Growing up in a liberal Jewish family, Richard Taruskin was encouraged by both his parents to regularly engage in intellectual political debate and music making. His father Benjamin was a lawyer and amateur violinist and violist, while his mother Beatrice was a piano teacher and school librarian. Taruskin learned cello at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan and studied musicology at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1976 with a dissertation on opera and drama in Russia during the 1860s. He spent a year as an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory on a Fulbright schol ..read more

The video for the song Ha-he by the Kenyan experimental pop music group Just a Band features a character named Makmende Amerudi as its protagonist. Within a week of its release on YouTube, Ha-he received nearly 25,000 views and fans began creating their own original Makmende tales, videos, and artwork, leading global media outlets to label Makmende “Kenya’s first viral internet sensation”. Using a contemporary style of hand-held camerawork and shallow depth of field, the video’s graphics, characters, and storylines are reminiscent of 1970s blaxploitation films. As the mysterious tough-guy pro ..read more

Photo: Jack Barron Formed in Long Island, New York, the U.S hip hop group Public Enemy emerged from a DJ sound system called Spectrum City DJs, founded by Hank Shocklee in 1975. Although the sound system originally consisted only of Shocklee and his brother Keith, the group eventually added rapper Chuck D, DJ Mellow, who later became Terminator X, and Professor Griff, the security team leader for the Spectrum City DJs’ mobile parties and a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI). In 1979, Chuck D and others from the group who attended Adelphi University in Long Island began hosting a hip hop show ..read more

The social organization of musicians in South India is often reflected in the Tyagaraja ārādhana, the annual death-anniversary celebration in honor of the revered composer Tyagaraja (1767–1847, pictured above). Thousands of musicians appear at this huge annual celebration, including men and women of different social communities and performance traditions. These musicians include performers in the Karṇāṭak art music tradition–ubiquitous in the contemporary concert halls of South India–as well as two closely related performance traditions sharing the Karṇāṭak musical language of raga and ..read more

Electric mandolin and violin player and vocalist Nash The Slash (Jeff Plewman), whose name comes from the 1927 Laurel & Hardy movie Do detectives think?, is well known for his instrumental soundtrack work and reinvention of classic rock cover tunes while his image, that of a bandaged, walking, Invisible Man has made him instantly recognizable. During a performance in the late 1970’s to raise awareness of the threat from the Three Mile Island disaster, Nash walked on stage wearing bandages dipped in phosphorous paint and exclaimed: “Look, this is what happens to you!” Since that appearance ..read more

The corrido is a Mexican folk music that narrates a story or series of events in verse. The genre has developed in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States over the past 200 years. Similar to how the jarabe genre is closely linked historically to Mexican Independence (1810-1821), the corrido is linked with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). Unlike the former, the corrido is not typically danceable. It was one of the most popular song manifestations of the early 20th century, although its origin dates back to the Spanish colonial era. In the 18th century, the corrido was a popular t ..read more

While vocalizations have been elucidated in various songbird studies, non-vocal sounds have received less attention. In the blue-capped cordon-bleu (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus), both sexes perform courtship displays that are accompanied by singing and distinct body movements (i.e., dance). A previous study revealed that cordon-bleu courtship bobbing includes multiple rapid steps. This behavior is quite similar to human tap dancing, because it can function simultaneously as a visual and acoustic signal. In many cases, the acoustic signal value of such steps (along with the high-speed step movem ..read more

In the post 1970 revolution era, women musicians in Iran, especially women vocalists, have represented a challenge to societal norms and have inspired new musical trends. Such trends, however, have largely been inconsistent with the gendered restrictions of the Iranian state’s cultural policies which limit the musical activities of women, especially singing in public. Iranian society has long been one where religion and politics have been integrated into everyday life. With Islam as the official state ideology, this integration has been felt even more deeply. There is, however, a significant ..read more

From 1972 to 1974, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho studied at the University of Industrial Art and Design in Helsinki. Although she had played violin since childhood, she initially did not pursue her interests in music and composition because she saw no professional prospects in music as a woman. By 1976, however, Saariaho had enrolled at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki where she studied with Paavo Heininen until 1981. After completing a degree in composition, she continued her studies at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg (Freiburg University of Music), where she studied with Brian Ferne ..read more

In practice, the term música popular brasileira, often referred to by the‎ acronym MPB, does not apply to a particular genre of Brazilian music. Although it came into widespread use around 1965, the term had been used since at least 1961, when it appeared in the liner notes of Carlos Lyra’s LP Bossa nova. Initially, the acronym MPB emerged around 1959 as a synonym for bossa nova, a genre inspired by jazz, carioca, samba de morro, and music of northeastern Brazil. The term was further popularized after the television show Jovem Guarda began featuring local pop and rock artists in 1966–many of ..read more