Music History IV Flashcards: Place, Space, Modernism, Postmodernism, and Work & Notation

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, aesthetic concepts, and theoretical frameworks from Lectures 1 through 4 of Music History IV.

Johann Gottfried Herder's 'Folk Genius'

A 19th-century concept that influenced efforts to document and safeguard folklore, emphasizing cultural diversity while historically reinforcing ideas of cultural and spatial separation.

Cowpat Music

A derogatory label coined by Elisabeth Lutyens for the nostalgic, pastoral style used by British composers such as Arthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling whose legal reinforcement of racial segregation reorganized New Orleans life along a stark Black/white binary, forcing distinct Creole of Color and Black musical traditions to intersect and integrate.

Alan Lomax's 'Grey-out'

A term used by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax to express concern over cultural homogenization, where local musical specificities are smoothed over by global mass culture.

International Repertoire

A category identified by Keith Negus in the 1980s and 1990s consisting of ballad-based songs sung in American-accented English, which accounted for 40% of international sales with 75% of artists originating from the USA.

Glocalization

The process by which local musicians adapt global musical styles to fit local contexts, such as repurposing U.S. hip-hop to address local social and cultural situations.

Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

Motti Regev's concept describing pop-rock culture as a space where participants engage in cross-cultural dialogue and seek global musical citizenship while remaining distinct to their local context.

The Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy's 1993 theoretical framework conceptualizing transatlantic Black culture as a fluid, networked space of movement ('routes' rather than 'roots') unified by shared musical motifs and the historical memory of slavery.

Appadurai's 'Scapes'

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's framework categorizing globalized experience into fluid, irregular spaces: mediascapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes.

Modernism in Music

The cultural response from 1890 to 1960 to the rapid technological, scientific, and industrial changes of modernity, characterized by technical experimentation, innovation, and rejection of bourgeois conventions.

Ars Gallica

A French post-Franco-Prussian War movement calling for a distinctly French musical art to distinguish French culture from Austro-German musical dominance.

Emancipation of Dissonance

Arnold Schoenberg's concept of treating dissonant harmonies as autonomous tonal entities freed from the traditional requirement to resolve into consonance.

Expressionism in Music

A modernist aesthetic influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, focusing on hyper-emotionality, psychological trauma, and the subconscious inner life, as seen in Schoenberg's Erwartung and Berg's Wozzeck.

Primitivism

A modernist artistic movement driven by Western fascination with non-Western or ancient cultures to revitalize artistic expression, famously demonstrated in Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

Afro-Modernism

Guthrie Ramsey's term for African American cultural strategies navigating 20th-century urban migration and racial oppression through intellectual autonomy, social critique, and artistic innovation.

Bebop

A 1940s jazz movement led by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk featuring rapid tempos, harmonic dissonance (altered chords, flat fifths), melodic disjunction, and an assertive politics of style.

Milton Babbitt's 'Who Cares If You Listen?'

A 1958 article title encapsulating the view that modernist composers should withdraw from public commercial markets and pursue composition as specialized research within university settings.

Susan McClary's 'Who Cares If You Compose?'

A 1989 feminist critique challenging the institutional authority, academic isolation, and social irrelevance of university-supported modernist composition.

Postmodernism in Music

A late 20th-century cultural orientation that rejected modernist teleology and high-art elitism, embracing ironical quotation, polystylism, audience accessibility, and the blurring of high and low culture.

Lyotard's 'Postmodern Condition'

Jean-François Lyotard's 1979 formulation defining the postmodern mindset as an incredulity toward universal 'grand narratives' or 'meta-narratives', favoring localized micronarratives.

Afrofuturism

A cultural framework defined by Mark Dery that utilizes cosmic and science-fiction themes to reframe the history of transatlantic slavery and project Black futures, exemplified by Sun Ra.

Musical Semiotics

The study of musical signs based on Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, analyzing how musical structures signify cultural meanings, emotions, or tropes through difference and convention.

Deconstruction in Musicology

A poststructuralist analytical method derived from Jacques Derrida and applied by scholars like Lawrence Kramer to expose underlying power dynamics, binary oppositions, and ideological assumptions in musical texts.

Edward Said's 'Orientalism'

A 1978 critical concept demonstrating how Western representations depict the East as exotic, static, and monolithic to justify colonial domination, widely applied to analyze musical exoticism.

Death of the Author

A poststructuralist concept associated with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault holding that a text's meaning is generated by cultural discourse and listener intertextuality rather than the single intent of a composer.

Polystylism

A postmodern compositional technique featuring the deliberate juxtaposition, quotation, pastiche, and collage of contrasting historical and popular styles within a single piece.

McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Message'

Marshall McLuhan's principle that the media technology through which content is delivered reshapes society and human relationships far more than the specific content delivered.

Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle'

A 1967 theory positing that modern social relations are no longer directly lived but are mediated and replaced by images and capitalist commodity consumption.

Jean Baudrillard's 'Hyperreality'

A condition in which empty signs and representations ('simulacra') replace material reality, creating a state where images dictate and construct effective social reality.

The 'Work' Concept (Werktreue)

The Western musical ideology that views a musical composition as a fixed, autonomous, single-authored object preserved in a written score or recording.

Graphic Notation

Non-traditional scoring systems using visual symbols, grids, and diagrams—such as Morton Feldman's Projection I or Cornelius Cardew's Treatise—to grant performers varying degrees of creative autonomy.

John Cage's 4'33" (1952)

An indeterminate tacet composition that challenged the romantic work concept by removing intentional sound and authorial control, shifting the focus of creation to environmental noise and the listener.

Happening

An unscripted, multidisciplinary performance event pioneered in the 1950s by John Cage and others that dissolved distinctions between artist, performer, and audience without relying on a repeatable score.

Fluxus Event Score

A minimal, text-based instruction sheet created by artists like Alison Knowles or George Brecht that prompted conceptual actions, reconfiguring relationships between performance, performer, and audience.

Pauline Oliveros's 'Sonic Meditations'

A 1974 collection of text-based 'attentional strategies' designed to cultivate 'deep listening' and non-hierarchical musical interactions among participants.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Intuitive Music'

A late-1960s practice (e.g., Aus den Sieben Tagen) using meditative text instructions to guide performers in playing spontaneously without traditional scores or rehearsals.

Historically Informed Practice (HIP)

A performance movement aimed at reproducing early music using historical instruments and scholarly editions, criticized by Richard Taruskin for projecting modernist text-fetishism onto pre-modern practices.

Lead Sheet

A simplified jazz score containing only the basic melody, chord symbols, and copyright details, serving as a flexible foundation for performer improvisation.