JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. Relationships between popular musics and technology, while commonly acknowledged in music scholarship, often have been limited to discussion of these musics as dependent upon large, complex industries whose ability to produce and reproduce a product is technologically based.' Only recently have technologies been scrutinized as lived and experienced, not just as the annoying tape noise in the background of daily life but tied to familiar and persistent cultural practices.2 Most pertinent here are technologies as they emerge in intentional linguistic and behavioral processes for rationalizing and dividing the world (see Penley and Ross 1991; Ross 1991) for local New York City rock musicians.3The close relationship between electronic technologies and the very concept of popular music in this century is affirmed each time we pick up an electric guitar, watch MTV, or purchase a compact disc. Thus it is not surprising that knowledge of music technologies and how to exploit, adapt, and resist them is essential to communities of rock musicians in New York, and elsewhere. Technologies also become bound to tropes within the lives of rock musicians and central to their existence as rockers. These tropesspecifically metaphors-are intricate, with patterns and meanings continually reformed through the social and technological encounters of musicians. Most explicitly for New York rock musicians, technologies and technological adaptations are tied to cultural practices that authenticate musicianship and signal alliances within and alienation among musical and social groups. Moreover, new technological adaptations offer openings for reconfigurations and new alignments of power for women rock musicians. ? 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAt the 305 Bar, a Chinese restaurant turned rock club near New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, a rock musician friend criticizes another guitarist's performance by saying that he has "too many knobs between the guitar and the amp's speaker" (Jimbo Walsh, pers.com. 1989). This statement refers to the highly processed guitar sound the other musician had created with his considerable electronic gear: electric guitar, amplifier, rackmounted digital-delay reverb and a battery of effects pedals linked through a few feet of cables. My friend later explained that "every electronic thing adds some muck to the sound and deteriorates the fidelity, hindering the directness of the 'feel' of the guitar" (Walsh, pers.com. 1994).At the heart of the critique was a problem of obstructing musical communica...

This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.

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Gerhard Kubik's African Guitar shows 26 performances of seven Central African finger-style guitarists from six countries. Built around research footage recorded from 1966 to 1993, this video is no television documentary with its ubiquitous voice-over descriptions, nor is it an ethnographic film exploring broadly a music-culture through the voices and actions of its participants. Rather Kubik's focus on performances of this solo guitar style makes this production look mostly like an archival document to illustrate the style and its history. Yet Kubik's extensive research in Africa, his professional and personal relationships with many of these performers, and his interest in film and ethnography along with the technical limitations of some of his footage demand that he make more with his footage, at times splicing together segments that include other audio, film, and video sequences as well as still photographs. These additions, combined here according to a set of rules that Kubik has devised to maintain historical and ethnographic validity, further contextualize the performance and the individual musicians. On one hand, these additions produce a look that sometimes resembles a music video, albeit much less frenetic than the many videos built almost entirely of jump-cuts. (The resemblance is here too because some music videos themselves mimic documentary film.) On the other hand, the video's lack of voice-over narration (indeed, there is very little spoken word here) and its emphasis on illustrating the techniques of guitar performance reinforces the archival nature of this video. The 75 page study guide that accompanies the tape confirms this video as a study and research document. Within the booklet Kubik explains his philosophy toward research with film and video production, discusses Central African guitar style and techniques, first generally and then for these performances, provides details about the recordings, and finally gives biographical information on the performers. The video doubtlessly must be viewed in combination with a reading of this extensive and detailed guide. Primarily Kubik sees this video as a unique document for the history of African guitar, which it surely is. Drawn from Kubik's field recordings, the film and video segments, which feature

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