Welcome to Volume 15 (2012)
of STM-Online
In different ways, all four articles in this 15th volume of STM-Online comment on the media culture of today or take advantage of multimedia and the possibilities of IT. Here you find theoretical reflections on intermediality, a critical edition using links, an investigation on yoik with sound samples, and research on the globalized hybridity in popular music.
Mats Arvidson’s article might be a consequence of the Swedish Musicology Debate of the 2000s, but it deflects from the issues there involved by introducing the perspective of intermediality. For some time now, intermediality has been on the agenda of literary studies, and there also are debates regarding its implications for film studies, media studies, and Cultural Studies. Referring to these different fields, Arvidson proposes that intermedial perspectives are vital for the study of music, though in his final conclusion he seems to see them as a matter of a new separate discipline of intermedial studies, rather than as a new alternative approach for musicology.
Pehr Frigel’s Om Contrapunkten, or On Counterpoint, is the earliest known extant counterpoint method in Swedish vernacular (c. 1815). It is an important source for the study of training in species counterpoint in Sweden, at a crucial stage in the development of conservatory education of composers. Mattias Lundberg proposes a critical edition, and a translation to English of the text, which together with an extensive commentary has the explicit aim to contribute to an on-going comparative research of music-theoretical texts. Thanks to links between the folio numbers, the reader can navigate easily between the English translation and the edited Swedish text.
Ola Graff takes advantage of the digital medium when presenting the results of his research on the structural understanding of yoiks. Challenging the accuracy of earlier transcriptions, and including samples of the recordings these are based on, he argues against the common view that there are yoiks with one motive only, showing that small deviances makes it possible to understand them as having two or more motives.
The hybridization of culture, closely related to globalization, is the theme of Ola Johansson’s investigation of Swedish rock music of the 2000s. He shows how local circumstances influence the reception of the global popular music canon by the Swedish musicians. In a discursive investigation of articles and reviews, he uncovers the figures of thought that lie behind the notion of “Swedishness” attributed to this music.
Deadline for submitting articles for Volume 16 (2013) is April 15, 2013.
Jacob Derkert and Erik Wallrup, editors