Sounding the Bromance: The Chopstick Brothers' 'Little Apple' music video, genre, gender and the search for meaning in Chinese popular music

This article analyses the music video of ‘Little Apple’ by Wang Taili and Xiao Yang, also known as the Chopstick Brothers, one of China’s most successful productions in 2014, and one that exemplifies certain emerging trends in Chinese popular music more generally. The music video draws on K-pop models but also on Western inspirations (biblical, historical and contemporary) and has proven hard to reduce to a single, definitive narrative or interpretation. The analysis proceeds by introducing the song and its video, in the context of the Chopstick Brothers’ wider work. Its musical structure is presented, leading to questions as to its particular retro aesthetic. This leads to a study of the emergent genre of shenqu (divine song), which is based on notions of virality, epic craziness and the earworm effect, and to which ‘Little Apple’ contributes. The final sections of the article look at the production of gendered positions within the music video— noting that it is a love song sung by one man to another—and examine the public square dance setting where this song has been so widely picked up. Finally, I suggest why it may be that ‘Little Apple’ particularly can open out a space temporarily in which participants can experience a warm sense of human collaboration

New Musicologies, Old Musicologies: Ethnomusicology and the Study of Western Music*

Ethnomusicology currently engages with the study of Western music in two principal ways. On the one hand, there are specific ethnomusicological studies that focus on aspects of Western musical traditions. Examples include Paul Berliner's analysis of improvisation in jazz (1994), Philip Bohlman's study of chamber music as ethnic music in contemporary Israel (1991), and the examinations of music schools and conservatories by Bruno Nettl (1995) and Henry Kingsbury (1988). These works, in and of themselves, offer explicit and direct indication of what an ethnomusicological approach to Western music involves and what manner of insights can be produced thereby. Second, and more diffusely, ethnomusicological research plays into the study of Western music through musicologists' adoption, adaptation, and application of ethnomusicological techniques and concepts: some musicologists have drawn from specific ethnographies of non Western musical traditions, and others have made recourse to the standard texts of ethnomusicological theory and practice (such as Merriam 1964 and Nettl 1983). This article discusses the recent diversification of traditional musicology and the serious consideration by musicologists of ethnomusicological theory and practice

Afterword

The Afterword discusses the new research on Siamsa Tire from the perspectives of: assembling a new body of theatrical history; the formation of new performance institutions in the postcolonial era; the sustaining of such initiatives under more recent moves toward intangible cultural heritage; and the rise of a sense or metaphor of spirituality via performance

François PICARD : Lexique des musiques d’Asie orientale (Chine, Corée, Japon, Vietnam). Yinyue – ŭmak – ongaku – âm nhac

Réalisé en collaboration avec Henri Lecomte, Pierre Perrier, Jean-François Lagrost, Aïmé Konuma et Lê Ylinh, l’ouvrage de François Picard enrichit de manière originale et stimulante la littérature traitant des musiques d’Asie orientale. Il vise principalement à offrir, pour chaque pays considéré, une série de termes-clés musicologiques assortis de leur traduction française ainsi que d’une brève explication de leur usage habituel. Voilà une idée simple, mais difficile à réaliser avec élégance...

Scoring Alien Worlds: World music mashups in 21st-Century tv, film and video games

This article provides three case studies of the use of world music resources to build alien worlds in mainstream screen media with Sci-Fi or Fantasy settings. The case studies—the TV series Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, the film Avatar and the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) video game World of Warcraft— show how composers and associated music professionals in the early twenty-first century increasingly draw on such sonic materials to generate a rich sense of sonic otherness and note the means they employ to sidestep such music’s existing geographical and cultural references. Each case study explores a contrasting subject position—composer, music consultant and consumer—to better trace not only the creation of such soundtracks but also what senses disparate groups of ordinary listeners subsequently make of them. The examples suggest that outside the sphere of big-budget cinema there is a growing confidence in both the creation and reception of such sonic projections, and that, when sufficiently attracted by what they hear, listeners may actively seek out ways to follow-up on the expressive characterisations put forward in such soundtracks. Three broad types of mashup are uncovered, those that work with world music ingredients by insinuation, integration and creolisation

Violence

The article provides a critical review of a wide cross-section of ethnomusicological research into violence, conflict, and music, leading to proposal of a new model for field researchers. The article begins with a contextualization of selected analytical positions, as offered by theorists of violence and conflict. The main body of the essay then assesses notable contributions from the already substantive ethnomusicological literature on music and violence. Music is not inherently peaceful: instead, it frames and commemorates conflict, making its impacts resound. Music is put to contrasting, and even conflicting, usages by those in, or recovering from, situations of hurt, hostility, or overt conflict. The article provides examples from research carried out in many parts of the world and in the shadow of numerous types of violence, from the re-imagining of a heroic individual to the systemic antagonisms of colonization or poverty, and from the recruitment of extremists to the selfregulation of inmates. Finally, a new model for applied ethnomusicological involvement in the area is briefly presented. Its component parts – naming, witnessing, intervention, and survival – are briefly explained and discussed, showing how an ethnomusicologically trained researcher can contribute to peacebuilding via musical research, listening, and participation

Music in the moment, or one day in Buklavu

This chapter presents a range of music that villager or visiting ethnomusicologist alike might encounter on a single day in the village of Buklavu in the mid-2000s. With these various sounds in mind, it's now timely to reflect more theoretically on what this set of usages tell us about the study of music in daily life. In Buklavu and beyond, moments of special musical activity are part of, and are woven into and provide respite from, established daily routines. After lunch, and particularly in the summer months, there's some quiet in Buklavu, as many take a short siesta. It's a moment when a Bunun mother might soothe her infant with soft, comforting singing. In the evenings after work, when the forest was dark, and when waiting onsite some days to clear the weeds that inevitably sprang up around the newly planted saplings, the work teams typically occupied themselves by singing together and making up new songs