Academic literature on the topic 'Guitar music (Slack key)'

AbstractIn this essay, I explore the ways in which kī hō‘alu (Hawaiian slack key guitarists) articulated Native Hawaiian aspirations for self-determination and reterritorialization during the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. I argue that Hawaiian music speaks to a liberatory politics that is embedded within an aesthetic of nahenahe (soft, sweet, melodious). Nahenahe invests slack key guitarists with the mana (power, authority) to invoke a Native Hawaiian perspective that empowers and sustains Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) efforts for self-determination and political autonomy. The connections between music and political activism were highlighted and strengthened throughout the period. Indeed, although numerous political groups organized throughout the period, providing the modern foundations to the struggles for sovereignty today, at the forefront of it all were the musicians.

Indie alternative rock in the 1980s is often presented as authentically autonomous, produced in local scenes, uncaptured by ideology, free of commercial pressures, but also of high culture elitism. In claiming that the music is avant-garde, postmodern and subversive, such accounts simplify indie's historical, social and cultural context. Indie did not simply arise organically out of developing postpunk music networks, but was shaped by media, and was not just collective, but also stratified, hierarchical and traditional. Canon (articulated through practices of archivalism and connoisseurship) is a key means of stratification within indie scenes, produced by and serving particular social and cultural needs for dominant social groups (journalists, scenemakers, tastemakers, etc.). These groups and individuals were mainly masculine, and thus gender in indie scenes is an important means for deconstructing the discourse of indie independence. I suggest re-envisioning indie as a history of record collectors, emphasising the importance of rock ‘tradition’, of male rock ‘intellectuals’, second-hand record shops, and of an alternative canon as a form of pedagogy. I also consider such activities as models of rational organisation and points of symbolic identification.

Introduction. The guitar class, opened by V. Dotsenko in 1989, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary and presented the university with many winners of international competitions, ensemble groups and new scholarly discourses. Together with the constant changes in society’s requirements for academic education and musician’s activities, this encourages us to estimate its achievements and prospects at the present stage. The aim of the article is to identify the key vectors of the guitar class of Kharkiv National University of Arts at the present stage. In accordance with the goal, such methods are chosen as historical, which allows to reveal the dynamics of development of the Kharkiv guitar school in the period of its formation to the present; typological – to identify key areas of activity of the guitar class at the present stage. Results and Discussion. The study of the Kharkiv guitar school and guitar class of KhNUA from its formation to the present day allows us to identify the leading vectors and key features of their activities, among which it is proposed to distinguish two main ones: innovation and multivectority. Already at the stage of formation, the Kharkiv guitar school proved to be innovative – it was in Kharkiv where the first guitar club in Ukraine and the USSR was opened, within which the first guitar quartet in the USSR soon appeared, the first in Ukraine scholarly conference dedicated to guitar art, it was one of the first to join the digitalization process, conducting online performances and successfully presenting the guitar orchestra at the international level, resulting in two Grand Prix in 2020. Already within the activities of the guitar club, another leading feature of the Kharkiv guitar school – multivectority – has declared itself. Gathering like-minded people to share experiences and get acquainted with samples of modern guitar art, the club “nurtured” teachers, masters of instruments, and musicians-ensembles. All the directions initiated in the last century deepen and continue to branch out in the XXI century in the activities of the guitar class KhNUA: educational one is supplemented by scientific (conferences, defense of PhD theses), pedagogical one – by methodical complex (methodical works of V. Dotsenko), solo and ensemble performance – by the orchestra. Conclusions. Innovativeness and multivectority become leading features of the guitar class of KhNUA at the present stage. In recent years, the school’s activities are supplemented by such vectors as the formation of a guitar orchestra (2016), cooperation with European institutions of higher music education (Erasmus), active immersion in the digitalization process, in particular, online competitions and online broadcasts of the concerts, which fit its activity into the latest trends in the development of musical performance and education and shows the involvement in the European standards of artistic activity.

There is a lack of scholarship on informal private popular music lessons compared with school and conservatoire teaching, and informal private music lessons have been viewed as lacking structure. Instrumental teachers often develop strategies from their own experiences, and there is a paucity of recognition of the processes that underpin teachers’ knowledge. This article brings into focus indicative examples of my own teaching experiences with my current student cohort, focusing on how specific approaches are informed by a general structure, where teaching approaches are tried, tested and developed. The article contributes to literature on informal popular music teaching developed by the likes of Schulman (1987) and Lucy Green (2001). Key benefits identified in adopting a flexible template for guitar lessons include a growth in student confidence positively affecting their progress and engagement with music.

The physical arrangement of pitches in most traditional musical instruments—including the piano and guitar—is non-isomorphic, which means that a given spatial relationship between two keys, buttons, or fretted strings can produce differing musical pitch intervals. Recently, a number of new musical interfaces have been developed with isomorphic pitch layouts where these relationships are consistent. Since the nineteenth century, it has been widely considered that isomorphic pitch layouts facilitate the learnability and playability of instruments, particularly when a piece is transposed into a different key; however, prior to this paper, this has not been experimentally tested. To address this, we investigated four different pitch layouts to examine whether isomorphism facilitates retention and transfer of musical learning within and across keys. Both non-musicians and musicians were tested on two training tasks: two immediate retention tasks and a transfer task. Each participant played every task on two distinct layouts—one being an isomorphic layout (Wicki or Bosanquet), the other being a minimally adjusted non-isomorphic version. For musicians, isomorphism was found to facilitate transfer of learning to a novel task; for non-musicians, the results were mixed. This study provides insight into features that are important to music instrument design.

Thisarticle offers a comprehensive overview of the “saxophonejazzimprovisation” phenomenon. It was noted that in the contemporary jazz studies, the components of this notion are, as a rule, not combined but studied separately. This work is the first study that proposes to combine them based on the textureandsyntaxparameters. For that purpose, a number of perceptions already developed in academic music studies have been corrected in this work, including the perception of the instrument’s textural style (A. Zherzdev), specifics of its reflection in improvisation, syntax as a “system of anticipations” (D. Terentiev), which has its own specifics in saxophonejazzimprovisation. Being one of the style “emblems” of jazz, saxophone combines the specifics and universalism of its aggregate sound, which makes its sound image communicatively in-demand. It was emphasized that the methodology and methodic of the topic presented in this work need to be concretized on the example of saxophone jazz styles, which offers prospects for further studies of this topic. The theory of jazz improvisation inevitably includes the question of instrument (instruments, voices) used to make it. At this point, we need to tap into information about the instrumental-type style (style of any types of music according to V. Kholopova) available in jazz practice in both of its historical forms: traditional and contemporary. Saxophone becomes one of the key objects of this study, being an instrument of new type capable of conveying the entire range of jazz intoning shades represented in such origins of jazz as blues, ballad, religious chants, popular “classical music”, academic instruments. To generalize, it is worth noting that information about saxophonejazzimprovisation is concentrated in two areas of study: organological (jazz instruments and their use: solo, ensemble, orchestral) and personal (portraits of outstanding jazz saxophonists made, as a rule, in an overview and opinionbased style). The historical path of saxophone as one of the most in-demand instruments of jazz improvisation was quite tortuous and thorny. The conservative public considered this instrument “indecent” and believed that its use in jazz does not meet the requirements of high taste (A. Onegger). It was emphasized that specifics of jazz saxophone sound indeed lay in the instrumentalization of expressive vocal and declamatory intonations originating from blues with its melancholy and “esthetics of crying”. It is manifested especially vividly, and with even greater share of shock value than in jazz, in the use of saxophone in rock music, which exerted reverse influence over jazz that gave birth to it (V. Ivanov). The timbre-articulatory diversity found in saxophone is identified when taking its organological characteristics out of the dialectics of the pair of notions “specifics – universalism”, where the deepening of the former (specifics) means overcoming thereof towards the latter, universalism (E. Nazaikinskyi). As a result, we have a textural style of saxophone based on melodic nature of this instrument, its specific timbre enriched by the influence of other instrumental sounds, including trumpet, piano, and later, electric guitar. Among the existing definitions of texture in music, there are three key, determinant parameters of the approach to the study of texture style of saxophone in jazz. The first of them is spatial-configurative (E. Nazaikinskyi), the second is procedural-dynamic (G. Ignatchenko), and the third is performance-based (V. Moskalenko). On aggregate, the textural style of jazz saxophone is defined in this article as the synthesis of the instrument’s “voice” and the “voice” of the improviser saxophonist. The former defines the typical in this style, and the latter defines the individual, unique. The specifics of texture in jazz, including saxophone jazz, are special, because this improvisation art does not have the component of final “finishing” of musical fabric. The formulas existing in saxophone jazz texture are divided into three types: specific (typical for jazz itself), specifized (stemming from the folklore and “third” layers), and transduction-reduction (according to S. Davydov, borrowed from the academic layer). The syntactic composition of saxophone jazz improvisation correlates by the textural one, taking the shape of textural-structural components (a term by G. Ignatchenko) – units of the first scaled level of the perception of form, which are related to the one and the other. The mechanism of anticipation – a forestalling perception of the next segment of the process of improvisation, and the intuitionallogical orientation of an improviser saxophonist toward the number “7” have great significance (E. Barban). Like in academic practice, syntax in jazz improvisation is built on the basis of “stability” and “instability” semantics (D. Terentiev), forming a complex system of paradigms and syntagmas (the former are typical for traditional jazz, the latter for contemporary one). The rules of jazz improvisation semantize, because the most important thing for a jazz musician is the process, not the result. At this point, the aspect of temporal distance from the “cause” to the “effect” becomes especially distinguishable: the farther they are from each other the less predictable improvisation becomes, and vice versa. The process of improvisation is largely structured by choruses, which represent sections of a form related to variant reproduction of a theme (standard theme or author’s theme). In addition, improvisation (including saxophone improvisation) may contain elements of general forms of sound used as the bridges connecting sections inside choruses.

From the 16th to the 18th century the lute dominated the attention of European musicians, who cared little for the early guitar. Composers and musicians of the time held the tone and versatility of the lute in the highest esteem, while largely ignoring the guitar due to the relative simplicity of the existing repertoire. By the 19th century, however, the guitar had become extremely popular while the lute had disappeared almost entirely. The socioeconomic background of Europe played a key role in the fate of these two instruments; in particular, the growing economic power of the newly emergent middle class was decisive in determining the rise and fall of the guitar and lute, respectively. This presentation will compare and analyze the cultural and aesthetic antecedents that led to the acceptance of the guitar and the retrospective difficulties the European middle class had with the lute. Drawing connections between the evolving musical aesthetic and the social and economic climate of a particular period is an important undertaking as it serves to not only broaden the understanding of music and its’ history, but also to provide a unique insight into society at that time.

In the world of rock, blues, and popular music, guitarists who pull faces when they play are somehow more entertaining to watch – as if there is an agreement between the performer and the audience that certain facial gestures enhance the expression of the music at key moments. How does this agreement come about? What is it that viewers and performers share? Research in the field of cross-modal perception has demonstrated that humans share systematic linkages between the senses, including vision and audition. For example, people link higher pitched sounds with smaller, paler, and higher-up objects than lower sounds (e.g., Mondloch & Maurer, 2004). Yet few investigations have explored how these linkages relate to performance in the creative arts. One theory suggests that artists have stronger functional connectivity between sensory areas, and are therefore able to invoke or translate sensory experiences across modalities, using sensory metaphors, and strategic sensory exaggeration (Ramachandran, 2003). To test if viewers share a sensory experience with performers, we asked participants in an online quiz to guess which of two guitar faces ‘went with’ particular moments in guitar solos. One-hundred and seventeen volunteers guessed guitar faces at rates higher than would be predicted by chance, indicating that people were able to draw meaningful information about music from still images of the guitarist’s face. In addition to presenting the results of the study in a poster format, this demonstration will give visitors a chance to engage with the interaction between musical performance and performative gesture, in two activities.

Music teachers are often faced with students’ negative attitudes towards Music as a school subject, and dilemmas of what would be most important to teach and at the same time interesting, useful and relevant to students. Looking at music teaching and learning through the eyes of students can play a key role in re-shaping the condition of learning and promoting a positive and motivating musical learning environment. The aim of this study was to ‘turn up the volume’ of secondary students’ views of their music lessons in secondary school, including what they value and how they would have liked lessons to be if they had the opportunity to change things. A self-report questionnaire was devised for the purposes of the study and was administered to 749 secondary school students in schools in Cyprus. Our findings reveal that participants enjoyed Μusic, ranking it as their second favourite out of 15 secondary school subjects. However, there was a reported discrepancy between the activities students are engaged with and what they would like to be engaged with. Students called for more focus on singing, to play a greater variety of instruments besides the recorder (i.e., drums, guitar and piano) and to play the music they like. Building on students’ perspectives, recommendations are made for music teachers and policy makers.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

This chapter present a preliminary study of the emergence of the guitar in the music, culture and society of Turkey, a transcontinental Republic founded in 1923, noting also the instrument’s presence within Ottoman music culture. It argues that the rise of the guitar in Turkey constitutes a transformative moment in the history of the instrument, if not Turkish music, with the emergence and development of local playing styles and physical modifications made to suit local musical practices, aspirations and sensibilities. Crucially, in reaching back to the near past, the study employs both ethnographic and oral historical techniques of research, including in-depth interviews with key musicians, whilst also drawing attention to the importance of the past—its interpretation, negotiation, contestation and fabrication—in the present.

How can you make a guitar sound full, large, and deep even if it was recorded in a bedroom? In this advanced lesson, I introduce the “standard 3-point micing technique,” which picks up the different personalities of an electric guitar and amplifier with a “bright” mic, a “dark” mic, and a “back” mic. This recording approach mirrors the “standard 3-point lighting technique” and its “key” light, “fill” light, and “back” light to form the basis of most lighting approaches for video, film, and still photography. The “standard 3-point micing technique” offers multiple mixing options based on different mic combinations, creative panning, and time delay.

It was some time after I first met Panamanian vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Lucho de Sedas, in early 2005, that he began playing a custom designed Fender Stratocaster whenever he performed for audiences in Toronto. In contrast to the sleek B. C. Rich Gunslinger Assassin that had followed him from Panama, Lucho’s new electric guitar had emblazoned on its front the tricolored Panamanian flag. This new guitar would become a key part of his signature look, for it communicated his connection to and love of country. Indeed, for the highly diverse contingent of Hispanic Canadians that made up the audience for his music in his newly adopted land, the instrument was also the most striking if not principal reference to the musician’s nationality. This is because—as Lucho would remark to me on several occasions—Panamanian music is little known outside of Panama. This lack of familiarity with the music to which he had devoted his life was deeply felt by Lucho, who is not only a household name in his own country, but had risen to fame performing the most widely embraced form of popular music in Panama....