Panel discussion: Music and Myth in Las Vegas On November 17, the Shaw Center hosts authors featured in the upcoming book titled The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (University of Illinois Press). This collection of essays examines how music-making and soundscapes shape our city. Treating topics ranging from Cher to Cirque du Soleil, the contributors delve into how music and musicians factored in the early development of Vegas’s image; the role of local communities of musicians and Strip mainstays in sustaining tensions between belief and disbelief; the ways aging showroom stars provide a sense of timelessness that inoculates visitors against the outside world; the link connecting fantasies of sexual prowess and democracy with the musical values of Liberace and others; and the echoes and energy generated by the idea of Las Vegas as it travels across the country.
November 17, 2023 5:00 p.m. Harmon Auxiliary Building, UNLV, Room 110 1325 E. Harmon Avenue Las Vegas, NV 89119 Free and open to the public. Parking free in front of H.A.B.
The Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center at UNLV is excited to announce our 2022–2023 lecture series. This season, we are joined by four well-known scholars and musical practitioners from around the United States. They will share with us their research on jazz, blues, film music, and Japanese popular music. Their work draws broadly on multiple disciplines, including African American Studies, Asian Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and more.
All lectures take place on Wednesdays at 5:30 in the Alta Ham Fine Arts Building (HFA), room 147. They are free and open to the public.
Our first event is on October 12, 2022. We will be joined by Damani Phillips, Director of Jazz Studies at the University of Iowa, who will give a talk titled “Lost Soul: Issues in Teaching Ethnically Derived Arts in Academia.” Exploring the topic of what has happened as a result of the academic embrace of jazz within schools of departments of music, his lecture will engage questions of race, appropriation, cultural transformation, and cultural displacement.
Our subsequent events will be held on October 26, February 1, and March 1. Visit https://asc.unlv.edu/ for further details.
We proudly announce the publication of an archive prepared by Bill Spilka between the 1970s and the 1990s of recorded jazz interviews, masterclasses, and performances. This archive contains one-of-a-kind items related to over ninety jazz artists, including Benny Goodman, Harry Goodman, Stan Kenton, Lester Young and many others. Mr. Spilka was often backstage at venues such as Rockefeller Center or New York’s Roseland Ballroom, catching conversations with musicians when they took breaks during their live sets.
Interviews are streamable from our website, while performances and masterclasses can be listened to by patron request.
The Arnold Shaw Popular Music Center presents a lecture by Robert Fink, musicologist at the Herb Alpert School of Music, UCLA. The event is free and open to the public.
Abstract: The phrase “playlist culture” conjures up a musical world dominated by algorithms, one whose rise spells the death of the record album and the ecosystem of creativity it once enabled. But playlist culture, balanced between opposing aesthetics of mashup and flow, encourages us to explore new structures of feeling rooted in second-order music making. While genre-busting collages of heterogenous elements — mashups — get a lot of attention, it is equally suggestive to investigate the pragmatics of flow. What techniques are available for organizing a playlist of pre-existing musical elements so that they flow seamlessly into each other, creating a single, overwhelming experience? How can radically heterogenous elements be mixed into a homogenous flow?In electronic dance music, the DJ set is an exceptionally sophisticated form of playlist culture dominated by a rigorous art of transition, developed by pioneering dance DJs like Paul Oakenfold. A close reading of Oakenfold’s 1994 “Goa” Mix — still the single most requested DJ set ever broadcast by the BBC — discloses (1) elaborate preparation and execution of key transitional moments and (2) their marshaling into a single large-scale structure of dramatic yet orderly flow.
Bio:
Robert Fink is a past chair of the UCLA Musicology department, and currently Chair of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Minor in the Music Industry. He also currently serves as President of the US Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US). His research focus is on music and culture after 1950, with special interests in the history and analysis of African-American popular music and the politics of contemporary art music.
His book, Repeating Ourselves, a study of American minimal music as a cultural practice, appeared in 2005 from the University of California. More recent published work appears in The Journal of the American Musicological Society (an essay on analyzing Motown’s rhythms, which was honored by the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory), The Oxford Handbook of Opera, and Cambridge Opera Journal.
Before coming to UCLA, Fink taught at the Eastman School of Music (1992-1997), and has been a visiting professor at Yale University (2006) and a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (1998-99). His ongoing projects include Declassified, a study of art music, urban space, and politics; and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone, an edited collection of essays on “sound” in popular music.
Fink’s UCLA lecture course on “The History and Practice of Electronic Dance Music” was the first of its kind at a major university; it was named the “Best College Pop Music Class” of 2002 by Spin Magazine. He also teaches on Motown and Soul, the History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and on pop music and politics in UCLA’s long-running interdisciplinary Freshman Cluster on America in the 1960s. His dissertation advisees have won tenure-track positions at the University of Texas at Austin, UC Irvine, University of Richmond, and the Southern Methodist University, among others.
Fink has been a frequent public speaker on contemporary art music in Los Angeles, presenting lectures at Disney Hall, the Getty Center, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He has presented numerous “On the Road” programs for Bruin alumni, and has been a featured speaker on popular music during UCLA’s on-campus Parent’s Weekend. He comments on contemporary trends at the American Musicological Society’s “Musicology Now” blog. More information and unpublished work.
The Arnold Shaw Popular Music Center presents a lecture by Chris Washburne, Professor of Music at Columbia University. The event is free and open to the public.
Abstract: Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. The talk will focus on Professor Washburne’s recently published book Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz (Oxford University Press 2020) which corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre’s international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
Bio: Chris Washburne is Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Columbia University and the Founder of Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program. Chris Washburne has published numerous articles on jazz, Latin jazz, and salsa. His books include Bad Music: the Music We Love to Hate (Routledge, 2004), Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York (Temple University Press, 2008), and Latin Jazz: the Other Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2020). As a trombonist has performed on over 150 recordings, two Grammy winners and seven Grammy nominated. He has been hailed as “One of the best trombonists in New York…” by Peter Watrous of The New York Times and “one of the most important trombonists performing today” by Brad Walseth of www.jazzchicago.net. He was voted as “Rising Star of the Trombone” numerous times in the annual Downbeat Critics Poll. He has performed with Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ruben Blades, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Justin Timberlake, Marc Anthony, Björk, They Might Be Giants, Roscoe Mitchell, Grady Tate, Jaki Byard, and Duke Ellington Orchestra. He is the leader of the highly acclaimed SYOTOS Latin jazz band, FFEAR, and the Rags and Roots jazz band.
The Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center is proud to announce its spring 2022 lectures — back in person on the UNLV campus! The Shaw Center’s mission is to preserve items related to popular music studies and to serve as a platform for current research about popular music. Our lecture series fulfills this second goal, welcoming popular music scholars from outside of UNLV to share their work and perspectives. All events are free and open to the public. Please join us!
Shaw Center director Jonathan Rhodes Lee has published an article in the latest issue of the international Journal of Musicology. Lee’s contribution, “Texts, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Easy Rider and the Compilation Soundtrack,” is the first musicological article to take the famous 1968 film as its primary focus. Lee draws on filmmaker commentary, critical writing about Easy Rider, as well as scholarship from popular culture studies, film studies, literary theory, and musicology to support his own interpretive readings of this film’s interactions of image, music, and narrative. Lee also sketches out a general theory of inter- and intratextuality that might be applied to other films with popular compilation soundtracks, pointing out possible directions for further research.
We are deeply grateful to Dr. Jason E. Roberts for joining the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Center – UNLV director Jonathan Rhodes Lee and an enthusiastic group of graduate students for a virtual seminar tonight. Dr. Roberts was supposed to be lecturing at UNLV in person, until COVID-19 complicated matters. Undeterred, he gathered with us for an invigorating discussion about Contemporary Christian Music, in a session titled “A Blemished Offering: Popular Music as ‘The Unclean’ in Evangelical ‘Worship War’ Polemics.”Dr. Roberts is a lecturer at UT Austin, with a joint appointment in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies.Thanks to Dr. Roberts, and to all involved!
COVID-19 might have stopped the Shaw Center from welcoming Professor Robin James (http://www.its-her-factory.com/) on campus, but that doesn’t stop us from learning from her! Since we can’t host our on-campus lecture, we encourage you to attend Professor James’s online lecture, hosted by Music Scholarship at a Distance, on April 8 at 7:00 p.m. It’s free and open to anyone to tune in using the Zoom video conferencing application.
Title: ” ‘You Need To Calm Down!’: The political economy of ‘chill’ in contemporary popular music”
Jonathan Rhodes Lee (Shaw Center, Director, and musicologist) has just published a book, Film Music in the Sound Era, with the Routledge publishing firm.
The book offers a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on music in sound film (1927–2017). Thematically organized sections cover historical studies, studies of musicians and filmmakers, genre studies, theory and aesthetics, and other key aspects of film music studies. Broad coverage of works from around the globe, paired with robust indexes and thorough cross-referencing, make this research guide an invaluable tool for all scholars and students investigating the intersection of music and film.
This guide is published in two volumes:
Volume 1: Histories, Theories, and Genres covers overviews, historical surveys, theory and criticism, studies of film genres, and case studies of individual films.
Volume 2: People, Cultures, and Contexts covers individual people, social and cultural studies, studies of musical genre, pedagogy, and the industry.
A complete index is included in each volume.
Image generated by GPL Ghostscript (device=pnmraw)
