The Department wields tremendous power in the dissemination of ideology, causing an increase in creative activities by folk musicians of all ages and skill levels and general knowledge about and respect for folk music. Contemporary folk musicians incorporate musical elements from other cultures, reifying their desired relationships with those cultures. Their ideology authorizes all (Finnish) musicians to become tradition bearers and innovators, compose, improvise, and arrange, regardless of musical background or skill. Department pedagogues have developed unique teaching methods drawing from historical practices, manipulating aural memory to imitate oral culture, simulating oral composition, and using avant-garde improvisation to develop individuality and personal expression. Contemporary folk musicians legitimize their practices by claiming to enter into the same creative process as folk musicians of the past, allowing them to innovate and experiment while maintaining historical continuity and authenticity. The Folk Music Department, influenced by its conservatory environment, has adopted a Western art music ethos of individual artistry while rebelling against its pedagogy and performance practices, which folk musicians perceive as inhibiting creativity. Finnish contemporary folk music serves as a case study and jumping-off point for theoretical discussions of five larger socio-musical issues: 1) the institutionalization of musicians’ training in traditional musics 2) the construction of legitimacy, authenticity, and historical continuity in revived and recontextualized musics 3) the ideology, pedagogy, and methods for teaching creativity 4) how the authority to be musical and specifically to be creative in music is created and allocated and 5) the expression and reification of transnational relationships through musical fusions and appropriations. It focuses primarily on the Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy music conservatory in Helsinki, where the genre was created and where its most important practitioners have studied or currently teach and work. This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the history, ideology, teaching methods, and current performance practices and creative processes of Finnish contemporary folk music, an urban, professional music using traditional Finnish folk music as a point of departure for contemporary, individualistic creations. The exploration and systematization of a wide range of crossover phenomena reveals that different types of background motivations, such as marketing concerns of record companies or the experimenting attitudes of musicians, can result in highly dissimilar pieces being labelled generally as Crossover. Qualitative interviews with current international genre-mixing composers expand the scope of the study. Analyses of chosen works from Gentle Giant, Liquid Tension Experiment, Kutiman, and of popular adaptations of Vivaldi´s “Four Seasons” help illuminate characteristics of different sub-categories of “crossing over”. The examination of crossing over within popular music focuses on jazz fusion, progressive rock, classical-crossover and mashup. How do social meanings and general associations attached to certain musical genres come into play when classical music meets disco, hip-hop meets the symphony or heavy metal meets the opera? How do artistic or commercial concepts and communication strategies affect composers' techniques of mixing genres? This study observes musical exchange between western art music and various forms of popular music with regard to intra- and extra-musical aspects.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |