OU on Music Theory Print

Ou opera

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

History#

Wenzhou was the birthplace of nanxi, a Chinese opera form of the 12th century. The earliest form of Ou opera, however, emerged only after the end of the Ming dynasty in the 17th century, when the singing styles of gaoqiang (高腔) and kunqiang gained popularity in southern Zhejiang. Because luantan proved the most popular vocal style, it dominated the form which gradually became known as Yongjia luantan or Wenzhou luantan.

Outlaw country

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

History#

Some country fans consider outlaw country a slightly harder-edged variant of progressive country. The outlaw sound has its roots in blues music, honky tonk music of the 1940s and 1950s, rockabilly of the 1950s, and the evolving genre of rock and roll. Early outlaws were particularly influenced by predecessors such as Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. A greater transition occurred after Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson secured their own recording rights, and began the trend of bucking the “Nashville sound”. According to Michael Streissguth, author of Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville, Jennings and Nelson became outlaws when they “won the right” to record with the producers and studio musicians they preferred. At the same time, country music was declining into a formulaic genre that appeared to offer the establishment what it wanted with artists such as Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton making the kind of music that was anathema to the growing counterculture. While Nashville continued to be the focus of mainstream country music, cities like Lubbock and Austin became the creative centers of outlaw country. Southern rock also had a strong influence on the outlaw country movement, and that sound and style of recording was centered in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In the Western United States, the Bakersfield sound was providing a counterpoint to the traditional Nashville sound, and the counterculture was also giving rise to the fusion genre of country rock, with groups such as the Flying Burrito Brothers and The First National Band (whose lead singer Michael Nesmith had similar creative rebellion against the West Coast music establishment dating to his time with The Monkees).

Outsider house

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

Lo-fi house#

Around the mid-2010s, outsider house developed into a new form, known as lo-fi house. Producers like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Boring and Ross From Friends combined rough sounds of the parent genre with the aesthetic of melancholy, irony and postmodernism attributed to vaporwave, creating songs “resembling melancholic 1990s deep house recorded to cassette and packaged with a veneer of internet-age irony”. but also use jazzy piano samples and warm percussion samples.

Outsider music

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

Etymology#

The term “outsider music” is traced to the definitions of “outsider art” and “naïve art”. “Outsider art” is rooted in the 1920s French concept of “L’Art Brut” (“raw art”). In 1972, academic Roger Cardinal introduced “outsider art” as the American counterpart of “L’Art Brut”, which originally referred to work created exclusively by children or the mentally ill. and to rock as early as 1979. In the 1970s, “outsider music” was also a “favorite epithet” in music criticism in Europe. By the 1980s and 1990s, “outsider” was common in the cultural lexicon and was synonymous with “self-taught”, “untrained”, and “primitive”.