A bagpipe is an aerophone instrument with one or more sounding pipes, each with a single or double reed. The pipes are made to sound by air from a wind container in the form of a bag, which is pressurized ..read more

Amidst a summer break flying by all too quickly, RILM presents another installment of its Instant Classics series—posts comprising annotated bibliographies of books, indexed in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, that have received the most reviews in academic literature across a given time span. The content of these books exemplifies RILM’s commitment to disseminating publications that are truly international in scope, with coverage that embraces a diversity of languages, nations, subject matter, and approaches to music research. This 2022—23 list contains a little something for everyon ..read more

The library of the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) in Paris is home to an extensive collection of writings on music from the Arab world, a region stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Indian Ocean. This series of blog posts highlights selections from this collection, along with abstracts written by RILM staff members contained in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, the comprehensive bibliography of writings about music. In 2023, the Institut du Monde Arabe hosted the exhibition “Ce Que la Palestine Apporte au Monde” and supplemented it with a resources page on the topic. Th ..read more

Immediately after World War II, taarab orchestras and music clubs proliferated in coastal Kenya and Tanganyika, and on Zanzibar. They were formed by Waswahili, residents of the region who spoke the Kiswahili (Swahili) language. Through taarab music clubs, the Swahili people developed and paid homage to their language and traditions, providing the cultural basis from which political nationalism might operate. The Swahili word mpasho is related to the verb -pasha, “to cause to get”, and it refers to someone “getting the message”. In the popular genre taarab, mpasho  ..read more

The U.S. guitarist Duane Eddy, known as the “King of Twang”, helped popularize the electric guitar in the late 1950s and was the most commercially successful instrumental musician in rock ‘n’ roll. His first hit was Rebel rouser (1958), for which he received a Gold record award. His greatest successes were Peter Gunn (1958, composed by Henry Mancini and awarded a Grammy) and Because they’re young (1960), which also went Gold. He received his third Gold record in 1962 for (Dance with the) Guitar man. Eddy became known for the twang sound: a sharp, slightly reverberant overtone and vibrato-ric ..read more

Music teachers are generally exposed to work-related stressors sufficient to negatively impact their mental health, and both the COVID-19 pandemic and culture wars have amplified the likelihood of teacher-targeted bullying and harassment. LGBTQ+ teachers, however, have been historically more likely to experience workplace discrimination, and many are even more at risk since the advent of the third wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States. For instance, 588 antitransgender laws were introduced across the United States, 85 of which passed in 2023. Given the absence of a body of LGBT ..read more

By the 18th century, the port city of Nantes had become an important transfer point in the Atlantic triangular trade, as ships carrying African slaves docked in the port, one of the first instances where this was allowed in France. The city’s strategic location was evident again during the French Revolution, when Nantes served a base in the battle against Vendée and royalist armies in 1793 Battle of Nantes. Like other French port cities, Nantes industrialized rapidly during the 19th century and specialized in the textile and food trade. The new economy contributed to the modernization of the ..read more

The “Sultan of Lingga’s brass band”, as it was dubbed by the Singapore press, or korps musik as it was known locally, was a European-style military band located in the former Netherlands East Indies, owned and operated by the Sultan of Riau-Lingga, not by the colonial Dutch regime. Formed in the 1820s, the band was particularly prominent from the installation of the last sultan, Abdulrahman Mu’azamsyah, in 1885 until he was deposed in 1911. Despite this history, there is no surviving tradition of military band music practiced in the band’s former home on Penyengat Island and few discernible t ..read more

Painting by Linda Ruiz-Lozito Queen Liliʻuokalani was born into an extraordinarily musical family and was probably the most musically gifted of her class and time. She became Queen of Hawai’i in 1891 and reigned for two years, until she was deposed by the U.S. settlers under Sanford B. Dole, a Hawaii-born lawyer and judge who advocated for the Westernization of Hawaiian culture and government, and who later became the first and only president of the Hawaiian Republic. Under Dole’s orders, Liliʻuokalani was arrested in January 1895 and sentenced to life imprisonment; however, she was kept under ..read more

For nearly two centuries, Beethoven’s ninth symphony, which premiered on 7 May 1824 at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, has held musical audiences captive. Few other musical works hold such a prominent place in the collective imagination, and each subsequent generation has rediscovered the work for itself and made it its own. Understanding the significance of the symphony in contemporary culture requires a dialog between Beethoven’s world and ours, marked by the earth-shattering events of 1789 and of 1989. What is special about the ninth in contemporary millennial culture is that th ..read more