Recent hasom_musicology items

Resilience and Unity: The Immigrant Experience Through the Corridos of Los Tigres Del Norte

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper seeks to explore how the corridos of Los Tigres Del Norte, specifically discussing experiences regarding immigration aid in bringing these issues and stories to a larger audience and in turn helps foster unity and solidarity within the Latin American community. The group’s own experience as undocumented immigrants has shaped their dedication and willingness to highlight the stories of their audience, many of whom can relate closely to the experiences and events recounted in their songs. While analyzing these songs, it is important to be aware of the significant differences between corridos and narcocorridos. Although both forms share similar instrumentation, musical form, and have evolved alongside one another, both consider very different subject matter. Narcocorridos tell stories regarding the narco lifestyle while corridos can present a variety of themes such as love, religion, politics, and discrimination to name a few. Through lyrical...

Permanent Change: Rush, Musicians' Rock, and the Progressive Post-Counterculture

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study explores a particular musical-cultural ideology by interpreting and contextualizing the music of a specific popular music artist. The progressive/hard rock band Rush exemplifies what Dr. Bowman calls the “post-counterculture.” This involves individualism, libertarianism, entrepreneurialism, technique, and an unusually large sub-community of fans who were, or are, musicians themselves. Rush’s music also inscribes an interest not in rock music’s reactive-revolutionary tendencies but, rather, in its adaptive-evolutionary potential. Geddy Lee’s countertenor singing style and virtuosic bass playing, Alex Lifeson’s precise-yet-tuneful guitar playing, and Neil Peart’s elaborately constructed drumming and “middle-brow” lyrics comprise the central features of Rush’s music. The band’s music often includes aspects of progressive rock, hard rock, heavy metal, and individualism. However, as the band evolved, it also increasingly engaged with...

"Didn't Buy the Beat": Ownership, Labor, and the Meme-ified Producer Tag

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This project investigates the history, sonic function, and authorial significance of producer tags in hip-hop. Over the past two decades, producer tags have become a ubiquitous component of rap production as a means of signaling authorship, branding, and aesthetic identity. Industry titans, such as Metro Boomin and Tay Keith, have created famous tags that rile up audiences and resonate within rap communities. Underground rap producers–especially those making “type beats” and beat tutorials on SoundCloud and YouTube–require producer tags to maintain ownership and increase visibility of their work. In these digital spaces, however, tags have transcended simple utility to undergo a process of meme-ification, where producers employ absurdist humor and ironic performances to stake their claim in the industry. Despite their prominence, producer tags remain relatively understudied within musicological scholarship. This paper seeks to examine producer tags at the intersection of authorship,...

Sounding Spirituality: A Proposal for Sound Healing as a Clinical Intervention for Adolescent Survivors of Verbal Abuse

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adolescence represents an incredibly complex period of human development that is marked by rapid neurobiological and personal change. Uniquely positioned between childhood and adulthood, adolescents search intensely for a sense of personal identity. This is more than just a search, however; it reflects a ubiquitous, biologically programmed hunger to know the self and establish a connection to a transcendent force—the core of what is understood as spirituality. When properly cultivated, spirituality encourages a sense of connectedness, meaning, purpose, and contribution. When disrupted, adolescents become significantly more susceptible to depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. While genetic predispositions and psychosocial factors have been widely discussed as contributors to depression and anxiety, verbal abuse remains an overlooked yet pervasive risk factor that directly impacts two fundamental aspects of spiritual development: parent-child relationships and the...

Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain

Wed, 2 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Catholic doctrine, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is the belief that Mary, the mother of Christ, was exempt from original sin from the moment of her conception, and thereby a co-redeemer alongside her son. Praise for this complicated devotion took place in Europe throughout the medieval period and resounded in the Americas with the founding of the first convent in Mexico City under the Order of the Immaculate Conception in 1540. All other orders of nuns in New Spain branched out from this convent, spreading the Marian devotion throughout the region.

In this book, author Cesar D. Favila argues that the sonification of virginity and the Virgin Mary was fundamental to the promotion of the Immaculate Conception doctrine, and that this was part of a complex network of sonified practices in the lives of New Spanish nuns. These "immaculate sounds," a term Favila uses for the cloistered nuns' idealized vocalizations as well as the expression of doctrinal rhetoric...

Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. By Nick Seaver

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. By Nick Seaver

Just Pain: Zine #1

Thu, 2 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just Pain: Zine #1

Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

From his cavernous voice and unparalleled artistry to his fearless struggle for human rights, Paul Robeson was one of the twentieth century's greatest icons and polymaths. In Everything Man Shana L. Redmond traces Robeson's continuing cultural resonances in popular culture and politics. She follows his appearance throughout the twentieth century in the forms of sonic and visual vibration and holography; theater, art, and play; and the physical environment. Redmond thereby creates an imaginative cartography in which Robeson remains present and accountable to all those he inspired and defended. With her bold and unique theorization of antiphonal life, Redmond charts the possibility of continued communication, care, and collectivity with those who are dead but never gone.

Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On March 1, 1954, the US military detonated “Castle Bravo,” its most powerful nuclear bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, the US military evacuated the Marshallese to a nearby atoll where they became part of a classified study, without their consent, on the effects of radiation on humans. In Radiation Sounds Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to US nuclear militarism on their homeland. Schwartz shows how Marshallese singing draws on religious, cultural, and political practices to make heard the deleterious effects of US nuclear violence. Schwartz also points to the literal silencing of Marshallese voices and throats compromised by radiation as well as the United States’ silencing of information about the human radiation study. By foregrounding the centrality of the aural and sensorial in understanding nuclear testing’s long-term effects, Schwartz offers new modes of understanding...

Radiation Songs and Transpacific Resonances of US Imperial Transits

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

This article listens to Marshallese radiation songs to hear how singers subject to US nuclear colonial practices—including US nuclear testing (1946–1958), extant displacement, and human radiation experimentation—continue to be ignored in official capacities, even after nuclear colonialism officially ended with the Republic of the Marshall Islands’s sovereignty through the Compact of Free Association (1986). US nuclear imperialism is persistent given the establishment of these official spaces where the Marshall Islands and United States governments are allowed to interact, politically, and the radiation communities, particularly women subject to disproportionate impacts from nuclear colonialism, are denied entrance or, (literally and metaphorically), voice. Radiation songs, which detail the ongoing and systemic violences of US nuclear imperialism, are ways that singers subversively make their petitions to US citizens and governmental representatives...

Bob Dylan’s ballade

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bob Dylan’s ballade

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. Eidsheim examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as the vocal synthesis technology Vocaloid to show how listeners carry a series of assumptions about the nature of the voice and to whom it belongs. Outlining how the voice is linked to ideas of racial essentialism and authenticity, Eidsheim untangles the relationship between race, gender, vocal technique, and timbre while addressing an undertheorized space of racial and ethnic performance. In so doing, she advances our knowledge of the cultural-historical formation of the timbral politics of difference and the ways that comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience,...

Making light : Haydn, musical camp, and the long shadow of German idealism

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp—a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience—that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology...

Fields, Genres, Brands

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Despite the music industry's attempts to genericise world music, it is not a genre, though it is nonetheless possible to talk about world music as a field of cultural production. There are identifiable forms of capital, such as the types of authenticities musicians are expected to sound and exhibit; and there are identifiable positions available to be taken, concerning the proximity of the musician's sound to western popular music, and, most prominently, the position of whether or not to sing in English or another major European language. This essay takes up the theoretical problem of genres and fields: What is the relationship between an industry-imposed genre and a field? How do forms of capital congeal in fields? In today's neoliberal capitalism, it is clear that the fields of power and economics are increasingly encroaching on all fields of cultural production, to the extent that some genres of music have become brands. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Luigi Boccherini: Dictionary of Persons, Places, and Terms

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

An illustrated dictionary of names, places, and terms pertinent to the life and art of Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), containing some 400 entries and accompanied by a short biographical sketch of the composer. It also includes a comprehensive Bibliography and an up-to-date CD Discography.