White Heather Club: A Twentieth-Century Taste of the Highlands Lauren Park
From epics about the ancient bard Ossian to Queen Victoria’s journals describing the misty Highlands, representations of Scotland have occupied popular culture since at least the eighteenth century. A twentieth-century manifestation of this trend, BBC’s television variety show White Heather Club presented traditional Scottish music and dance with descriptions of brave Jacobite soldiers and the natural Highlands to viewers across the United Kingdom from 1958 to 1968. While the show enjoyed tremendous popularity, drawing in more than ten million viewers at its peak, some people today view White Heather Club with skepticism and question its claim of providing an authentic representation of Scottish culture. This paper asks why White Heather Club captivated audiences, what kind of portrayal of Scotland it created, and what broader political aims the show served. By analyzing three full episodes of the show, situating the show in the politics of twentieth-century Scotland, and examining previous portrayals of Scotland, this paper argues that White Heather Club stands in a long tradition of both British monarchs and Scots romanticizing Scotland for opposing political goals. While British monarchs have appropriated Scottish culture to justify British rule over Scotland, Scots have adopted stereotypical representations of their culture to cultivate a unique Scottish national identity and resist British domination. White Heather Club’s dual purpose of serving both offensive imperialism and a more defensive nationalism demonstrates the flexible nature of representations.
Identification with the Machine: Disco's Electronization and the Evolution with Black and Erotic Movements of the 1970s Natalie Tavares
The introduction and popularization of disco music offered unprecedented potential for gay sexual liberation in the 1970s. Disco’s suggestive lyrics only begin to scratch the surface of a genre whose musicality defies male heterosexual domination, uplifts female pleasure and creates space for the formation of the gay identity. This examination of disco’s foundation and popularization discusses disco’s reliance on the contributions of Black musicians and modern technologies such as DJ decks and synthesizers to curate transformative in-person experiences. Disco differs from other genres by removing the focus on the talent of musical performers on stages, and instead spinning recorded music, turning dancers’ focus towards the dance floor and the bodies within it. This “whole-body eroticism” as a result fuses mechanical elements and lived body experiences to transform reality into something more perfect. The electronization of music and its journey into authenticity as real music coalesced with gay and sexual liberation and their journey into validity as public movements. It is in the pleasure-as-politics blend of synthetic elements and in person experiences that allowed disco to transform the sexual politics of music as it was previously understood.
Gender Nonconformity in Punk: A Close Analysis of YUNGBLUD's album weird! Vaniel Simmons
Punk culture has always had defining features, most notably, the culture’s strict adherence to anti-mainstream values that served as refuge to LGBTQ+ individuals, especially from homophobic culture in the 1960s. Since the culture’s emergence, what is considered mainstream has drastically changed, and traditional punk trademarks of dyed hair, multiple piercings, and ripped jeans are now seen in everyday expressions. While traditional punk trademarks are popularized, punk as a subculture has expanded further to express their non-conformity ideals, specifically tackling the gender binary by embracing gender nonconformity/fluidity. YUNGBLUD, a modern pop-punk artist, released his sophomore album Weird! in 2020, and it is an expression of the sexual and gender fluidity present in punk culture today. By looking at album covers, song lyrics, and published interviews through the lens of punk academic scholarship, this paper establishes how queer and punk cultures have intertwined for some modern artists.
Twin Suns and Spiral Galaxies: The Role of Extended Technique and Augenmusik in the Music of George Crumb Sven Joseph
This paper examines the relationship between the sophisticated expression of twentieth-century avant-garde composer George Crumb's music and his characteristic use of extended techniques and Augenmusik. Composers of the twentieth-century Avant-garde movement, faced with an unprecedented existence in a machine-centric world, aimed to develop new compositional techniques that both challenged the previously assumed fundamentals in music and represented an evolution toward a new intellectual artistic philosophy. This mission to innovate often took precedence over the vivacious emotional expression that dominated Western music of the century prior, resulting in works that showcased new musical ideas while providing little interpretive substance to listeners. Crumb, despite composing at the height of the Avant-garde movement, managed to create unconventional works that featured novel timbres and experimental visual scores while weaving stories that invoke the expressive traditions of the nineteenth-century Romantic era. By comparing works by Crumb and his avant-garde contemporaries, I position Crumb's music within the greater context of Avant-garde experimentalism to argue that his unique implementation of extended technique and Augenmusik functions well outside of the creative scope of experimentalism. While many of his contemporaries succeeded in generating entirely new compositional ideas, their music often fails to communicate a meaningful message and are therefore devoid of lasting relatability. This paper shows that Crumb's selective use of extended technique and Augenmusik bears a narrative significance that allows his music to relay impactful Romantic stories within the post-industrial context of the twentieth-century.
