Warm welcome to our online IIPC Debates (Zoom details for Dr Størvold available in this post, others will follow near the presentations)!
IIPC debate: Wednesday 25.11, 16.15
Nordic noir television music: Sounding an Arctic Scandinavia in Trapped
Tore Størvold, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
The Icelandic television crime drama Trapped (“Ófærð”, 2015), has become an international success that continues to impact the circulation of images and myths about Iceland in popular culture. This paper highlights aspects of its audiovisual aesthetics that construct a version of Iceland in line with current national aspirations and geopolitical rhetoric. To this end, I focus on the show’s opening title sequence, where many of the key visual and musical features are distilled in a gripping montage featuring music by the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969–2018). The analysis focuses on the use of voice, string instruments, and aspects of studio production that enjoy a lineage within the genre of Nordic noir television music. In Trapped, these musical details are employed in new ways in order to provide an audiovisual narrative of Iceland as an “Arctic Scandinavia”.
Tore Størvold is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research on contemporary music and culture in Iceland has appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society. His current research project deals with musical strategies for promoting ecological knowledge of the oceans. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Oslo.
Topic: IIPC debate: Tore Størvold, Nordic noir television music:
Time: Nov 25, 2020 04:00 PM Helsinki
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Meeting ID: 690 3680 0563
IIPC debate: Wednesday 2.12., 16:15
Gender and Taste in 1970s Rock Criticism
Sarah Hill, Cardiff University
Progressive rock is a genre primarily populated by men, whether as musicians, producers, or audience members. As a genre marketed less for bodily engagement than for cerebral pleasure, it is worth noting that the early years of prog rock coincided with both the rise of rock journalism – another field populated largely by men, who valorised the ‘authentic’ over the ‘pretentious’ – and the nascent Women’s Liberation Movement. In this paper I will explore these intersections in the reception of two canonical recordings from the mid-1970s, chronicle the critical language used to describe prog rock in the UK and US music press, and chart the ways in which women’s musical tastes were alternately defined and stereotyped in the early-1970s. I will then turn to reviews of prog rock written by women critics, with a view toward understanding the role of second-wave feminism in the expressions of women’s critical thoughts in mainstream music magazines, and the curation of taste in women’s magazines of the early 1970s.
Dr Sarah Hill is currently Senior Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University and Co-ordinating Editor of the journal Popular Music. She has published on issues of popular music historiography, popular music and politics, and popular music and cultural identity, particularly as it relates to the Welsh language. Her most recent monograph was San Francisco and the Long 60s (Bloomsbury, 2016), and she is currently editing a collection of essays on one-hit wonders and, with Professor Allan Moore, the Oxford Handbook of Progressive Rock. In April she will take a new post as Associate Professor of Popular Music and Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford.
IIPC debate: Monday 7.12., 16:15
Spatial Imagination in Contemporary Music Video
Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Aarhus University
When compared to other audiovisual media, music video has occasionally been credited with opting for “a different articulation of space and time” (Shaviro 2017, 58). Scholars have noted how music videos “expand and transcend our conceptions of temporality and spatiality” (Frahm, 2010, 155), maintaining that music video space is often “fragmented and unstable” (Vernallis 2004, 116) or “hybrid” (Willis 2005; Korsgaard 2017ff). This spatial hybridity can be taken to mean two different things. Firstly, on a general level any music video represents space on two planes at once: an auditory/musical space alongside a visual/cinematic space, with the interrelation between these two creating a distinctly composite “audiovisual space” (Lexmann 2008, 49). Secondly, the notion of spatial hybridity also more specifically implies that music videos are visually discontinuous and fragmented with different spaces and image-planes frequently intermingling and colliding. This hybrid and composite nature of music video necessarily calls for an equally hybrid and composite theoretical and methodological approach to the analysis of music video spaces. Departing from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, this lecture will engage with spatial imagination in contemporary music video, detailing how music video spaces are characterized by having become increasingly heterogeneous in the digital age.
References
Frahm, Laura (2010), “Liquid Cosmos. Movement and Mediality in Music Video”, in Rewind. Play. Fast Forward. The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 155-178.
Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde (2017), Music Video After MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music. London & New York: Routledge.
Lexmann, Juraj (2008), Audiovisual Media and Music Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Shaviro, Steven (2017), Digital Music Videos. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Vernallis, Carol (2004), Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press.
Willis, Holly (2005), New Digital Cinema. London & New York: Wallflower.
Bio
Mathias Bonde Korsgaard is assistant professor of film and media at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of Music Video After MTV (Routledge, 2017) and has published widely on music video, film, and audiovisual studies. He is editor in chief of the Danish online film journal 16:9.
IIPC debate: Tuesday 8.12., 16:15
Female Metal Vocal Expression. Jinjer: Progressive Metal and Alternative Femininity
Lori Burns, University of Ottawa
Lori Burns is Professor and Director of the School of Music at the University of Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary research (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada) merges cultural theory and musical analysis to explore representations of gender in the lyrical, musical and visual texts of popular music. She has published articles in edited collections published by Ashgate, Bloomsbury, Cambridge, Garland, Oxford, Routledge, and the University of Michigan Press, as well as in leading journals (Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, The Journal for Music, Sound, and Moving Image, Studies in Music, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online and The Journal for Music Theory). Her book on popular music, Disruptive Divas: Critical and Analytical Essays on Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music (Routledge Press, 2002) won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2005). She was a founding co-editor of the Tracking Pop Series of the University of Michigan Press and is now serving as co-editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series. She is also Associate Editor of the journal Music Theory Spectrum.
Abstract:
In the context of female performance in heavy metal bands—globally at the level of 3% (Berkers & Schaap 2018, 103-104)—my recent work examines the contributions of female vocalists to the metal subgenres. Using case studies, I realize two research objectives: 1) to analyze multimodal performance expression of female vocalists in metal music; and 2) to complicate the conventional understanding of extreme gender subjectivities (hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity) in metal subgenres. Heavy metal scholarship affirms the genre to be dominated by male performers (Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000) and points to the preponderance of patriarchal values and hypermasculinity, with the performance content contributing to an aesthetic production of misogyny, power, and intensity (Barron 2007; Kummer 2016; Overell 2013, 2014; Rafalovich 2006; Walser 1993; Weinstein 1991, 2009). The notion of heavy metal as a hegemonic discourse exhibiting “fantasies of masculine virtuosity and control” (Walser 1993, 108-109) has been queried by recent scholars who reveal metal to support a range of gendered and sexualized subjectivities (Clifford-Napoleone 2015; Kahn-Harris 2007). I examine how extreme vocalists navigate the hypermasculine discourse of death metal to express an alternative gendered subjectivity. Recognizing the dearth of music analysis for extreme vocal expression (Smialek 2015), and a recent appeal for scholars to “ground a constructed perspective of masculinity from examples in heavy metal itself” (Scott 2016, 122), this study analyzes the work of a female extreme metal vocalist within the subgenre of progressive metal. I adopt a rigorous analytic model for words, music, and images and illustrate how the expressive strategies of Tatiana Shmailyuk (of the band Jinjer) challenges the hegemonic norms of metal.
IIPC 