Journal of the Society for American Music 

About: Journal of the Society for American Music is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Musical & Jazz. It has an ISSN identifier of 1752-1963. Over the lifetime, 539 publications have been published receiving 2309 citations. The journal is also known as: Society for American Music. Journal.

“You are in a place that is out of the world. . .”: Music in the Detention Camps of the “Global War on Terror”

Abstract: Based on first-person accounts of interrogators and former detainees as well as unclassified military documents, this article outlines the variety of ways that “loud music” has been used in the detention camps of the United States‘ “global war on terror.” A survey of practices at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan; Camp Nama (Baghdad), Iraq; Forward Operating Base Tiger (Al-Qaim), Iraq; Mosul Air Force Base, Iraq; Guantanamo, Cuba; Camp Cropper (Baghdad), Iraq; and at the “dark prisons” from 2002 to 2006 reveals that the use of “loud music” was a standard, openly acknowledged component of “harsh interrogation.” Such music was understood to be one medium of the approach known as “futility” in both the 1992 and the 2006 editions of the US Army's field manual for interrogation. The purpose of such “futility” techniques as “loud music” and “gender coercion” is to persuade a detainee that resistance to interrogation is futile, yet the military establishment itself teaches techniques by which “the music program” can be resisted. The article concludes with the first-person account of a young US citizen, working in Baghdad as a contractor, who endured military detention and “the music program” for ninety-seven days in mid-2006—a man who knew how to resist.

Music as a Technology of Surveillance

Abstract: This article explores surveillance in cloud-based music streaming. Key catalysts in the transition from ownership- to access-based models of music distribution, services like Spotify, Pandora, or Deezer have positioned themselves as a means of reintegrating listeners into “digital enclosures” over which rights holders exercise greater control. Yet streaming's promise of remonetizing musical commodities demonetized by filesharing has been called into doubt by difficulties in converting users of advertising-based “freemium” services into paying subscribers. In need of alternative means of extracting value from users, streaming platforms have increasingly refashioned themselves as enterprises whose business extends beyond music-related services to encompass the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. In pursuing this strategy, streaming platforms place themselves in direct competition with other new media companies trading in user data. In order to distinguish themselves from such competitors, streaming platforms cast music as a particularly valuable source of data, offering privileged access to listeners’ innermost selves. But they also cast music as an ideal tracking device, accompanying individuals across a variety of social, physical and geographical spaces. In this way, the very attributes that make music so powerful a “technology of the self” facilitate its transformation into an equally powerful technology of surveillance.

Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band , and Virtual Virtuosity

Abstract: This article addresses Guitar Hero and Rock Band gameplay as a developing form of collaborative, participatory rock music performance. Drawing on ethnomusicology, performance studies,popularmusicstudies,genderandsexualitystudies,andinterdisciplinarydigitalmedia scholarship, I investigate the games’ models of rock heroism, media debates about their impact, and players’ ideas about genuine musicality, rock authenticity, and gendered performance conventions. Grounded in ethnographic research—including interviews, a Web-based qualitative survey, and media reception analysis—this article enhances our understanding of performance at the intersection of the “virtual” and the “real,” while also documenting the changing nature of amateur musicianship in an increasingly technologically mediated world. A video camera pans over the wheels and body of a red motorcycle and comes to rest on its rider, who introduces himself as he dismounts: “What’s up, Internet? My name’s Freddie.” As a deferential roadie helps remove his black leather jacket, Freddie Wong proclaims his intention “to come and rock you with ‘YYZ.’ ” He explains the heavy chains he wears around his neck: “The reason I have them on is that my solos are so blisteringly fast that if I didn’t keep them tied down somehow, I might impregnate women.” Another assistant hangs a miniature electric guitar around Freddie’s neck, and he turns to a TV topped with liquor bottles to begin a virtuosic rendition of Rush’s “YYZ.” Guitar Hero II’s on-screen streaming notation is superimposed over close-up views of his performance. Every hammer-on and pull-off has its exaggerated flourish; Freddie plays some passages with the guitar held behind his head, turns away from the screen to demonstrate his mastery of the material, and often lifts the guitar neck into rock-god phallic position. At the end of the song, he smashes his instrument into pieces. This YouTube video has been viewed over six million times and has inspired over 37,000 comments since it was posted in October 2006. 1 Freddie Wong is a film student at the University of Southern California; he took first place in the 2007 World Series of Video Games Guitar Hero II competition.

“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”: Music Criticism in Manhattan and the Case of Cage (1943–58)

Abstract: This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at the New York Herald Tribune, with that of music journalists based at the New York Times and other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from the Tribune in 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.