Guttman scale analysis is a very useful tool to understand the evolution of societies. It shows the accumulation of cultural traits throughout history in various societies and that those cultural traits were usually accumulated in the same order. The results of studies, by Robert Carneiro and others, shows the accumulation of cultural traits is…[Read more]

This paper was written to question the widespread belief among anthropologists that prehistoric hunter gatherers knew about agriculture long before agriculture began to be practised. The paper suggests gradually accumulating human knowledge led to the development of agriculture rather than population pressure, favourable mutations or convenient…[Read more]

Article for the exhibition catalogue “Hagenbund. A European network of modernism 1900 to 1938” (2014)

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Leslie White, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, and Stephen Sanderson, all produced some of the more interesting theories of history, social change and cultural evolution but their theories have a common deficiency. None of them provide an ultimate explanation for social, cultural and historical change. This failure was…[Read more]

Brass bands are, of course, musical organisations first and foremost, and the bulk of their heritage is bound up in the hundreds of thousands of concerts, marches, contests and other performances they have provided their audiences with over the years. Very few of these live performances were ever recorded, at least until recent years, and we must…[Read more]

During the 1890s and early parts of the 20th century a type of band arose using kazoo-type instruments. Zobo instruments, based on kazoo principles, were invented and developed in the USA in the early 1890s, rapidly becoming a new craze for a while. When the instruments spread to the UK the bands that were formed using them were largely “comic”…[Read more]

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos’s militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body part…[Read more]

(v9 – August 2019) [c. 6,740 entries] A comprehensive list of books, articles, theses and other material covering the brass band movement, its history, instruments and musicology; together with other related topics

Travelling musicians and entertainers had been a part of European life for centuries. In the German speaking countries of Europe during the German Empire there arose a large number of “Damen Kapellen”, troupes of musical and variety entertainers consisting largely of women, usually led by a man, and occasionally including males as players. Thi…[Read more]

Review of ‘The History of European Jazz: The Music, Musicians and Audience in Context’, ed. by Francesco Martinelli (Sheffield: Equinox, 2018), SAMPLES – Online-Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Popularmusikforschung, 17 (June 2019).
Published online 12 June 2019.

The functioning of truth in a history text does not depend only on its episte-mological conditions, but also on an ethical relation between the historian and the reader. Paul Ricoeur proposed that such ethical relation is based upon a tacit reading pact, a contract in which the author ensures his reader that his narra-tive is…[Read more]

In Historians of Brazil, Francisco Iglésias reviews some of the great names in Brazilian historiography as divided by him into three distinct moments: up to 1838, from 1838 to 1931, and from 1931 onwards. This article shall focus on the third of these moments, which has traditionally been considered the moment of the “modern Brazilian hi…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]

In the valuation of works of art, the setting of a price is the last step, the result of a discursive attribution of quality; in this regard, aesthetic and commercial evaluations merge. The structure of this mediation is characterised by the concept of the “knowledge market;” knowledge that is ordered and able to spread is essential in order to…[Read more]

Digital images with metadata contain unique potential for research into the history of the art market. The embedding of digital images in a database allows for the possibility of an association with their historical context due to the presence of metadata, which includes economic data, such as the provenance chain, as well as information about…[Read more]

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily r…[Read more]

Based on ethnographic research that is part of a larger project on the role of music and sound among migrant Moroccan men in Italy, this article focuses
on ‘L-ḥərraga’, a song that narrates the voyage and the experience of undocumented migration that ends with the tragic death of a young
Moroccan man crossing the Mediterranean. Through ‘L-ḥər…[Read more]

‘L-ʿalwa’, a sung poem whose text recounts the pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine in Morocco, is celebrated for its ability to convey images and emotions stirred up by the sacred journey. As part of the repertory of ʿaita—a genre of sung poetry from the Moroccan plains and plateaus traditionally performed by professional female singer-danc…[Read more]

ʿAiṭa–a genre of sung poetry from the Moroccan Atlantic Plains and its adjacent territories—is regarded as the quintessential expression of the identity of the region. If it is possible to analyse the poetic language of ʿaiṭa in order to understand its significance among these populations, it is also critical to examine how the affective power of…[Read more]