scholarly journals Growing Old Together: Pop Studies and Music Sociology Today

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-343
Author(s):  
TOM PERCHARD
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Communications

Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.

scholarly journals Theory and Fieldwork

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Shepherd ◽  
Beverley Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Social Contingencies ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Study

Abstracts John Shepherd This intervention suggests that the recent and welcome emergence of fieldwork as a prominent feature of much current work in popular music studies has deflected attention from an undertaking that characterized the early days of popular music studies: that of developing from within the various protocols of cultural theory concepts to explain the meanings, significances, and affects that music as a socially and culturally constituted form of human expression holds for people. In tracing a shift from theoretical to ethnographic concerns in work carried out in popular music studies by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, social anthropologists, and sociologists, it is suggested that a renewed emphasis on theory in musicological work in popular music studies may be of consequence for the academic study of music as a whole. Beverley Diamond In response to the editor's question concerning theory and fieldwork, this colloquy argues that the two are inseparable. Further, the importance of fieldwork in providing "alternative theory" which challenges the consistencies of academic thinking is emphasized. For this reason, the article eschews disciplinary history as a means of tracing important theoretical currents in music scholarship and, instead, presents arguments which confront the hegemonies of any history, any discourse of intellectual continuity, positing incidents which expose the social contingencies of theory.

The ambivalence of becoming a small business: Learning processes within an aspiring rock band

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 585-599
Author(s):  
Tobias Malm
Keyword(s):  
Small Business ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Organisational Form ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Social

The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).

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.

scholarly journals The medium and materials of popular music: ‘Hound Dog’, turntablism and muzak as situated musical practices

Popular Music ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLES FAIRCHILD
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Specific Relation ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractPopular music studies has rarely exhibited the kinds of disciplinary coherence found in closely related disciplines mostly due to the field’s adoption and adaptation of methodological and theoretical innovations from a variety of disciplines, notably sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, media studies and musicology. However, many commentators continue to seek disciplinary coherence without making any critical aesthetic distinctions between the medium and materials of popular music. Distinctions and interrelationships between the literal or material aspects of popular music and the social or cultural processes of making meaning from popular music are central to the definition of a particular but not exclusive field of analysis. Through such distinctions, the very category ‘popular music’ can be understood as a more flexible and supple distinction based on an understanding of methods of construction, production and mediation in specific relation to the technical, contextual and sociological aspects of music. I use different performances of ‘Hound Dog’, the practices of ‘turntablism’, and the exigencies of Muzak as examples for analysis offering ways in which the aesthetic, material and contextual aspects of popular music can be understood in order to incorporate the actual sound of music into the analysis of its social, cultural and musical construction.

Looking Towards the Future: Popular Music Studies and Music Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
BRIAN F. WRIGHT ◽  
AMY CODDINGTON ◽  
ANDREW MALL
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Academic Journals ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The Future

In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance’. Today, exactly fifty years later, the position of popular music studies within the academy is far removed from Browne's experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted solely to popular music, scholars regularly present papers on popular music topics at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of popular music courses. Popular music has even become a viable area of interest within music scholarship.

“We Speak the Truth!”

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Sari Hanafi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Qualifications

This study investigates the preachers and their Friday sermons in Lebanon, raising the following questions: What are the profiles of preachers in Lebanon and their academic qualifications? What are the topics evoked in their sermons? In instances where they diagnosis and analyze the political and the social, what kind of arguments are used to persuade their audiences? What kind of contact do they have with the social sciences? It draws on forty-two semi-structured interviews with preachers and content analysis of 210 preachers’ Friday sermons, all conducted between 2012 and 2015 among Sunni and Shia mosques. Drawing from Max Weber’s typology, the analysis of Friday sermons shows that most of the preachers represent both the saint and the traditional, but rarely the scholar. While they are dealing extensively with political and social phenomena, rarely do they have knowledge of social science

Approach to the Social Sciences in Religion Past and Present

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Robert Segal
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Social

The social sciences do threaten theology/religious studies even when they do not challenge either the reality of God or the reality of belief in the reality of God. The entries in RPP ignore this threat in the name of some wished-for harmony. The entries neither recognize nor refute the challenge of social science to theology/religious studies. They do, then, stand antithetically both to those whom I call "religionists" and to many theologians, for whom there is nothing but a challenge.

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