Fifty-six years after its establishment, the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra in 2015 recorded its debut album Ghanaian Classics at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. Despite the overwhelming challenge of low patronage of art music in Africa generally, the choice of repertoire and composers for this historic album was largely drawn from the Ghanaian popular music domain. This paper investigates the extent to which the album recording and launch represented a deliberate attempt by the orchestra to negotiate its multiple identities through Ghanaian highlife music and musicians. We argue that the album recording, the choice of the highlife genre and artists featured on the CD, the instrumentation and the venues for the recording and launch were all a deliberate attempt to de-escalate the elitist label the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra has carried right from its inception and to court a larger following from the Ghanaian populace as a national cultural asset.

Like any form of artistic production in the Soviet 1970s (Brezhnev's ‘Stagnation’ era), films had to tread a fine line between being acceptable to official organs, yet managing to appeal to the average citizen. Music – and specifically popular music or estrada – was an important factor contributing to how filmmakers could express themselves and connect with audiences despite official restraint. This article will explore the soundscapes of two iconic movies embodying that tension: The Twelve Chairs (Двеннадцать стульев, 1971, dir. Leonid Gaidai) and The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ирония судьбы, или с легким паром!, 1975, dir. El'dar Riazanov). A close reading of musical scenes from these Stagnation-era artefacts will expose several key tactics that emerge in the complicated nexus between composer, director and text, demonstrating how popular music fits into a complex and multi-faceted relationship of minor liberties and major limits.

This article explores Auto-Tune's importance to the production, perception and reception of trap music, a sub-genre of hip hop. Central to this exploration is the observation that Auto-Tuned trap vocals are readily audible as such because the software's pitch correction function is applied unnaturally quickly to the vocal audio signal, a feature herein termed ‘zero-onset Auto-Tune’. First, I posit that although Auto-Tune is ostensibly a pitch-correction device, its impact on vocal timbre is not well documented or understood. Second, I argue that Auto-Tune's recent importance as a creative tool in trap recasts it as an instrument. Third, I suggest that understanding Auto-Tune's repurposing as an instrument begets its situation in a lineage of technologies repurposed, adapted and embraced by the hip-hop community, including the turntable, digital sampler, and analogue mixer. And fourth, I propose that this repurposing surfaces in Auto-Tune's ability to facilitate emotiveness in trap vocals.

This article focuses on the history of the Czechoslovak sociology of popular music, which formed at the beginning of the 1960s. The article first examines the origins of thinking about ‘mass music genres’ in the Czech lands in the interwar period. It further discusses considerations of mass music genres and their audiences after World War II in light of the communist takeover in 1948, Stalinism of the 1950s and liberalisation of the 1960s. Finally, the article presents the situation after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. Based on analysis of archival sources and original theoretical texts, hitherto unknown in the context of Anglophone scholarship, this article seeks to show how the specific political background of the Central European state behind the Iron Curtain determined the foundation, scholarly focus and social role of the sociology of popular music and how it differed from the situation in Western capitalist countries.

This article focuses on the innovative developments of some emblematic rock bands in Bulgaria, observed during the late 1970s and 1980s in terms of their social, ideological and artistic maturity, as well as of their significant impact on local youth life-styles through the liberating experience of specific musical styles ranging from classic rock (Shturtsite) and progressive rock (FSB) to, say, new wave (Tangra) or punk (Rock Trio Milena). Why the 1980s? What were the dominant verbal and musical messages at that time? Did they stimulate and accommodate the democratic political changes in 1989? In trying to answer such questions, the article develops a thesis according to which the acculturation of transnational musical models as the ones in the field of rock music is not a form of any flat mimicry of modern trends; this process inevitably passes through the filter of specific local contexts and subjective experiences.