I sliced a fingertip open earlier tonight, so please forgive any egregious typos I miss. Trying to shift and hit punctuation when you can't feel the keyboard with that finger is...interesting. (Looking for Part 2?) Since it's Black History Month, I want to take a break from my dissertation research (which is so overwhelmingly white).... Continue Reading →
I've been focusing on dissertation research lately, but I wanted to take a moment to remind readers, I love answering questions! Do you want to know something about music that Wikipedia didn't answer to your satisfaction? Ask me! I can answer questions about Western classical music and music theory. I specialize in medieval music, mainly... Continue Reading →
I once encountered a book so demanding of attention that even with my peripheral vision, walking past the ML stacks at the library, its spine jumped out at me. It was KLEZMER! Ever since, I wish every book every had such a title. (LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!) Today we're not going to talk... Continue Reading →
I want to take a slight detour to talk about socialism and folk music. If you've ever Googled "industrial music," or especially if you've done an academic database search for the term, you find a lot of material on folk music. The artists who came up were familiar—Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax—but I had... Continue Reading →
We left off before the holidays with some background on how medieval fantasy suddenly became mainstream in the '60s. There were also some other semi unintentional mirrorings of the values of the Victorian medieval revivals, where a previously fringe elements advocating for pre-industrial communal lifestyles also became more mainstream. With these cultural threads established, let's... Continue Reading →
In my last post, I tried to begin answering why medieval fantasy suddenly begins to flourish in the midst of the Space Age (which encompasses the end of WWII to about the mid-60s), in terms of some of the basic facts—namely, a bunch of medievalist fantasy sagas came out in the '50s, which were written... Continue Reading →
If you lived through the '90s, you probably remember that strange-upon-reflection moment where everyone was into Gregorian Chant. It's pretty strange that a religious tradition that is more than 1000 years old, and not even that common in actual Roman catholic practice these days, was suddenly a hot topic. The album Chant, recorded by Benedictine monks,... Continue Reading →
As a brief departure from strictly music/arts discussion⸺I just picked up a book again that I started reading earlier this year, called Reichsrock. Kirsten Dyck published it last year, stemming from her dissertation research. Basically, it is a history and map of "the international web of white-power and neo-Nazi hate music." In each chapter, she... Continue Reading →
Maybe I just continually gloss over it, but it seems like drumming styles are frequently neglected in discussions of genres in rock music. I've realized more and more over the years how much I rely on drum style as a genre marker, just for my own ear and tastes. It's something I still have a... Continue Reading →
Since successfully defending my dissertation prospectus, life has been such that I've had little interest in blogging. I can hardly believe that the last post was in December. Time moves entirely too quickly. However, I find that working through ideas informally here is beneficial, and I'd like to maintain this here blog as a way... Continue Reading →
Katarina von Sporken
Violent Brain Fever 