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1. The sport's sounds

Sport is in the air

    The fever of sport in the 20^th century has defined the contemporary history and has created hurricanes of associated ideas with freedom and torrents of creative energies in the Anglo-Saxon world. It has given rise to a rich in ideas melody which could be named Fields of sport, after drawing notes of feelings in the air and shaping a new atmosphere full of water of saliva and sweat; of air of strong puffs, cries or breaths where the voices and the maximum expressiveness of silence explode.

    This new reality of the golden fields of sport forms a celebration where the engines of motor racing strums chords on the guitar and discharge on the neck shill sounds and electrical ones in the extreme sport. Where the boxing gloves punch the bass's low and sudden sounds. Where the basketball players' training shoes drag themselves along like the fingers along the neck of an acoustic guitar.

    In it the golf's swings exude the elegance and the lightness of the string instruments. The timbres of wood and copper of the wind instruments cut through the jumps of athletics with their fleeting transition from high notes to low ones like a tenor saxophone, they also reproduce the advance of the blades of the skates in the ice hockey like a flute, they push with a wind from horn the sails of the sailing boats and surf….

    This magic celebration is a new essential experience where the heart's beats are devoted themselves to the drums of feelings, emotions created by baseball bats transformed into drum-sticks in order to give the instincts a free hand, by tone-deaf and incisive sounds which appear from the impacts of the bones and protecting elements in the soccer, by rhythms of wood which appear by means of beatings from the cricket bats, by a percussion of high-pitched sounds created with the wheel spokes and the chains of the bicycles of cycling in their revolutions in time….

    It is created a special atmosphere where rugby also generates intercalated sounds, based on bones and voices, like an electronic organ. Where the home straight of a horse race rides strenuous and fluid performances on the acoustic piano. Where the Olympic Games synthesize the sounds in an electronic keyboard in a polyphonic way. A place appears where the soloists' voices reproduce onomatopoeias je, pic, pic-pac, pim, pin-pan, ¡pssssssiiiiiii!, ¡pum!, tac, track, ¡zum! ¹ in the displays to the press. And where a chorus claps, roars, sings in chorus, snorts, vibrates, lengthens vowels and notices the fricative consonants in the tier in order to transform language into a fantastic game.

2. Towards two industries based on leisure

The roars of silence

    The artistic relationship between modern music, language and sport gives a complex and historic dimension based on musical and poetic contents. They form an act of special communication where word has no the authority, but music and show, spectacle cover the simple sentences or without quality or sense to the extent of creating palpitating moments, paralyzing emotions and charging with electricity the sensory perception of the contents.

    The game of the sport and popular music is based on silences and sounds, with worlds which have been understood as separate. But in the last third of the 20^th century, music and sport were mixed to the extent of achieving a convergence where the musical art becomes a game and the sport's game becomes an art with easy comprehensiveness for masses.

    The intense communicative quality of masses' both cultural forms have developed romantic styles for the individual affirmation, in order to sing the dark side of official versions based on history.

    In both of them the social comment with features of youthful rebellion, irrational violence, exaltation of progress appear. Both of them are fields for the oppressed people's refuge in the presence of a society which crushes creativity, they are places where the men's universal and tragic destiny is redeemed. Both places are a field, grounds for the game based on complex feelings where the essential popular expression creates a literature transmitted orally and also an in tune one with a rhythm of music based on repetition. They are fields, grounds for strong and brave sincerity, this same sincerity to the extent of being to the limit. Fields or grounds in order to run away from the life heartbreaking aspect, routine, monotony, multiple ways of a strict, complex and cruel society.

    Music and sport include a creative flood of lyricism, passion, bitterness and beauty destined to be lived in clamor, dreams, fascination. Their relationship in the Anglo-Saxon world, during the 20^th century, can be organized into two big phases or stages: at the end of the 19^th century, 1966 and 1966-2000.

The sport machine: 19th century-1965

    In the first half of the century, sport and popular music are joined together in order to create melodies and signatures tunes, musical theater, calypso, marches….

    One of their pioneering examples is from 1893, to be exact the song Utopia Limited dedicated to cricket by Gilvert and Sullivan. Together with this song, later, other ones appeared, they were songs for orchestras and comical theater with a special preference to baseball, horse races and cricket till I World War.

    In the period which is between the wars, sport became a source of hopes in order to overcome poverty and misery thanks to the bets, and in this way the fanning out of sporting spectacles was diversified into baseball, horse races, cricket and football, and music and sport were joined as a way of happiness in order to show feelings in an atmosphere of cultural vanguards where art was also understood like a game.

    In 1927, the creation of music for special occasions appeared with the final of the Football Cup and since 1932, the mass media were incorporated into the dissemination of this popular expression with the song I do like to see a game of football which favored the daily named Daily Herald.

    They were times in order to exalt the racial values, also the hygienic ones and the values based on the population's improvements of health, as well as the literature of manners generated by the very spectacles, because the audience or presence at them formed a social celebration.

Rock and sport music: 1966-2000.

    After the II World War, at a first moment an estrangement is produced because the new popular music with its contra-cultural and hedonistic values was opposed to other values such as hygiene, authority and suffering sport praised.

    However, with the pop-art irruption, people had a tendency towards a convergence of these two cultural ways; the masses' cultural ways thanks to several common aspects: they generated youthful ways of life for society based on consumption, created heroes in the collective subconscious, worked like forces of personal liberation in order to get dreams of eternal youth, happiness or freedom going beyond the limits of reality with a new rhythm and a special aesthetics….

    The sporting and musical feats became a field for the imaginary aspect thanks to the impossible mixes and recreations, which technology allows, for the concentration of emotions at the moment of showing the desire to live and stop time.

    Primitive and exotic chorus, persistent and syncopated sounds, regular rhythms to the sound of beats and emotions, fast languages of light expressions transform unconsciously senses and transfigure stadiums into a kind of pub where the purest feelings and the strong emotional burden speak loudly, become art and form an industry based on leisure in a magic atmosphere which brings about the fan's total enthusiasm, excitement in order to support his team or in order to get from it a greater efficiency.

    Stadium has become a combination of literary genres for the human necessities. Together with the lyricism of pop music and the epic nuance of sports, an hybrid formula comes together these aspects and where the musical epic poetry with sporting theme faces up to chaos of real life, does again an imagined world which transforms cruelty into the possibility of enjoying, fights against topics with a 4/4 time in intervals with strong resonance in order to create a new cultural commodity.

    According to musical movements of different decades, this strength of the sporting music and its social celebration in the stadium, as a combination of all the creative energies which settle in the collective subconscious, it has been able to flirt with the supporters' aesthetics of the associated violence, also it has been able to create signs of identity and to attract the great crowd's attention in favor of all kind of shared common causes ².

3. The sound track

    The creation of music with sporting theme includes a complex panorama with four sides. Firstly, the relationship with several musical movements in order to create fetishes, magazines, books and new ways of social communication. Secondly, the composition of specific songs with works of general characteristics that have to do with the Olympic Games and with fifteen sporting disciplines. Thirdly, the connection between sportsmen/sportswomen and musicians thanks to sportsmen/sportswomen who are singers, musicians who are amateurs, sporting actions in musical performances and the combination of both artistic branches in order to establish new relationships with the mass media and the dissemination of social values. And fourthly, the transformation of songs into sporting hymns for the fans who are in the tiers.

3.1. Preferences based on musical movements

    Out of the different movements of modern music, pop-art is important due to its relationship with sport. This tendency has given rise to five phenomena. Firstly, the edition of records with the presence of sporting fans in the frontispiece, like in The action and Wedding Present where the Liverpool and Manchester United's fans appear. Secondly, the several of their leaders' public statement, as great fans of a football club, like the Englishman Mike Allway and his passion for the Brentford. Thirdly, the figures of the footballers George Best and Robert Friday have been included as fetishes. Fourthly, the establishment of a cultural relationship of masses by means of magazines and fanzines like in the cases of the Dutch publication Hardgras and the English one When Saturday comes.

    And finally, also the edition of books where musicians write about football is registered, like The greatest footballer you never saw, the footballer Robin Friday's biography from which the singer of the group Oasis, Paul Mc Guigan, and the musical critic Paolo Hewitt are authors. Panorama which is completed due to the compilation of stories Perfect Pitch and the works of literary creation Football factory by John King, Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby and My favourite year by Roddy Doyle.

3.2. Songs with sporting theme arranged as far as sporting disciplines are concerned

    The production of songs with sporting theme in the Anglo-Saxon world has generated compositions with a general kind, works for the Olympic Games and themes for 15 different sporting disciplines at a first compilation. Compositions with a general kind have been the following melodies:

A chorus line

    An authentic sporting chorus is formed by the theme Barcelona, performed by the soloist Freddie Mercury and the soprano Montserrat Caballé for the Olympic Games in summer, 1992.

Rock around the sport

    A numerous group of sporting musical themes is formed by activities which fight against time. For example sports such as: athletics, horse races, cycling and winter sports.

Lecturas: Educación Física y Deportes · http://www.efdeportes.com · Año 8 · Nº 46

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