and functions in the Lagos congregations context. I argue that Wazobia gospel music—multilingual singing in Nigerian churches—embodies multilayered roles in negotiating identity and creating hospitality. The complexity of studying congregational singing in cosmopolitan cities (like Lagos, Nigeria) due to multiple ethnolinguistic and musical expressions within local and transnational links is also addressed. To tackle this complexity, this article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research, oral history, and hybrid ethnography. This approach ensures a thorough and in-depth understanding of Wazobia gospel music, a topic of significant importance in the study of Nigerian music, linguistics, and cultural studies. By employing frameworks of musical localization and signification, I incorporate the results of my ethnographic studies of three Protestant churches in Lagos, Nigeria, to illustrate Wazobia gospel music’s continued importance. The article conceptualizes multilingual singing and offers fresh perspectives on studying Nigerian Christian congregational music in the twenty-first century. Full article

This article explores the ethics of “speaking” the artistic languages or idioms of diverse cultures in the earliest Christian communities. This article presents a key New Testament text, the Song of Zechariah (the Benedictus in Luke 1:68–79), as a poetic text meant for communal performance and examines that cultural phenomenon through the lens of “musical caring” to examine the meaning such a poetic phenomenon has for modern Christian life and worship. First, I will briefly summarize the evidence for the Song of Zechariah as a lyrical poem containing the artistic “multilingualism” of both Hebrew and Greek poetic idioms. Then, I will assess such an artistic communal expression in its first-century context with Myrick’s concept of musical caring, broadened to allow for uncertainty of the Song of Zechariah’s first-century performance methods. Finally, I will consider the twenty-first-century implications or lessons from such care and inclusivity in the first century. Full article

For over a century, Hong Kong Christians have sung Chinese hymns in an “out-of-tone” manner. Lyrics in traditional hymnals were translated or written to be sung in Mandarin, the national language, but most locals speak Cantonese, another Sinitic and tonal language. Singing goes “out-of-tone” when Mandarin hymns are sung in Cantonese, which often causes meaning distortions. Why did Hong Kong Christians accept this practice? How did they move from singing “out-of-tone” to creating contextualized Cantonese contemporary worship songs? What does this process reveal about the evolution of Chinese Christianity? From a Hong Kong-centered perspective, this article reconstructs the city’s hymnological development. I consider the creation of national Mandarin hymnals during Republican China as producing a nationalistic Mainland-centric and Mandarin-centric Chinese Christianity. Being on the periphery, Hong Kong Christians did not have the resources to develop their own hymns and thus continued to worship “out-of-tone”. With the decline of the old Chinese Christian center of Shanghai, the growth of Cantonese culture and Hongkonger identity, and the influence of Western pop and Christian music, local Christians began to create Cantonese contemporary worship songs. This hymnological contextualization reflects and contributes to not only the decolonization but, more importantly, the decentralization of Chinese Christianity. Full article

Country music has become commercially successful both in the US and worldwide. It is perceived as a genre that values authenticity, which may be reflected in the choice of linguistic features, with (White) Southern American English (SAE) serving as the “default” variety. Given the recent diversification of the genre, the question arises whether the use of SAE features is still considered obligatory as a kind of “supralocal norm”. This study compared the lyrics of 600 highly successful songs by male and female artists from White Southern, Black Southern, and White non-Southern backgrounds. The aim was to test (i) whether morphosyntactic SAE features are used to index authenticity in the sense of having become enregistered for this music genre and (ii) whether non-Southerners engage in the styling of relevant markers. It emerged that non-Southerners use more of these features than their Southern counterparts, providing preliminary evidence for “genre fitting” as a means of indexing authenticity. However, there is only one marker that qualifies as a core Country feature used across all artist groups, namely negative concord. As this item arguably is better categorized as vernacular universal, SAE morphosyntax appears to have largely lost its indexical function in Country, while accent features are still vital to establishing cultural authenticity. Full article

The traditional Colombian vallenato was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO on 1 December 2015 with urgency for it to be safeguarded, which led the government of Colombia in the head of the Ministry of Culture and the vallenato music cluster to develop a safeguarding plan that contains different activities, among which stands out a platform for the management of vallenato through educational processes. In this sense, this document proposes an ontological model for the representation of vallenato as cultural heritage in a context-aware system called Vallenatic. The ontology was developed using the NeOn methodology, designed in the Protégé software, and has 15 concepts (Vallenata Songs, Artist, Devices, Persons, Environment, Cultural Managers, Interface, Location, MOOC, Learning Object, Profile, Preference, Net, Time Cultural, Event, Cultural_Sites). The model was evaluated by means of nine (9) situations described in natural language and SWRL; this language was used since it allows expressing OWL concepts in combination with RuleML. The proposed model can be used for other musical genres that have the recognition of cultural and intangible heritage, such as the Spanish flamenco, Argentine Tango, Mexican Mariachi music, Peruvian scissors dance, Brazilian capoeira, Dominican bachata, Jamaican reggae, among others. Full article

N’we Jinan, a group of young Indigenous artists who run a mobile production studio and an integrative arts studio, travel to different Indigenous communities, where they support youth in writing and recording music that involves the local community. N’we Jinan employs social media to articulate and protect Indigeneity through the sharing of Indigenous music videos, empowering youth to resist continued colonization. These videos serve to create a sense of connection in Indigenous communities in Turtle Island (Canada) as well as offer a means by which non-Indigenous listeners can learn about contemporary Indigenous cultures. Viewed in conjunction with Nunavut’s Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and the Northwest Territories’ Dene Kede and Inuuqatigiit, which provide a framework of traditional knowledge, values, and skills specific to Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic, the texts implicitly invite non-Indigenous listeners’ engagement in social justice activism as settler allies. The texts invite listening to and viewing the empowering songwriting and recording practices through the lens of social justice and wâhkôhtowin or kinship relations, which involves walking together (Indigenous and settler) in a good way and engaging with Bourdieu’s influential framework of cultural capital. The themes explored in the songs include cultural identity, language, and self-acceptance. The empowering songs of N’we Jinan are place-based articulations of identity that resist coloniality and serve as calls to action, creating embodied videographic, musical, and linguistic partnerships that serve as important articulations of Indigenous identity and which promote the decolonization of reading and listening practices and, by extension, education. Full article

In this article, I examine the emotional content of songs sung in Christian churches. An analysis of the lyrical content of the songs that have been tracked by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) from 1988 to 2018, shows there is a definition of the Christian life that is set before the church and in turn sung by it. The word “joy” appears 37 times and the word “praise” is used 152 times in the 133 songs that comprise the contemporary praise and worship hymnody in the defined time period. In the same time frame, the word sad or any of its derivatives (sadly, sadness, etc.) never occurs in the group of songs that are being discussed. Nor is the word “sorrow” ever used. There are two conclusions that can be drawn from the lack of the use of the word sad. The first is that sadness is undervalued. The second conclusion is that the word “sad” is not a good song word, meaning that it is awkward to sing and fit in the rhythm or meter of a song. The first conclusion relates to the lexical value of a word and the second to the semantic value. To understand the emotional content of music, the texts which provide a lexical meaning need to be examined. Secondly, the semantic meaning, which is composed of the cultural connotations, needs to be considered. The first part, the lexical, is considered by looking at only the text. The second, the semantic, involves looking at how the words and music (both apart and together) conceal and reveal meanings that surpass the lexical level. Thus, the first part of the present work will look at the lyric’s words devoid of context while the second part of the essay will examine the fullness of the songs. As the semantic levels are explored, they will be brought together with the lyrics and the previous level and the question of whether there is an overpromising of joy in the songs will be answered. Full article

Music as a potential prevention strategy can play a pivotal role in developing behavioural changes and creating awareness about malaria and malaria prevention. The study was conducted in a moderate-risk malaria district in sub-Saharan Africa. A comparative analysis and pre-and post-intervention evaluation of three teaching intervention methods to teach and educate young children about malaria, e.g., song intervention, drama intervention, and song-and-drama combination, was evaluated. Data were collected by means of pre-and post-intervention interviews with Grade 3 primary school children and teachers, as well as a post-intervention questionnaire with teachers, parents, guardians, and caregivers. The purpose of the study was to investigate knowledge gains on malaria in relation to malaria awareness interventions. The results revealed that the song-only intervention was the most effective learning intervention strategy in this population and that behavioural changes and knowledge growth occurred regarding malaria and malaria prevention in this population. Independent of the teaching styles of each teacher in teaching the song to the children, the findings established that culturally and age-appropriate songs contributed to increasing children’s knowledge growth regarding sustainable malaria prevention. Full article

As an essential subset of Chinese music, traditional Chinese folk songs frequently apply the anhemitonic pentatonic scale. In music education and demonstration, the Chinese anhemitonic pentatonic mode is usually introduced theoretically, supplemented by music appreciation, and a non-Chinese-speaking audience often lacks a perceptual understanding. We discovered that traditional Chinese anhemitonic pentatonic folk songs could be identified intuitively according to their distinctive bell-shaped pitch distribution in different types of pitch histograms, reflecting the Chinese characteristics of Zhongyong (the doctrine of the mean). Applying pitch distribution to the demonstration of the Chinese anhemitonic pentatonic folk songs, exemplified by a considerable number of instances, allows the audience to understand the culture behind the music from a new perspective by creating an auditory and visual association. We have also made preliminary attempts to feature and model the observations and implemented pilot classifiers to provide references for machine learning in music information retrieval (MIR). To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first MIR study to use various pitch histograms on traditional Chinese anhemitonic pentatonic folk songs, demonstrating that, based on cultural understanding, lightweight statistical approaches can progress cultural diversity in music education, computational musicology, and MIR. Full article

The zhuiniu 椎牛 ritual is one of the most elaborate of the Miao people of western Hunan, China. Zhuiniu means “kill the buffalo with a spear” and traces its origins to the worship of spirits and natural elements. Sponsored by a family to repay the spirits, the ritual was a village-wide event that culminated with the sacrifice of a water buffalo and a community celebration. The zhuiniu, estimated to be several thousand years old, is rapidly vanishing from cultural memory. In July and August of 2018, six master badai-spiritual specialists of the Miao—were gathered in La Yi 腊乙, a village in the Wuling Mountain by the cultural bureau of the Xiangxi Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province to reenact and document the ritual. Using performance ethnography as research methodology, the author employs on-site observations, interviews, field notes, audio, and video to document the reenactment and describe its significance in the words of its practitioners. This essay argues that the zhuiniu has no definitive expression but is an adaptative and interpretative cultural narrative adjusting to circumstances and practice. The ritual exists today as it had historically, in many and varied expressions and interpretations shaped by local need, geography, and subject to the vagaries to orally transmitted forms of practice. Although fragmentary in performance expression and interpretation, the zhuiniu ritual narrative serves as a mythologically-based script that organizes a series of dramatic events that invites community awareness and interaction. In so doing, this sacred ritual has sustained its importance in conveying, embodying, and encoding a spiritual, social, and cultural record of Miao cosmology, culture, and history. Performatively conveyed—using song, music, costumes, dance and movement, props, and set pieces—the zhuiniu has been efficiently and sensorially reimagined in order to reiterate and reaffirm cultural knowledge. With rural modernization, dissolution of cultural context and need, and the aging of its practitioners, the traditional role of the zhuiniu is now in question. Full article

This essay examines the flow of music associated with orisha—anthropomorphic deities—across networks defined variously by art, scholarship, folklore, and religion, all of which overlap and nourish each other. Transmitted via oral tradition, written texts, and multimedia technologies, a handful of orisha-themed songs are analyzed as case studies in the subtle nexus of liturgy and cultural authenticity. Taken together, the songs shed light on a broader phenomenon in which creatively-minded, ostensibly-secular iterations of culture play a significant role in the dissemination and ongoing codification of ritual orthodoxy. Orisha music traditions are analyzed as a fertile ground for a multitude of devotional and/or artistic expressions, many of which have a particularly ambiguous relationship to the concept of religion. In this context, the fluid movements of orisha music between ostensibly sacred and secular contexts can be usefully understood as not only common, but as a conspicuous and characteristic aspect of the tradition. The essay’s structure and rhetorical strategies offer distinct layers of cultural and historical commentary, reflecting a multi-vocal tradition of exchanges among orisha music scholars, artists, and ritual experts. The essay’s historical analysis of orisha music further suggests that a host of subtle, seldom-discussed phenomena—multilingualism, liturgical ambiguity, and transmission via multimedia technologies—are not necessarily aberrant or irregular, but rather vital themes which have resonated clearly across the Afro-Atlantic for at least a century. By obligating us to attend to both musical meaning and cultural context, the essay’s case studies of orisha music shed light on the mingling and synthesis of elements from varied historical sources, languages, and cultural idioms, each of which represent distinct notions of tradition, creativity, religiosity, and secularism. Full article

In this article, I discuss the use of the term “Balkan” in the regional popular music. In this context, Balkan popular music is contemporary popular folk music produced in the countries of the Balkans and intended for the Balkan markets (specifically, the people in the Western Balkans and diaspora communities). After the global success of “Balkan music” in the world music scene, this term influenced the cultures in the Balkans itself; however, interestingly, in the Balkans themselves “Balkan music” does not only refer to the musical characteristics of this genre—namely, it can also be applied music that derives from the genre of the “newly-composed folk music”, which is well known in the Western Balkans. The most important legacy of “Balkan” world music is the discourse on Balkan stereotypes, hence this article will reveal new aspects of autobalkanism in music. This research starts from several questions: where is “the Balkans” which is mentioned in these songs actually situated; what is the meaning of the term “Balkan” used for the audience from the Balkans; and, what are musical characteristics of the genre called trepfolk? Special focus will be on the post-Yugoslav market in the twenty-first century, with particular examples in Serbian language (as well as Bosnian and Croatian). Full article

What triggered the emergence of uniquely human behaviors (language, religion, music) some 100,000 years ago? A non-circular, speculative theory based on the mother-infant relationship is presented. Infant “cuteness” evokes the infant schema and motivates nurturing; the analogous mother schema (MS) is a multimodal representation of the carer from the fetal/infant perspective, motivating fearless trust. Prenatal MS organizes auditory, proprioceptive, and biochemical stimuli (voice, heartbeat, footsteps, digestion, body movements, biochemicals) that depend on maternal physical/emotional state. In human evolution, bipedalism and encephalization led to earlier births and more fragile infants. Cognitively more advanced infants survived by better communicating with and motivating (manipulating) mothers and carers. The ability to link arbitrary sound patterns to complex meanings improved (proto-language). Later in life, MS and associated emotions were triggered in ritual settings by repetitive sounds and movements (early song, chant, rhythm, dance), subdued light, dull auditory timbre, psychoactive substances, unusual tastes/smells and postures, and/or a feeling of enclosure. Operant conditioning can explain why such actions were repeated. Reflective consciousness emerged as infant-mother dyads playfully explored intentionality (theory of mind, agent detection) and carers predicted and prevented fatal infant accidents (mental time travel). The theory is consistent with cross-cultural commonalities in altered states (out-of-body, possessing, floating, fusing), spiritual beings (large, moving, powerful, emotional, wise, loving), and reports of strong musical experiences and divine encounters. Evidence is circumstantial and cumulative; falsification is problematic. Full article

In antiquity, the relationship between “music”, “poetry”, and “language” was very different from the way they relate to each other today, for back then each of these mediums was endowed with a distinct, independent signifying code expressing a semiosis all its own. However, these separate “semiospheres” nonetheless never ceased growing towards and into one another. This is so because music and “melic” poetry were believed to have the capacity to denote something ordinary language could not denote but could not do without, namely “etymonic truth”. As a result, the users of ordinary language were obsessed with divining the “hyponoia” poets encoded in music and chant. Above all, they wanted this hyponoia to constitute the signifié of their language. For this reason, the meaning expressed in language was subject to a process in which it was constantly being “deported” from its ordinary acceptations and transported towards meanings encoded in music. However, this “deterritorialization” of ordinary meaning never resulted in a full “reterritorialization” upon the terrain of the truth encoded in music. Musicians and poets would not tolerate it. As far as they were concerned, music and poetry would cease being “truthful” if the semiosis they conveyed and the semiosis conveyed by language were interchangeable. For, again, as a signifying code, prosaic language was sui generis incapable of representing the truth. Hence, the relationship between these three codes consisted of a sort of intersemiotic dynamic equilibrium in which language was continuously evolving towards a non-linguistic expression of meaning which conferred truth upon it and what it means. And yet the music and poetry which were the source of that truth deliberately kept language from consummating the aspiration of accosting the truth they encoded. This paper explores the mechanics of this intersemiotic dynamic equilibrium. Full article