Author Archives: vioannou

Hi all, here is some of the music I’m working with for my final paper on the semiotics of the intersection of whiteness and women in CE’s live performance at Berserktown III this past summer. As this project is largely … 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 →

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 →

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 →

In “Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945-1953,” Mark Edele describes the alternative masculinity articulated and embodied by the image-conscious, musically engaged, and socioeconomically well-placed stiliagi of the immediate post-war period as a … Continue reading →

The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party write, in their scathing resolution on Muradeli’s “Great Friendship,” that the opera is not only “vicious” but further, “inartistic” in both its “music and subject matter,” (Sovetskaia muzyka, No. 1 (1948), pp. 3-8.) … Continue reading →

Stylistic distinction in music, and its political role, is a central theme in the material of all four texts we read for Wednesday. Bodek says that “Social Democratic cultural theorists…took pains to differentiate between what they believed was class-conscious proletarian … Continue reading →