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Quick Takes — Sounding Empathy in Aronofsky’s Mother!
By Brooke McCorkleThe season of fall horror movies is upon us; It reigns the box office and a slew of Halloween slashers will soon follow, but it is Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! that is generating the...
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Quick Takes — Mother! as Impulse-Image: Sound, and the Steepest Slope
By Jim BuhlerDarren Aronofsky’s Mother! is an exceptionally bleak film. It offers an ambitious and disturbing allegory of creativity and, evidently, “climate change and humanity’s role in environmental...
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Adventures in “Survey Adjacent” Music History Courses
By John SpilkerAt the 2017 Teaching Music History Conference, colleagues discussed two potential trends in teaching music history courses: a content-oriented music history survey approach and a...
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Building a Better Band-Aid
By Gwynne BrownTo teach any survey course is to resign oneself to a series of regrettable omissions, generalizations, and compromises. I was keenly aware of this fact a few years ago when I prepared to...
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Dissertation Digest: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera
By Nicholas StevensIn September 2017, I pasted a link to an interview into an email, and sent it to my former doctoral advisor with the subject line “!!!!!!!!” In the interview, the film director...
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Holding Don Giovanni Accountable
By Kristi Brown-Montesano “Now am I allowed to say rapist.” — Rose McGowan tweet, 10 Oct. 2017“No one took Rose McGowan’s claims seriously. Now everyone is listening.”— Headline in the Los Angeles...
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Quick Takes on Twin Peaks
Musicology Now is delighted to offer a series of Quick Takes on music and sound in the reboot of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Featuring posts by Brooke McCorkle, Katherine Reed, Frank Lehman, and Reba...
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There’s Always Music in the Air: Sound Design in Twin Peaks: The Return
By Brooke McCorkleDavid Lynch has always walked the fine line between painter and cinema director, and I believe we can attribute another title to his name: sound artist. Lynch, who has recorded two...
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“Just You and I”: Performance, Nostalgia, and Narrative Space in The Return
By Katherine M. ReedPart 13 of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return approached its close, as had become expected, with a performance at the Roadhouse. As the opening guitar riff began,...
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Optigan Allusions: Sonic Dislocation in The Return
By Frank LehmanAs an ardent fan of Lynch's oeuvre, I have trained myself to relax my critical faculties when watching his films. I prefer to simply surrender to the fantasy, to let the work act on me...
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Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and the Trinity...
By Reba WissnerWhen Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return aired on Showtime in June 2017, fans and critics alike referred to it as revolutionary. The centerpiece of the episode was an extended scene of the...
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‘Tis the Season to be Melancholy: Sia’s Everyday Christmas
Justin aDams BurtonCritics haven’t really loved Sia’s album of Christmas originals, Everyday is Christmas. For that matter, neither have listeners, as Everyday’s metacritic score is lagging...
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Putting it Together: The Anatomy of a Solo YouTube Cover
By William O’Hara(Source: screen grab from https://vimeo.com/88165960)Flanked by two wrought iron lamps, a young woman sits in the center of the frame. To her right, a large glass holding two fingers...
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Sacred Traditions, Gender, and the Choir that Ate Hot Chili Peppers
By Jacob SagransOn December 13, 2017, Danish entertainer Claus Pilgaard (stage name: Chili Klaus) released a YouTube video he made with the Herning Boys Choir, the main church choir in Herning,...
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Quick Take — Mexico’s epoca de oro and Music in Pixar’s Coco
Día de muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Mexican holiday that celebrates the memory of the dead, taking place the evening of October 31 and ending November 2. During this period, people remember their...
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Quick Take — “I am not like the rest of my family”: Miguel Rivera as...
By Matthew J. Jones and Martín Vega OlmedoIs Miguel Musical?Philip Brett once winkingly asked “Are you musical?” noting the historical slippage between musical and gay identities which “exist in an...
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Quick Take —The Future of the Souls is the Present: Sounds and Cultural Memory
By Guadalupe Caro CocotleI resisted as long as I could before going to see Coco (Pixar, 2017). Since my son was born we have watched every children’s film that has come out and some of them, I must...
View ArticleTranslation and the Musicologist: A Case Study in Four Parts
The place of linguistic translation in the musicological enterprise is a topic that attracted a great deal of attention among members of the American Musicological Society this past fall, in response...
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An Introduction to Fernando Ortiz on Music
By Robin MooreIn conjunction with David Font-Navarrete, David Garcia, Susan Thomas, and others, I have recently been involved in the translation of selected writings by Fernando Ortiz. The resulting...
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The Directionality of Time and Sound in the Work of Fernando Ortiz
By David GarciaWhen I began the work of translating Fernando Ortiz’s essays on the instruments of the Cuban Congo and Arará, I had been thinking a lot about the nature of time as it factored into the...
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