HO on Music Theory Print

Hò khoan

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hokkien pop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terminology#

The historical origin of Hokkien pop comes from a Japanese enka base instead of a Chinese shidaiqu base. Because it developed from traditional Japanese enka, it has become diverse in its varieties.

Origin#

Under Japanese rule (1895–1945), Taiwanese music continued and developed its new form from the previous period. By the 1930s, vinyl records of traditional music, such as Taiwanese opera, Peking opera, Nanguan, and Beiguan were popular. The first Hokkien record to have “pop song” printed on its label was . Sung by Chiu-chan and released in March 1929, the song featured Taiwanese opera-style seven-character lines with a Western orchestral instrumentation. In March 1932, a Hokkien-language promotional jingle recorded by Sun-sun to advertise the film The Peach Girl was released, and achieved wider popularity. A new business model of the popular music industry emerged when Kashiwano Seijiro, who led the Taiwan branch of Columbia Record Company, started to market their records in new ways, such as marketing songs with silent movies. Kashiwano also recruited and made popular musical talents such as Teng Yu-hsien, , , Lee Lim-chhiu and Sun-sun. They produced important titles such as Bāng Chhun-hong (Longing for the Spring Breeze) and The Torment of a Flower (Flower of a Rainy Night). The Taiwan branch of Victor Records was an equally competitive company, delegated by the influential Lin Ben Yuan Family and headed by Chang Fu-hsing. With talents such as Chen Ta-ju, Victor produced important titles such as . This new business was led by a new generation born under Japanese rule. This generation received modern Japanese education at that time and was exposed to western musical styles and ideas. Some were active in the new music industry because of their interest in politics. Music helped them demonstrate their disapproval against the Japanese ruling and support of native culture. However, Hokkien pop was soon set back. As Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, non-Japanese songs were banned, and talents were required to write songs (and change previous songs) for military propaganda. The situation worsened in 1941 when the Pacific War broke out. The bombings of Taiwan (called Formosa at the time) by the United States, poverty, and the shortage of raw materials hit the music industry hard, a situation which drove many talents away. This period ends with the end of World War II and the handover of Taiwan to the Republic of China in 1945.

Hokum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Terminology#

“Hokum”, originally a vaudeville term used for a simple performance bordering on vulgarity, “old and sure-fire comedy”, but hinting at a smart wordplay, was first used to describe the genre of black music in a billing of a race record for Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band (Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, 1929). After producing a big hit, “It’s Tight Like That”, with Vocalion Records (and its sequel) in 1928, the musicians went on to Paramount Records where they were called The Hokum Boys. Other recording studios joined the fray using similarly named ensembles. The application of “hokum” to describe the musical approach of these bands was fostered by Papa Charlie Jackson with his “Shake That Thing” (1925). The meaning of the stage slang word “hokum” was a subject of an extensive debate in the 1920s (“most discussed word in the entire vernacular”, right next to the “jazz”). The term “hokum blues” did not become a formal designation of a style until 1960s. “Hokum” is also used to describe the low comedy acts that were used at the turn of the 20th century to lure audiences to musical performances. In the words of W. C. Handy, a veteran of a minstrel troupe, “Our hokum hooked ’em” outside the opera house, so that “ticket sellers would go to work”. King applies the term to the early short slapstick films.

Holy minimalism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Origins#

With the growing popularity of minimalist music in the 1960s and 1970s, which often broke sharply with prevailing musical aesthetics of serialism and aleatoric music, many composers, building on the work of such minimalists as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, began to work with more traditional notions of simple melody and harmony in a radically simplified framework. This transition was seen variously as an aspect of musical post-modernism or as neo-romanticism, that is, a return to the lyricism of the nineteenth century.

Hong Kong Café

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

First Run of Shows: 1979-1981#

The Plugz and UXA played at the club’s opening night on June 7, 1979, and numerous bands, including X, Catholic Discipline, The Mau Maus, Bags, The Smart Pills, Nervous Gender, and The Alley Cats, performed there until its closing in January 1981. Concert footage filmed at Hong Kong Café appears in the Penelope Spheeris documentary film The Decline of Western Civilization. The Hong Kong Cafe was typically more open to punk and hardcore acts than Madame Wong’s. Black Flag played some of its first few shows at the Hong Kong Cafe.

Hong Kong English pop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

As English was the only official language from 1843 to 1974 in Hong Kong, it was spoken widely, especially in formal contexts, by Hongkongers in the 20th century. As a result, pop songs performed in English language were very popular among both ethnic Chinese and British Hong Kong citizens.

Pre-WWII#

Many of the bandleaders and musicians were Filipinos. Lobing Samson, who led the house band at Ciro’s in Shanghai, China for many years, later made his way to Hong Kong as did Fred Carpio, Vic Cristobal and many others.

Honky-tonk

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Etymology#

The origin of the term honky-tonk is unknown. The earliest known use in print is an article in the Peoria Journal dated June 28, 1874, stating, “The police spent a busy day today raiding the bagnios and honkytonks.” There are subsequent citations from 1890 in The Dallas Morning News, 1892 in the Galveston Daily News (Galveston, Texas) (which used the term to refer to an adult establishment in Fort Worth), and in 1894 in The Daily Ardmoreite in Oklahoma. Early uses of the term in print mostly appear along a corridor roughly coinciding with cattle drive trails extending from Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, into south central Oklahoma, suggesting that the term may have been a localism spread by cowboys driving cattle to market. The sound of honky-tonk (or honk-a-tonk) and the types of places that were called honky-tonks suggests that the term may be an onomatopoeic reference to the loud, boisterous music and noise heard at these establishments. One theory is that the “tonk” portion of the name may have come from the brand name of piano made by William Tonk & Bros., an American manufacturer of large upright pianos (established 1881), which made a piano with the decal “Ernest A. Tonk”. The Tonk brothers, William and Max, established the Tonk Bros. Manufacturing Company in 1873, so such an etymology is possible; however, these pianos were not manufactured until 1889, at which point the term seems to have already been established. An early source purporting to explain the derivation of the term (spelled honkatonk) was an article published in 1900 by the New York Sun and widely reprinted in other newspapers.

Hookah rap

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Style and history#

The genre has no clear defined principles, although it is closely connected to music and modern aesthetics of the Caucasus, sometimes taking the use of the melodies of Arabic music, music of the Middle East, music of Central Asia, and intersecting with the production style of various trending in mid-to-late 2010s genres, such as hip hop music, trap music and house music, as well as being inspired by and crossing over into other mainstream genres like estrada. The album Chernika () released by Russian rapper in 2012 is called to be a precursor of hookah rap. The first tracks in the genre date back to 2014 from the artist Jah Khalib, who has been called a pioneer of the genre. The first use of the term “hookah rap” is also traced to them in 2018. According to the journalist of the Kommersant newspaper Boris Barabanov, this style was one of the most popular styles in Russia in 2019.

Hori (music)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Themes and Significance#

Hori songs often depict the playful and romantic interactions between Krishna and Radha, key deities in Hindu mythology, whose stories are deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of the Braj region. The lyrics frequently allude to the throwing of colors and the joyous spirit of the festival. These compositions are mainly based on the love pranks of ‘Radha-Krishna’ known for its connection with Vrindavan, the native place of Lord Krishna.

Horn trio

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Horror film score

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Early sound film scores included little music. Universal Studios was among several studios that had a policy of no music under their dialogue, which they felt interfered with it. What little music existed in early sounds films from the studio consisted of a combination of original compositions, classical music, and published music which had been composed for use accompanying silent films. In early 1931, Paramount Pictures initiated the idea of scoring films from beginning to end with music, other studios followed, including Universal creating a fully fledged score for Frankenstein (1931). Just as Universal tended to reuse similar characters, actors and writers for their horror films, they also did so with their music, often using the same music again and again in film in their series. Film journalist and musician Stephen Thrower stated that following Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho (1960), horror film soundtracks have rarely been mere background music, noting that James Bernard’s music for horror film productions by Hammer have been “gallopingly melodramatic, although one has to say it often raises more giggles than goosebumps”. Neil Lerner, in his book Music in the Horror Film, found that stylistically, the genre allowed for greater freedom for composers to experiment with harmony and instrumentation. Approaches in the 1960s and 1970s included work from Ennio Morricone, who Thrower described as bringing “shuddering, paranoiac quality” based around jazz, electronic effects and “rampant atonal twanging” to films by Dario Argento, Aldo Lado and Lucio Fulci. A short lived trend in the 1970s was for progressive rock scores in horror films following the release of The Exorcist (1973) with “Tubular Bells”. Italian progressive rock band Goblin contributed to several scores for Argento, about whom Thrower stated that “like Morricone, they occasionally gave brilliant work to dumb movies” noting their scores to Spasmo and Contamination. The shades of progressive rock were also found in other American productions, such as Carpenter’s Halloween, with its main theme having the piano tap out five beats to the bar. Thrower found that by the 1990s, horror film soundtracks were “stuffed with pop and rock in the hope that the album might shift enough units to reach the charts.”, noting the popular success of the soundtrack to Flashdance.

Horror podcast

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

History#

Horror podcasts are typically created and run by volunteers in their free time. As some podcasts such as Archive 81 and The Deep Vault have grown they have been able to attract advertisers. The world’s longest running, active horror podcast is WithoutYourHead.com which has been going since August 2006 as a semi-regular weekly series with celebrity interviews. Horror podcasts have featured in the Parsec Awards, and in 2013 The NoSleep Podcast won the award for “Best New Speculative Fiction Podcaster/Team” while in 2014 a story from Pseudopod won the award for “Best Speculative Fiction Story: Small Cast (Short Form)” and We’re Alive won “Best Speculative Fiction Audio Drama (Long Form)”.

Horror punk

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Characteristics#

Horror punk is defined by its fusion of punk rock music with the imagery and lyrical topics common in the horror film genre. Typically it references B movies, While both horror punk and gothic rock pull from many of the same points of reference, and sometimes early horror punk groups, particularly the Misfits, are themselves cited as being “proto-gothic”, the two genres are distinctly separate by modern definitions. However, the gothic rock genre death rock, with its emphasis on influence from punk rock, contains significant overlap with horror punk. Although, death rock lacks horror punk’s rockabilly and doo-wop influences, instead paying a greater attention to musical atmospheres. Psychobilly is also a closely related style to horror punk, particularly during the 2000s when the genres became increasingly intertwined. In an article by Kerrang!, writer Chris Krovatin stated that “the two genres have become so accepting of one another, that to make the distinction feels like splitting hairs”. Some psychobilly groups even take influence from horror punk imagery, notably Tiger Army.

Horrorcore

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Characteristics#

Horrorcore defines a style of hip hop music that focuses primarily on dark, violent, gothic, transgressive, macabre and/or horror-influenced topics such as death, psychosis, psychological horror, mental illness, satanism, self-harm, cannibalism, mutilation, suicide, murder, torture, drug abuse, and supernatural or occult themes. The lyrics are often inspired by horror movies and are performed over moody, hardcore beats. According to rapper Mars, “If you take Stephen King or Wes Craven and you throw them on a rap beat, that’s who I am”. Horrorcore was described by Entertainment Weekly in 1995 as a “blend of hardcore rap and bloodthirsty metal”. The lyrical content of horrorcore is sometimes described as being similar to that of death metal, and some have referred to the genre as “death rap”. Horrorcore artists often feature dark imagery in their music videos and base musical elements of songs upon horror film scores.

House music

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Characteristics#

In its most typical form, the genre is characterized by repetitive 4/4 rhythms including bass drums, off-beat hi-hats, snare drums, claps, and/or snaps at a tempo of between 120 and 130 beats per minute (bpm); synthesizer riffs; deep basslines; and often, but not necessarily, sung, spoken or sampled vocals. In house, the bass drum is usually played on beats one, two, three, and four, and the snare drum, claps, or other higher-pitched percussion on beats two and four. The drumbeats in house music are almost always provided by an electronic drum machine, often a Roland TR-808, TR-909, or a TR-707. Claps, shakers, snare drum, or hi-hat sounds are used to add syncopation. One of the signature rhythm riffs, especially in early Chicago house, is built on the clave pattern. Congas and bongos may be added for an African sound, or metallic percussion for a Latin feel. The electronic drum machines and other gear used by house DJs and producers were formerly considered “too cheap-sounding” by “proper” musicians. House music producers typically use sampled instruments, rather than bringing session musicians into a recording studio. Even though a key element of house production is layering sounds, such as drum machine beats, samples, synth basslines, and so on, the overall “texture…is relatively sparse”. Unlike pop songs, which emphasize higher-pitched sounds like melody, in house music, the lower-pitched bass register is most important. jazz-funk, or funk House tracks build up slowly, by adding layers of sound and texture, and by increasing the volume. House tracks may have vocals like a pop song, but some are “completely minimal instrumental music”. If a house track does have vocals, the vocal lines may also be simple “words or phrases” that are repeated.