Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ed. by Karen Ahlquist. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 323 pp. Bibliog. Index. ISBN 978-0-252-03037-6 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-252-07284-0 (pbk). US$65.00 (hbk). US$30.00 (pbk). While exploring the exhibitors' section of the 2007 American Folklore Society conference in Quebec, I was delighted to discover a copy of this book, having searched for months for a publication to aid my own research into Scotland's gospel male-voice choirs. With thirteen chapters in total, the book comprises a variety of ethnomusicological insights into diverse choral traditions under the subheadings: A Communal Art; Grassroots Aesthetics; Minority Identities; The Activist Chorus; and In the Western Tradition. As the title might suggest, discussions tend to be biased towards the social function of choruses within their wider community, and this help to increase the book's appeal to include not only ethnomusicologists but those involved in wider areas of sociological enquiry. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Gregory Barz opens the book with a study of youth and adult kwayas, community singing groups attached to religious institutions in Dar es Salaam. Much of his focus is on how a kwaya supports its members, an emphasis that Melinda Russell adopts in her research among choral singers in Decatur, Illinois. Taking a similar approach to Ruth Finnegan in The Hidden Musicians, Russell's intention is to present an ethnographic overview of the area through accounts of histories, membership, performance venues, and functions of choral singing groups. Concluding this section is Wesley Berg, with an analysis of the changes in style and practice among Russian Mennonite choruses in North America from the late 1800s to the present day. Grassroots Aesthetics opens with Bernard Lortat-Jacob discussing the polyphonic church singing of the Santa Croce brotherhood in the village of Castelsardo, in northern Sardinia. The repertoire, described as 'startlingly beautiful and profoundly original', is believed to 'act as a lightning rod for the emotions', and Lortat-Jacob analyses this emotional role in detail, specifically focusing on the singers themselves and the choir leader, the prior. A contrasting use for Christian music is uncovered in Charles Edward McGuire's discussion of the nineteenth-century temperance movement in Britain. Particular attention is paid to the role of composer and educator John Curwen, and the application of tonic sol-fa in Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. The section concludes with a rich examination from Amy Nelson of the role of choral circles among Soviet workers' clubs in providing a creative outlet through collective expression, and the use of choral circles to 'awaken collective feelings, articulate the heroism of the working class and summon the proletariat to a new way of life' (p. 139). Gospel singing provides the primary focus in the section Minority Identities, which opens with an account of the first, hugely successful tour of Holland by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1877. Helen Metzelaar includes accounts of reaction and criticism, both positive and negative, and some of the issues raised by the singers' appearances in the country. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".