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Enescu and makam
George Enescu’s use of elements of Romanian traditional music is well known; his most popular works today, the Rhapsodies roumaines, attest to his enthusiasm for his homeland’s music. Less known is...
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Folia de reis and family
The folia de reis Christmas tradition of southeastern Brazil involves a group of musicians and clowns traveling from house to house in a symbolic re-enactment of the journey of the Magi. The...
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Banknotes redux
SPIN: Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, a free online resource dedicated to the study of the Romantic period in Western culture, includes a database devoted to iconography on banknotes,...
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Shine and the Titanic
Religious African Americans saw the sinking of the Titanic as an example of God’s intervention in human affairs, as a divine overriding of the advantages conferred by wealth and mastery of technology....
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Hendrix’s asteroid prophecy
A timely prophecy remains hidden within the words of Jimi Hendrix—a connection between history and religions, linking the future with the past—that predicts the existence of an asteroid on course to...
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The first musical comedy
The earliest known secular stage play with music, Adam de la Halle’s Le jeu de Robin et de Marion, has been touted as the first musical comedy. Of the two extant sources, the Paris version is by far...
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Women and gramophones
A letter published in the June 1925 issue of Gramophone noted the magazine’s general absence of women correspondents: “are the sweet little things too shy, or what?” A response published in August of...
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Moroccan insult contests
A performance that occurred almost daily in a public square in Marrakech in the early 1980s traded on ethnic identity for fun and profit. The performance began with an Arab duo singing in Arabic; as a...
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John Cage, visual artist
Best known as an experimental composer and performer, Cage (1912–92) was also a visual artist who created an extensive body of prints, drawings, and watercolors during the last 20 years of his life....
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Bach at the table
The holdings of the Bachhaus in Eisenach include a polished goblet that was presented to J.S. Bach around 1735; the word VIVAT inscribed on it was meant as an invitation to enjoy a glass of wine....
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Svend Asmussen and Benny Goodman
In 1948 Benny Goodman invited the Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen to consider coming to the U.S. to play in his band. Asmussen agreed, but he soon discovered that the U.S. Musicians Union had...
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Reverend Gary Davis and Miss Gibson
One day Manny Greenhill, Reverend Gary Davis’s sometime manager, received a desperate call from Wurlitzer, one of Boston’s most staid and respected music stores. A quavering voice explained that an...
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Lena Horne’s second act
“I was the first black sex symbol, the first black movie star, and the first black to integrate saloons…I had to take a lot of flak from my own people, and everybody else’s people.” Thus spoke the...
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Vinko Dvořák and Croatian musical life
The acoustic physicist Vinko Dvořák was a gifted violinist and a tireless promoter of music in Croatia. As a member of the board of the Hrvatski Glazbeni Zavod between 1913 and 1919, he took an active...
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Louis Jordan and “Caldonia”
In an interview, Louis Jordan recalled the background of his 1945 hit Caldonia: “Caldonia started a long time before I came to New York. There used to be a long, lean, lanky girl in Memphis,...
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Bali remixed and revisited
In May 2019 Songlines Magazine and the PRS Foundation launched a competition to find the best remix of David Attenborough’s recording of a performance of Balinese gendér wayang, a style of...
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The Smithsonian Institution’s Object of the Day, October 5, 2019: Elaine...
Album cover of Seize the Time, by Elaine Brown, Vault Records, SLP-131 (LP), 1969 Back of album cover The First Songs of the American Revolution On a January evening in 1969, members of the Southern...
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The Smithsonian Institution’s Object of the Day, November 22, 2019: Jenny...
Jenny Lind Concert Program, 1850, National Museum of American History, Gift of Sarah Ella Cummings. “Music is prophesy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it...
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The Music of Black Lives Matter
Following is a timeline of writings on the relationship between music and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This timeline is selective–sourced from various scholarly writings and music...
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Rosie Flores and “Working girl’s guitar”
In an interview, Rosie Flores discussed the title cut of her 2012 album Working girl’s guitar: There’s a friend of mine who does, well, everything. He does bodywork, he’s written books on rolfing,...
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