Accented

This past weekend was the super bowl (American football, for my South African readers), and while the very exciting win by the New York Giants made for pretty good viewing anyway, NYChoirgirl explained that she usually only watches this for the ads. Seems the super bowl is the big night for ad agencies here. I only saw the second half of the game, and must admit that I found the game (which I only partially understand) more entertaining than the ads. I was, however, fascinated to read in today's New York Times that one ad featuring pandas talking in Asian accents and broken English, was withdrawn.


I remembered seeing this ad, and not paying much attention to it at the time. It is long, and rather boring. The flood of objections on the New York Times site, however, are much more interesting. Notice, in particular,
no. 8 "Once one puts an "ethnic" accent on an animated character, one raises the spectre of stereotyping and beyond. Ever watched "Finding Nemo"? I got the same queasy feeling - why does this fish talk like, in my opinion, an inner city "African American"?"
no. 13 "I was offended by the ad using Cavemen. I have many Cavemen friends myself, and I find them very intelligent, well-spoken people. Hey, they invented the wheel. Sure they can be a little bit on the hairy side, and they don't take advantage of the dental plan offered at work, but media's constant protrayal of these men as perpetual abusive grunters goes way over the line. I'm surprised Neanderthal-Americans have not spoken up on this issue."
no. 14 "I thought sales genie made a nod to acknowledging the real world when they made a fellow named Chakrabarty the successful salesman in the ad. He did have a south Asian accent, but a real one rather than a caricature."
no. 15 "Had they given the Pandas accents that were non-stereotypical, say British, or California Valley Girl dialects, the commercial would have been more memorable, funnier, and offended far fewer people."

So it's good to represent diversity in ads, so long as everyone sounds alike? British or California Valley Girl accents are less offensive than Chinese or African American? Nemo sounds African American?

I admit I can see how these things could be offensive. The broken English is not good. But sometimes I miss South African senses of humour.




on the other hand, SA banned this priceless gem

Oops!

What a crazy mistake to make! The posters for Bafana Bafana (South Africa's Soccer team) at the Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana show a player who was not selected for the squad, and the old South African Flag! Thanks mom and dad for forwarding the News 24 article to me.

More exam readings

Below is list number 2 for my comps. This one focuses on issues of voice and race. There is a huge amount of material on race and music, but in the interests of producing a list I can actually get through by April 11, I am focusing explicitly on singing voices. The anomaly, then, occurs at the final two entries on the list, which deal with speaking voices, but in such a literalist, hard-science way, that I couldn't resist adding them. I did a vaguely tongue-in-cheek experiment with my students last semester, playing them the same piece of music sung by a counter tenor, a female soprano, a treble and a digitally constructed combination voice, and asking them to guess which was which. I once joked that a similar experiment with singers of various races would be interesting. And now I find someone has done it! And written a PhD thesis on it!!

And just because I think it is worth saying, the article by Grant Olwage called "The Class and Colour of Tone" is, in my opinion, the strongest writing on this topic available at present. Well worth a read.

Racialized voices bibliography

Antelyes, Peter. “Red Hot Mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker and the Ethnic Maternal Voice in American Popular Song.” In Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, 212–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Averill, Gage. Four Parts No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hardy, Sarah Madsen, and Kelly Thomas. “Listening to Race: Voice, Mixing, and Technological ‘Miscegenation’ in Early Sound Film.” In ClassicHollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi, 415–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Lavitt, Pamela Brown. “First of the Red Hot Mamas: ‘Coon Shouting’ and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl.” American Jewish History 87/4 (December 1999): 253–90.

Leonard, Neil. Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form. London: Jazz Book Club, 1964.

Lhamon, W. T. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip-Hop. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia” in Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 1 January 2008 pp. 73_100

Olwage, Grant. 2002. “Scriptions of the choral : the historiography of black South African choralism” in SAMUS: The South African Journal of Musicology Vol. 22, pp. 29-45.

___. 2004a. Music and (post)colonialism : the dialectics of choral culture on a South African frontier. PhD Thesis, Rhodes University. Grahamstown: South Africa.

___. 2004b. “The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre” in Ethnomusicology Forum Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 203-226.

Michael Rogin. 2002. “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 3. (Spring, 1992), pp. 417-453. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0093-1896%28199221%2918%3A3%3C417%3ABWNTJJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

Rubio, Phil. “Crossover Dreams: The ‘Exceptional White’ in Popular Culture.” In Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, 148–61. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Stras, Laurie. 2007. “White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters” in Journal of the Society for American Music Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 207–255

Walton, Julie H. 1992. Speaker race identification from acoustic cues in the vocal signal. Ph. D. Thesis, Memphis State University.

Walton, Julie H. and Robert F. Orlikoff. 1994. “Speaker Race Identification From Acoustic Cues in the Vocal Signal” in Journal of Speech and Hearing Research Vol.37 738-745 August 1994.

Resources

It's kind of disconcerting to look out the window at the vividly lit empire state building, to see the glow from Times Square, and the sprinkling of sparkling lights all over this city, after reading in the Mail and Guardian and the New York Times about the power shortages, and very regular (in some places, two hours twice daily) power failures in South Africa. I just don't know what to say....

Reasons to be happy

The flowers are from NYChoirgirl! :-)

new semester

The new semester has started, and we hit the ground running. My teaching this semester is very different, as I'm TAing for a course on Bach, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Wagner's Ring Des Niebelungen. It's been ages since I've done any reading in any of these areas, but one of the set books is Edward Said's Orientalism, which I have read several times, and I know all of the set music really well. I wrote a huge project at the end of Matric on the Ring, and while I didn't really expect to use it again, I guess you never can tell what's going to happen.
I'm also taking superstar Suzanne Cusick's music and gender course this semester. It's a course this department is most famous for, and I'm really excited about it. The workload is pretty intense, but I have a reduced course load this semester to assist me with exam prep, so I think this is probably the best time of all to be doing this.
I'm also in the middle of submitting a whole series of applications for summer funding and summer work. It is a bit of a challenge, as there aren't many options open to international students, but I'm stretching my options a bit, and putting a lot of emphasis on my choral experience. One of the possibilities I'm most excited about will involve training childrens' choir all summer. I would so love to do that! The summer is a challenge for all students, and a lot of people warned me about the particular challenges of international grad student summers. But I'm sure I'll be able to make something work. Worst case scenario, I spend the summer waiting tables in Johannesburg, and saving money for the new year. Let's hope it doesn't come to that!

Comps lists

My comprehensive exams are on the weekend of the 11th of April. Of course I'm feeling a little nervous, but I'm also relishing the opportunity to do some of the reading I usually do for myself, as part of my work. Over the next little while, I plan to post my reading lists and some of my notes to this blog (it was intended for work, originally, after all).
So here is list 1:
The topic is "Afrikaans Music", and I am adding items as I access them (NYU interlibrary loan is working overtime, but wonderfully efficiently). But here, for now, is the start. Any other suggestions are much appreciated.

Bezuidenhout, Andries. 2007. “From Voëlvry to De La Rey: Popular music, Afrikaner Nationalism and lost irony” on LitNet http://www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id=11123&cause_id=1270 28 February 2007. Accessed 14 January 2008.

Bosman, Martjie. 2004. “Die FAK Fenomeen: Populêre Afrikaanse Musiek en Volksliedjies” in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Vol. 41, No. 2. (2004), pp. 21-46.

Byerly, Ingrid Bianca. 1996. The Music Indaba: Music as Mirror, Mediator and Prophet in the South African Transition From Apartheid to Democracy. PhD Dissertation, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University.

Currin, Brian and Stephen Segerman (eds). 1996-2007. South African Rock Encyclopedia. http://www.rock.co.za/. Accessed 14 January 2008.

Grobbelaar, Pieter W. 1999. Kommandeer! Kommandeer!: Volksang uit die Anglo-Boereoorlog. Pretoria: J. P. van der Walt.

Grundlingh, Albert. 2004. “"Rocking the Boat" in South Africa? Voëlvry Music and Afrikaans Anti-Apartheid Social Protest in the 1980s” in The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3. (2004), pp. 483-514.

Hamm, Charles. 1985. “Rock 'n' Roll in a Very Strange Society” in Popular Music, Vol. 5, Continuity and Change, pp. 159-174.

Hopkins, Pat. 2006. Voelvry: The Movement That Rocked South Africa.

Jury, Brendan. 1996. “Boys to Men: Afrikaans Alternative Popular Music 1986-1990” in African Languages and Cultures, Vol. 9, No. 2, Gender and Popular Culture, pp. 99-109.

Ludemann, Winfried. 2003. “Uit Die Diepte Van Ons See: An Archetypal Interpretation of Selected Examples of Afrikaans Popular Music” in South African Journal of Musicology/Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Musiekwetenskap, Vol. 23, pp. 13-41