Musiikki

Eroja purkamassa ja muutosta rakentamassa

Milla Tiainen — 2024-12-12

Musiikin erikoisnumero 4/2024 juhlistaa tänä vuonna 60 vuotta täyttäneen Taru Leppäsen laaja-alaista ja tärkeää työtä musiikintutkimuksessa sekä sitä leikkaavilla aloilla sukupuolentutkimuksesta kulttuurintutkimukseen, jälkikoloniaalisesta teoriasta uusmaterialismeihin. Numeron teema “Musiikki, erot ja muutos” pyrkii tiivistämään jotain olennaista niistä painotuksista ja pyrinnöistä, jotka luonnehtivat Tarun nyt 30-vuotista toimintaa tutkijana, opettajana ja esimerkiksi Musiikki-lehden päätoimittajana 2000-luvulla, huolimatta hänen tutkimusaiheidensa ja harjoittamiensa lähestymistapojen monipuolisuudesta. Seuraavaksi avaamme sitä, mihin Tarun työn piirteisiin erikoisnumeron otsikko viittaa.

Peikkous, erilaisuus ja tavallisuus – Käärijä sukupuolen uudelleenkuvittelijana

Leena-Maija Rossi — 2024-12-12

Being a Goblin, Different and Ordinary
– Käärijä Re-imagining Gender and Sexuality

The Finnish artist Käärijä (Jere Pöyhönen) achieved remarkable national and international success through the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023. The official Eurovision Jury placed Käärijä right after the winner, Sweden’s Loreen, and he won the popular vote. His performance Cha Cha Cha was also awarded with the prestigious MTV Music Europe Award, but most interestingly his discernable outfit and choreography were emulated countless times in schools and workplaces, and versions of the tune were performed both by amateurs and professional artists, in Finland and abroad. This essay scrutinizes the Käärijä phenomenon, or movement, in the context of queer theory, critical masculinity studies, and even posthumanities. The interpretation of the Eurovision performance and its media reception presents Käärijä as a goblin-like figure, who manages to embody masculinity and femininity, clumsy ordinariness and queer weirdness in a cartoonish way. It is maintained that Käärijä’s transgressive representation of gender also challenges the heteronormative, monolithic understanding of what it means to be a Finnish man. In their performance, Käärijä and his Eurovision team also momentarily morphed into another, fantastic species, or slipped in between species, in a way that can be described post human.

Lectio praecursoria

Marika Ahonen — 2024-12-12

Väitöstilaisuuden aluksi kuunneltiin Christina Rosenvingen ”Canción del eco” -kappaletta.

Äskeinen kuunneltu laulunalku on espanjalaisen laulaja-lauluntekijä Christina Rosenvingen vuonna 2011 julkaisema ”Canción del eco” -kappale, joka suomeksi kääntyy ekhon lauluksi tai oikeastaan, kaiun lauluksi. Sen tarina pohjautuu roomalaisen runoilija Ovidiuksen Muodonmuutoksia -teoksesta löytyvään kertomukseen nimeltä ”Narkissos ja Ekho”. Tarinassa kaunis Narkissos ei välitä muista ja rakastuu veden pinnasta heijastuvaan omaan peilikuvaansa siinä määrin, että lopulta nääntyy ja kuolee sitä katsellessaan. Hänen ruumiinsa maatuu ja tilalle versoaa narsissikukka. Narkissos hahmona ja hänen hahmostaan juontuva käsite narsismi ovat varsin tunnettuja aiheita länsimaisessa kulttuurissa, mutta kuka olikaan Ekho, ja mikä hänen merkityksensä on kulttuurisissa kertomuksissa ja muistissa?

Förändrade medialiseringar av barnmusik och etnicitet

Johannes Brusila — 2024-12-12

In the article, the role of children’s music in a changing cultural and media environment is studied by focusing on Arne Alligator & Djungeltrumman (Arnie Alligator and The Jungle Drum). The band (or project) started with very popular children’s live shows and CD releases among the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland (the so-called “Finland-Swedes”) but moved gradually into video production for also Finnish and international audiences. Today, its videos have had altogether more than 300 million views.

Children’s music holds a special place in upholding an ethnicity. It plays a role as part of the culture that is expected to be transmitted to the next generation for the whole ethnicity to live on. For minorities that are primarily constructed around a linguistic belonging, as the Swedish-speaking population of Finland, it is also a central, concrete upholder of a language. However, for the children’s music to survive, be meaningful, and live on in a changing world, it must renew itself and adapt new transmission techniques and norms to reach out to the next generation. This involves the challenge of negotiating ideas of tradition, education, ethnicity, and creativity. Based on the case study, it is possible to say that the technological changes have offered new possibilities for both producers and consumers of children’s music in a minority framework. However, the realization of this potential and the evaluation of the outcome depends on many contextual factors.

Pieni kuulijuus

Anne Tarvainen — 2024-12-12

Background Music, Urban Soundscapes, and Small Listening

This article examines the experiences of background music in urban spaces from the perspective of aural diversity. We study the experiences of individuals whose temporal or permanent auditory capacities, sensory experiences, or interpretations of soundscapes differ from prevailing socio-cultural norms of listening. Our approach draws on Marja-Liisa Honkasalo’s concept of small agency, which, in our study, highlights the small listening strategies individuals employ to navigate challenging sound environments. The data consists of sound diaries and interviews, analyzed through a transactional lens. The findings reveal that listeners’ agency is dynamic and situational, and that unmanaged elements of background music can either constrain their agency or foster creative responses. We argue that these aurally diverse experiences and their small listening strategies provide valuable insights into our listening cultures and challenge the auditory design of urban spaces to better accommodate aural diversity.

Äänellisen toiminnan sosioteknisyydestä 2020-luvun arjessa

Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo — 2024-12-12

Sociotechnical nature of sonic activity in everyday life in the 2020s

The study of human beings and their music has been the starting point of ethnomusicological research. The current study, too, is based on an ethnographic approach, which provides a rich framework for analysis. However, in the age of streaming, talking and listening technologies and artificial intelligence in the 2020s, sound culture has gained an even greater importance which exceeds the conventional ways of understanding the production and consumption of music. Consequently, the key question is what kind of concepts and approaches could contribute to the examination of sonic culture today.

In this article, I explore how the ontology of sound can be examined anew by applying the concept of assemblage, drawing from the new materialist approaches. I emphasize research perspectives used in the field of media theory, particularly in visual studies. These approaches partly overlap with the new materialist research in music studies, while also stressing the societal aspects characteristic of ethnomusicology. I propose that the concept of socio-technical systems could serve as a bridge between music studies and the examination of contemporary sonic infrastructure. I argue that this kind of research is essential during times marked by societal, social, and ecological brokenness.

Uusmaterialismit ja taiteiden tutkimus

Katve-Kaisa Kontturi — 2024-12-12

New Materialisms and the Study of the Arts:

Toward a Map of Co-Emergence

In this article, we propose that the very formation of new materialisms as a concept and range of research practices has partly occurred with(in) the study of arts. In some significant ways, then, which warrant further attention, studies of art and new materialisms have taken shape and acquired particular directions through their mutually constitutive, intra-active, relationship ever since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Our main aim is to offer new insights into these intra-active relations by analyzing examples from the work of several scholars across music and sound studies, art history, visual culture studies, and artistic research. Thus, we explore how understandings of human and more-than-human matter as active, productive, and thereby mattering, have emerged in specific ways in the practices and study of the arts. Based on a qualitative mapping of research topics and concepts that were addressed and developed in a working group consisting of artists and researchers of the EU-funded networking action New Materialism (2014–2018), we focus on three themes which encapsulate some key aspects of the intra-actions of new materialisms and (the study of) art. These themes are “work of art”, “co-creations”, and “aesthetic activisms”.

Kohti ihmisenjälkeistä musiikintutkimusta

Klisala Harrison — 2024-12-12

Towards posthuman music scholarship:

Reflections inspired by Inughuit music of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat)

This article argues, in the spirit of pluriversalism, for parallel statuses of Indigenous onto-epistemology and western humanistic research in the academy. Posthumanist theorization has often drawn on indigenous knowledge without proper reference to it. We consider this to be knowledge colonization. The reciprocal relationship between Earth, human, nature and the nonhuman has lived in Indigenous ways of life and thought for millennia. To inform solutions to the intensifying ecological crisis, posthumanism now seeks to develop a resonant “posthuman” epistemology.

We demonstrate the discrepancy between western human-centred and Indigenous musical ways of thinking and being by juxtaposing approaches to Inughuit music by Danish eskimologist and music researcher Michael Hauser, and Inughuit drumsinger Hivshu. Hivshu’s conceptualization of music is closer to a posthumanism that takes distance from representational theory. The discussion is contextualized in Indigeneity, the Inughuit philosophical tradition and in disciplinary developments of music research.

Keinuntaa – tasapainoilua tekemisen ja kritiikin välillä

Helmi Järviluoma — 2024-12-12

Kaksi ruskeaa tyttöä ystävystyy kirkon tanssikurssilla, mutta vain toisella heistä on lahjoja. Toinen lapsista taas on merkillisen viehtynyt vanhojen elokuvien musiikkiin ja steppauskohtauksiin, joita valkoihoiset filmitähdet usein tähdittävät.

Akrostikon Tarulle

Pirkko Moisala — 2024-12-12

Musiikissa vastakarva on yllättävä dissonanssi, ei jätä rauhaan

Uudistaa

Samalla herättävä, kuulee syvemmälle

Ilahduttaa

Ihastuttaa

Kekseliäisyydellään löytää

Itsestäänselvyyksien tuolle puolen

Näkyihin, jotka eivät miellytä kaikkia

Listening as—might

Anastasia (A) Alevtin — 2024-12-12

In the recent neoliberal politico-theoretical discourses, listening has become a buzzword alongside “relational,” “care,” and “togetherness.” Simultaneously, critical day-to-day practicing of these notions remains in urgent demand, specifically directed at those social groups that live in structural privilege which entitles them to shield themselves from all the intersectionally vulnerable, screaming, perpetually and violently silenced voices. In this context, (non-aural) listening principles might (still) need to be attended to. Relatedly, the following offering is a found poem that looks for some of these principles in the feminist new materialist and musicological work of Taru Leppänen, who has been striving to listen better, to listen well.