MIRANDA
REVUE PLURIDISCIPLINAIRE DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE
MULTIDISCIPLINARY PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
Issue 25
The spring 2022 issue of the journal
Miranda contains, in the music sub-section (edited by
Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud) of its
Ariel's Corner section, my article "« Vienne bientôt l’avitailleur » : viralité fraternelle et musique en ligne en temps de COVID — le cas du ShantyTok".
This new text is a sequel to my previous
Ariel's Corner article "Krakauer-Tagg Duo: du souffle et des marteaux pour abattre les murs du confinement" (on the album
Breath & Hammer by David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg, its relationship to the covid lockdown context, and to the spread of online music as a tool to create social cohesion). This sequel continues the study of the use of online music to bring together the lockdown-stricken, social distancing-afflicted, COVID-threatened from the English-speaking world. The analysis focuses, this time, on the ShantyTok, which is the name of the early-2021 explosion of viral videos on the social network TikTok (with subsequent uploads and sharing on other social media), devoted to the collective performance of sea shanties by TikTok users. The impacts of the COVID context, of TikTok's mood and how TikTok works, of how virality works, of the rallying properties of sea shanties' musical form, of their escapist cultural content, are examined in parallel to explain this sudden craze of a hyperconnected, anxious and reluctantly isolated youth for the catchy choral singing of hard-at-work Victorian sailors. In doing so, the article makes you travel upon all seas, from that of digital platforms, social networks and online video games, to that of real sailors and that of literary, musical and mythical sailors, from the seas that lie off the coasts of Victoria's Great Britain, and the Ireland and Scotland of folk bands and pubs, to those that lead to the Caribbean and America of the antebellum and Reconstruction periods, up until the sea that passes between the Australia and New Zealand of the whaling days.
The article is, like the rest of the issue, available online at the following address: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/45765
MIRANDA
REVUE PLURIDISCIPLINAIRE DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE
MULTIDISCIPLINARY PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
Issue 21
The autumn 2020 issue of the journal
Miranda contains, in the music sub-section (edited by
Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud) of its
Ariel's Corner section, my article "Krakauer-Tagg Duo: du souffle et des marteaux pour abattre les murs du confinement".
The article examines
Breath & Hammer, an album by New York-based klezmer and jazz clarinetist David Krakauer and South African classical and experimental pianist Kathleen Tagg, released on May 8, 2020, during the first period of lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to show how the warm and radically composite character of the album and its rhetoric of rapprochement between cultures work to form both a culmination of the explorations of sound and mood found in the respective careers of the two musicians, and an imaginary that is apt to counter that of extreme loneliness bred by lockdowns and social distancing.
While the eponymous show was accompanied by a video installation which extended its musical message in favour of ties and sharing, the album also got, at the time of its release, an audiovisual extension. Indeed, as they were denied a promotional tour because of the lockdown, Krakauer and Tagg embarked on the production of a weekly web-show hosted from home, with concerts given from their apartment, videoconference interviews with their friends and collaborators, extracts from video archives of concerts and interviews... All that works as extra features to the release of the album, enthusiastically guiding viewers through the two artists' eclectic, multicultural and musically adventurous universe. The article also analyses those
Krakauer & Tagg's Sunday Connections. It shows how this series of videos adds to the spirit of connection through music promoted by the album, and how it is part of a widespread increase of the sharing of music, via the Internet or from balcony to balcony, during that period of isolation.
The article can be read online at the following address:
https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/28782
