r/musicology

Greetings. I am a faculty member doing academic research about best practices for teaching courses about music and the law generally and forensic musicology specifically. If you have taken a course of any kind at the intersection of music and law I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a few moments to fill it out. Thank you!

https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=W9229i_wGkSZoBYqxQYL0jbrJjuo81RFrM9cJH301RJUMzc5TjVBWExTWEhMU0NUUlVXMEI1VlM4NS4u

Can anyone recall which lesser known opera by a better known composer has a character named Tigrana or something like that?

The same question would be interested to be analysed also in terms of spaciality and not only temporality: we mostly think of music from a western/US perspective, as most of the genres we listen to nowadays originated there, while everything else gets bundled under World/Folk music, so it feels that a genre such as "African music" exists in itself without the possibility of as many layers of subdivision. Do we apply to past music the same treatment?

I'm thinking about how much our attention spans are changing.

With short videos, endless scrolling, rapid dopamine bursts, and algorithms constantly presenting us with something new, I feel it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to engage deeply with music.

Sometimes songs are treated like fast-paced content. If the chorus doesn't come fast enough, people skip it. If an album requires patience, many people don't dedicate time to it.

Do you think this is changing the way we listen to music?

Are we losing our ability to appreciate slow, emotional, flawed, or complex music?

And do you think AI-generated music could make this even worse by creating even more endless background content?

The Department of the Navy pressured New Orleans to shut down the red-light district where most of the working musicians were employed. Mayor Behrman complied. November 12, 1917, the district closed. The players scattered.
Within five years:
• King Oliver in Chicago, Lincoln Gardens, recording for Gennett (1923).
• Sidney Bechet in New York with Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, then London, then Paris (1919 onward). He played for King George V before he was thirty.
• Jelly Roll Morton in Chicago, recording for Gennett and Paramount (early ‘20s; he’d left NOLA earlier).
• Bunk Johnson out of music until the 1940s rediscovery.
• Buddy Bolden already in the East Louisiana State Hospital since 1907 — he never left it.
The first record sold as jazz — the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” — was cut in February 1917 in New York, before Storyville closed, by white New Orleans musicians who’d already migrated.
Two questions:
1. How much of what we call the “Chicago era” is really just New Orleans players who happened to find a recording infrastructure in the city the Illinois Central terminated in?
2. Is there a good treatment of Bechet’s London/Paris years? The Sidney Bechet who came back to the U.S. in the 1920s had played for the King of England. The continental detour seems undertheorized in American jazz writing.
[Disclosure] Working on a podcast about American music history — happy to point if the mods are good with it. Mostly here for the conversation.

Basically what the title says. Is there any history behind why this might be the case or is this a coincidence? I tried using Google but none of the results were relevant to what I was asking. I figured if anyone knew the answer to this question, they’d probably be on this subreddit. TIA!