Monthly Archives: November 2016

After watching the Pussy Riot music videos, I found myself intrigued by the differing visual tactics they utilized for their political message(s). In the Gessen reading, we saw how visibility was of key concern to the members of Pussy Riot. … Continue reading →

In the chapters from Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot that we have read for class on Wednesday, Masha Gessen descriptively outlines the genesis of Pussy Riot, and their practices, group dynamic, and concerns leading up to the ultimate incarceration. I’m … Continue reading →

Vasiliki’s post on the reading is really interesting and more or less covers what I wanted to say, albeit in a more eloquent manner. To contribute further, I’d like to consider how the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir fits into … Continue reading →

In Buchanan’s chapter “Transits” from Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition, she describes the attempts by the transitional BSP government to create an illusion of national and ethnic homogeneity by co-opting the 1878 Liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman … Continue reading →

In the chapter we read from Donna A. Buchanan’s book Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition, Buchanan shows how “the [Bulgarian, BSP] government legitimized its new perspectives by nestling them in a slippery quilt of peasant tradition and socialist … Continue reading →

Listening to the track “I Know What I Know,” I was struck by the positioning of the Zulu and English vocals. This was the first track on the album that credited collaborating South African artists; in fact, the song itself … Continue reading →

A question that consistently popped into my head while reading the Meintjes article was whether or not visibility trumped authenticity. There were multiple answers given within the article, but the one that stood out most prominently was on pages 55-56: … Continue reading →

In her article “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning,” ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes invites her readers to consider how Graceland’s meaning and political stakes shift from individual to individual, depending on their positionality in relation to the context of … Continue reading →

In her article “Solidarity, Song, and the Sound Document,” Andrea F. Bohlman expands upon notions of musical textuality we have previously encountered by positioning the concept of “sound document” as a crucial and explicit aspect of their methodology, their overarching argument, and … Continue reading →

In the selected passages we read in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Alexei Yurchak articulates the ways in which Soviet society and culture developed with, and because of, sound technologies, how these sound technologies … Continue reading →