Perspectives in popular musicology: music, Lennox, and meaning in 1990s pop

Popular Music ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stan Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Communication Processes ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Popular Music Analysis ◽  
Music Study

Scholars of popular music in the 1990s are increasingly aware that traditional musicology has failed to recognise commercial pop music as a legitimate academic area of study. Intransigence on the part of many Western music institutions towards recognising the field of popular music study is attributable to issues that have been heatedly debated and discussed in most disciplines of popular music study. Even withstanding the expansion of critical approaches in the 1970s, which paved the way forward to the emergence of new musicological discourses by the late 1980s, musicologists engaged in popular music research have continued to feel some sense of isolation from the mainstream for obvious reasons. The implications of consumerism, commercialism, trend and hype, with the vigorous endorsement of modernist ideologies, have repeatedly curtailed any serious opportunity for studying popular music in Western music institutions. To start accommodating this area of music within any musicological discourse, scholars active within the field of popular music have had to branch out into new interdisciplinary directions to locate and interpret the ideological strands of meaning that bind pop music to its political, cultural and social context. Musical codes and idiolects are in the first instance culturally derived, with communication processes constructing the cultural norms that determine our cognition and emotional responses to musical sound (Ruud 1986). Any proposal of popular music analysis therefore needs to seek the junctures at which a range of texts interlock with musicology. Similarly, the point at which consumer demand and musical authenticity fuse requires careful consideration; it is the commodification of pop music that continues to problematise the process of its aesthetic evaluation within our Western culture.

scholarly journals For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn

2010 ◽  
Vol 135 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Born
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Practice Turn ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Music Study

What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisciplinarity in music research that is more often articulated, one that – in the guise of a turn to practice or performance – sutures together the historically inclined, humanities model of musicology with the micro-social, musicologically inclined aspects of ethnomusicology. The article suggests, moreover, that this vision obscures other sources of renewal in music scholarship: those deriving from anthropology, social theory and history, and how they infuse the recent work gathered under the rubric of a relational musicology. As an alternative to the practice turn, a future direction is proposed that entails an expanded analytics of the social, cultural, material and temporal in music. The last part of the article takes the comparativist dimension of a relational musicology to four topics: questions of the social, technology, temporality and ontology.

Reflecting surfaces: the use of elements from Indian music in popular music and jazz

Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Indian Music ◽  
Reflecting Surfaces

In this article I explore the manner in which elements from a non-Western music appear in pop music and jazz. The music under discussion is that of the Indian subcontinent and the classical music of North India in particular. The essay covers references to Indian music in pop, rock and jazz from the sixties to the present day but concentrates mainly on the sixties and seventies, and, in the world of pop, on the music of the Beatles. The influence of orientalism on Western music is not a recent phenomena, as Reck (1985) notes, but its appearance in pop during the sixties meant that it reached a larger audience than ever before.

Taste and familiarity affect the experience of groove in popular music

2019 ◽  
pp. 102986491983917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivier Senn ◽  
Toni Amadeus Bechtold ◽  
Florian Hoesl ◽  
Lorenz Kilchenmann
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Considerable Effect ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
Listening Experiment

Groove is a common experience in music listeners, often described as an enjoyable impulse to move in synchrony with the music. Research has suggested that the groove experience is influenced by listeners’ musical taste and their familiarity with a musical repertoire. This study reports the results from an online listening experiment in which 233 participants rated the groove quality of 208 short clips from different Western popular music styles. Findings show that participants’ familiarity with a song, its musical style, and listeners’ preference for that style have a considerable effect on the groove experience. Overall, pop and funk stimuli triggered a stronger groove experience than rock stimuli. Listeners had a tendency to give high groove ratings to music they had heard before and to music that belonged to a style they liked. Results also show that professional musicians had a tendency to experience more groove in response to funk compared to pop music, whereas non-musicians experienced more groove with pop compared to funk. Together, these effects explained approximately 15% of the groove ratings’ variance. In sum, listeners’ attitudes and their musical backgrounds have a considerable impact on their experience of groove.

Digitale Musikedition und die Wissenschaft der Populären Musik

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-393
Author(s):  
Rebecca Grotjahn ◽  
Joachim Iffland
Keyword(s):  
Western Music ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Cultural Behavior ◽  
Historical Objects

The term pop-music already claims to be artificial, just like "classical" western music. In this context, the article deals with the potentials of digital music edition, focusing on the necessity of a pop-music philology. In paying attention particularly to non-textual aspects of music, this seems one of the most important potentials of digital music edition in this area. Therefore, the need of a pop-music philology is emphasized here. This may include the edition of audiovisual objects, objects of cultural behavior and historical objects. We examine this using the example of the cover-version phenomenon, and recommend at least addressing copyright aspects.

The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Sound Technology ◽  
Sound Culture

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

scholarly journals Starting young: Multimodal gender presentation in children’s pop music

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
School Age ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Music Competition ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Selection Of

A recent quantitative study (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2018) demonstrates the hegemonic discrimination in today’s popular music scene, particularly but not exclusively in gender and race. This paper builds on that study, taking it not only into a multimodal dimension (where musical and visual performances are taken into account), but also extending it to children’s popular music, here defined as popular music performed by children for an audience and market primarily made up of children and their guardians.  The annual Norwegian popular music competition for children aged 8-15 Melodi Grand Prix Junior (MGP Jr) is the children’s equivalent of the adult competition to be Norway’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). It has been running since 2004, with 10 entries in each final, and those from 2007 onwards are available for public viewing on the national television channel’s website (tv.NRK.no). The resulting 130 songs thus provide a meaningful corpus from which to study current and recent multimodal gendered presentations of child performers.  Preliminary multimodal gender analyses (cf Maxwell and Mittner 2018) show that the performances are based around traditional gender binaries (i.e. boys and girls). While both presented genders sing, except for rare exceptions it is only boys who play instruments. This both complements and contrasts the study of the ESC (Isaksen forthcoming) which also shows a clear dominance of singing, particularly among female and female-presenting artists (including drag queens).  When these results from children’s pop music and from the ESC are set in relation to Smith, Choueiti, and Peiper 2018 in an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach, it is clear to see that the discrimination in the industry not only begins at a young age, it is also presented as normal, indeed attractive, to child viewers. This is borne out by the decreasing uptake of music tuition at Norwegian kulturskoler (the provider of state-sponsored lessons in the arts), particularly among school-age girls (Utdanningsdirektøret 2017).  In this paper I will present multimodal analyses of a selection of songs from MGP Jr in order to provide both examples of and exceptions to the norms shown by the statistics. In addition, an analysis of the (gendered) presentations of standard Norwegian instrument textbooks (cf Blix 2018) provides background context, with an emphasis on the gendered meanings that surround children in their everyday musical lives.  With thanks to Matilda Maxwell (age 11), aspiring instrumentalist, fan of MGP Jr, and research assistant. 

scholarly journals “Gimme a Beat!”

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
Christine Capetola
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
The Senses

In 1986, Janet Jackson forever changed the direction of pop music and its music videos with the release of her third and breakthrough album, Control. Working with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, choreographer Paula Abdul, and director Mary Lambert, Jackson created songs and videos that conveyed a new kind of feminist affect that intertwined individual stories of endurance, the forcefulness of relatively new digital music technology, and Black and female collectivity. In this article, I chart how Jackson transmitted this feminist affect through what I call hyperaurality, or sounds and vibrations that work in excess of the limitations of visual representation. Through tracing the affective excesses of Jackson’s visuals, sounds, and movements, I unpack how hyperaurality both intensifies and reintegrates the senses of sight, hearing, and feeling. In the process, I posit that vibration, or sound’s materially felt oscillations, works as a point of connection across these three aspects of hyperaurality. By demonstrating its connective power, I assert that vibration is a source of affective politics within popular music, one with the power of repurposing capitalism's excesses.

Rhythm Quantization: Notes on the History of a Technocultural Practice

2021 ◽  
pp. 340-365
Author(s):  
Landon Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Apparent Contradiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Sound Technology

This chapter sketches a general history of rhythm quantization as a widespread practice in popular music culture. Quantization—a sound technology that automatically maps microrhythmic fluctuations onto the nearest beat available within a predefined metric grid—challenges traditional notions of musicking as an embodied activity that is grounded in the co-presence of human agents. At the same time, it encapsulates cultural and cognitive processes that are entirely human, fitting into a broader historical shift towards chronometric precision in Western music. Questions arising from this apparent contradiction are taken up in this chapter, which situates rhythm quantization as an emergent technocultural practice, examining its attendant technologies and requisite structures of music-theoretical knowledge, as well as its reception within the context of different musical genres.

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