music

music

Early American protest music

Early American protest music

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What’s a protest song? According to musicologist David King Dunaway, a protest song functions more as a mode for a message, rather than a distinct art form itself.  “It is not popular music… it is not per se folk music…the field of political music includes everything from an electoral song of the 1730s to a punk-rock protest of the 1980s,” he observed in 1987. That means there are a lot of different songs that qualify as protest songs, and we’ll take a brief look at some of the very earliest American protest songs ever written. Yankee Doodle Written around 1755 by a British doctor, Richard Schuckburgh, “Yankee Doodle” has a rather interesting and perhaps unintentionally hilarious history. Although an author … Continued
A Pride Worthy Archives Update

A Pride Worthy Archives Update

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IU East LGBTQ+ Archive Just in time for Pride Month, we added several new items to the IU East LGBTQ+ Collection. Current Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, Dr. Nathan Froebe, recently premiered his new song cycle titled “In Paths Untrodden” on Facebook Live. This song cycle consists of ten poems by Walt Whitman and depicts the navigation of an LGBTQ+ relationship in the messy aftermath of romantic separation. Dr. Froebe composed this music over the last eight years, pulling from his own personal experience, and wrote the voice parts for two ungendered voices. The IU East Archives now has the performance, the performance program, the musical score, and Dr. Froebe’s interview on how and why he created this song cycle … Continued
Celebrating Pride and African American Music Appreciation Month

Celebrating Pride and African American Music Appreciation Month

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June celebrations are myriad and interesting, with lots of opportunities for discovery and learning.  This month, we celebrate both African American Music Appreciation Month and LGBTQ Pride Month.  African American LGBTQ musicians have contributed some of the most recognizable songs in American history, as well as serving as examples of successful artists who in many cases lived their truths openly.  Here, we profile a handful of artists spanning over 100 years of recorded music. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey Ma Rainey was born in 1886 with the full name of Gertrude Melissa Nix Pridgett, likely in Columbus, Georgia.  Her potent version of the blues was confrontational and influential, and she worked with some of the most famous artists of her (and any … Continued
New Digitized Collections and Archival Highlights

New Digitized Collections and Archival Highlights

, , , , Library Resources, Website
The Athletics Collection, The Joe Longstreth Radio Show, and the story of the Transgender Singing Voice Conference The IU East Campus Library has two very different, but incredibly interesting collections to highlights. One is new and one is rediscovered, and we also have a new oral history in the LGBTQ+ collection. All these audiovisual collections are accessible in Media Collections Online (MCO). You will need to log in with your IU account to listen to these. The Athletics Collection The Athletics Collection is a brand-new digitized collection thanks to IU’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI). This collection comes from the IU East Athletics Department and contained 126 DVDs of men’s (2006-2017) and women’s (2014-2016) basketball games, women’s volleyball games … Continued
American protest music: a brief history

American protest music: a brief history

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While Americans have always performed music, serious study of American musical forms only begins in the 20th century.  John Lomax, beginning as a graduate student at Harvard, was among the very first to take interest in traditional American music, and he began his work with “cowboy” songs, which detailed the lives of what he felt were “authentic” Americans and their experiences.  Although his viewpoint could comfortably be considered naïve today, his work, along with that of anthropologist Franz Boaz and, slightly later, poet Carl Sandburg, became the foundation for American folk music studies.  It is from folk music that the protest music movement stems.  The very first protest singer/songwriter was a Swedish immigrant, born Joel Hagglund in 1879.  After his … Continued