ANNOUNCEMENTS

The final exam review page is up, and growing! Also please see the lecture outline #30 for review from the last week of class.

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8 LINKS in the UNIT 4 LISTENING HAVE BEEN FIXED… all Unit 4 links should be working as of Monday at 10:00 pm.

But there’s always a chance that video/audio that’s working on YouTube now will be removed sometime in the near future. If you click a link that doesn’t work, try to find another recording of that song, made in the intended time period (1960s or 1970s).

(And be sure to email me to let me know that the link is broken!)

Hey everyone! Do the reading and listening early this weekend! You won’t regret it! It’s really fascinating, and it’s crucial preparation for your Unit 3 discussions and essays, which I will assign on Tuesday. (Also, it will be really hard to do well on the second mid-term, if you have to cram this stuff in at the last minute.)

Here’s how to access the Richard Peterson (1990) article

(“Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music.” In Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Jan., 1990), pp. 97-116.):

(1) If you are not in a U.C. Campus library, login at the UCSC “Off-campus Access” page. You will need your UCSC Library barcode.

(2) Once you are logged in, the following link should lead directly to the article:

http://www.jstor.org.oca.ucsc.edu/stable/pdfplus/852886.pdf

(Depending on your browser settings, the document may either download to your hard drive, or simply open in a browser window.)

ALTERNATE METHOD

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The “tone way” approach to learning music, invented and developed by the Abbott Family, is one of the best resources I know for self-taught musicians. Well-written, thoughtful, and accurate, I wish I’d had something like this when I was teaching myself to play guitar so many years ago. Be sure and check out the Abbott Family website and let them know what you thought of their show last week!

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The answers to the first mid-term are available (to logged-in students) in the “Learning Resources” pages. All students should take care to examine the correct answers, compare them to your lecture notes and reading notes, and ask questions if any of these concepts remain unclear. They will all be revisited in the final exam. :)

Unit 2 essays and discussions have begun! Finish your readings and listenings early so you can participate fully and get the most out of this great unit!

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Hey everyone — there’s a new series of Friday faculty concerts at the Music Department. Intense music, reflecting an intense and diverse department of widely reknowned musicians. In other words, you won’t want to miss it. On October 23 at 7:30, Barry Green brings us “Bass Music that Moves and Grooves”…on October 30, Brian Staufenbiel will sing for us in a concert punnishly called “Once Britten Twice Shy”, featuring the great progressive and innovative composer Benjamin Britten. Click on the link above to see more … 

The picture near the upper left of this page doesn’t change very often. I was going to make it change every week, but I decided to focus my energies elsewhere.

The current banner shows 1920s ‘jazz’ icon “Josephine Baker.” Baker started her career as a chorus girl in cabaret shows and other entertainment that was closely associated with minstrelsy. (Her images are also displayed on slides 12-14 of lecture outline #10.) Her fame, early in the 1920s, was related more to 19th-c models of popularity than to modern phenomenon that we discussed in class in connection with Gennet Records, Bessie Smith, and W.C. Handy. (See lecture outline #9.) Rather than acheive fame as a recorded voice, Josephine Baker rose to prominence as a star of stage and screen, first as “an awkward, knock-kneed colored girl” who made strange faces and danced clumsily, projecting a style that was deliberately silly, “savage”, and almost primate-like. This connected her to a decades-long legacy of overtly racist entertainment. In Paris, she was associated with “La Revue Negre” and similar shows, especially known for nudity, and the sexualization of (colonized) “savages.”

But her appeal also stems from a gift for singing tin-pan alley songs in a dramatic, natural, and speech-like way, infused with an excellent sense of rhythm and comic timing. Because her success on stage and screen was more related to the traditional skills of an actor than that of a singer, she has never been considered an influential “jazz musician.” But in many ways she represents the beginning of an era in popular music. She may have been the earliest example of a recording artist whose appeal was identified less with talent than with the “whole persona” of the performer, body and personality included. Being “revealed” to the world, and accepting the resulting vulnerability (and ridicule, and even hatred), has been a steadily intensifying aspect of 20th-century popular culture ever since.

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ANOTHER WAY to access the Richard Peterson (1990) article (“Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music.” In Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Jan., 1990), pp. 97-116.):

(1) After logging in to the UCSC “Off-campus Access” page (see step 1 above), navigate to “JSTOR” through the link on the right column of that page, or here: http://www.jstor.org.oca.ucsc.edu.

(2) Search JSTOR with the keywords 

> Explaining the Advent of Rock Music 

(3) Robert Peterson’s article “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music” will be the first item in the search. Click on that link, and the journal page will open.

(4) On the right side of the article page is an additional link you can use to download the pdf file.