Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Styles

The Introduction explains that like all popular music styles, the best country music balances the personal with the commercial; it is both nostalgic and progressive, reflecting earlier influences while rejecting their limitations; and ultimately it is expressive of our cultural values—both the laudable and the lamented. Country music is the most “popular” of all musical styles in terms of sheer numbers. While it rises to the surface of America’s consciousness occasionally, it is country’s deep-rooted, almost subterranean, nature that has made it in many ways America’s most profound indigenous pop music. It is a music of timeless themes, telling stories of love gone wrong and families torn asunder.

Buck Owens, country music, and the struggle for discursive control

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Fenster
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Studio Musicians ◽  
Music Publishers ◽  
Music Genre ◽  
Recording Studios

In the early- and mid-1960s, as mainstream popular music began to reach and exploit the growing youth market, the country music genre was going through a number of important transformations (see Malone 1985; Hemphill 1970). During this period the country music industry, including record companies, recording studios, managing and booking agents, music publishers and musicians, was becoming more fully consolidated in Nashville. In addition, a different kind of dominant sound was beginning to coalesce, based on a more ‘uptown’ feel and intended for a more cosmopolitan audience accustomed to mainstream, adult pop music. The beat and whine of the honky-tonk song, as epitomised by the rural twang in the music of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, was being replaced as the dominant country music sound by the smooth and urbane ballad styles of Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. This shift was both caused by and helped to foster the development of a steady set of studio musicians who would appear on thousands of country recordings per year. The musical style that coalesced in Nashville studios through the regular collaboration of these musicians and the record label producers who loosely arranged them became known as the ‘Nashville Sound’, a marketable and identifiable name for a particular set of musical conventions. This sound, nearly as similar to Rosemary Clooney as it was to Hank Williams, called into question the generic boundaries between ‘country’ music and mainstream ‘pop’ music.

‘Ethnic’ music traditions in the USA (black music; country music; others; all)

Popular Music ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Keil
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Ethnic Music ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Musical Styles

This is a brief meditation on ethnicity as a source of all powerful musical styles, as a kind of curse in the contemporary world of nation states, and as an ever more complex puzzle for every student of popular music to solve.

Popular Music and the Colloquial Tone in the Posthorn Solos of Mahler’s Third Symphony

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Freeze
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Military Band ◽  
The Third ◽  
Musical Styles

The posthorn solos in the trios of the third movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony have polarised critical and scholarly opinion regarding their stylistic origins. My examination places the posthorn solos in the context of the popular music of Mahler’s day. Drawing on contemporary reviews, sheet music, and military band manuscripts in Austrian and German archives, I uncover palpable references, since forgotten or neglected, both to the genre of sentimental trumpet solos, common in salon music and band concerts, and to posthorn stylisations distinctive to popular music. Mahler demonstrably knew these repertoires, and critics often cited them in reviews. These allusions do not negate the solos’ likenesses to folk song and the sound of actual posthorns. Rather, Mahler’s score refers to multiple musical styles without being reducible to any one of them.

Commercialising the sound of the people: Pleng Luktoong and the Thai pop music industry

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ubonrat Siriyuvasak
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Indigenous Music ◽  
The People

Since Thailand's Copyright Act became law in 1979 an indigenous music industry has emerged. In the past, the small recording business was concentrated on two aspects: the sale of imported records and the manufacture of popular, mainly Lukkroong music, and classical records. However, the organisation of the Association of Music Traders – an immediate reaction to the enforcement of the Copyright law – coupled with the advent of cassette technology, has transformed the faltering gramophone trade. Today, middle-class youngsters appreciate Thai popular music in contrast to the previous generation who grew up with western pop and rock. Young people in the countryside have begun to acquire a taste for the same music as well as enjoy a wider range of Pleng Luktoong, the country music with which they identify. How did this change which has resulted in the creation of a new pleasure industry come about? And what are some of the consequences of this transformation.

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.

Popular music heritage, community archives and the challenge of sustainability

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 476-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Baker ◽  
Jez Collins
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Sustainable Practices ◽  
Community Archives

This article identifies the challenges community archives of popular music face in achieving medium- to long-term sustainability. The artefacts and vernacular knowledge to be found in community archives, both physical and online, are at risk of being lost ‘to the tip’ and, consequently, to ‘cultural memory’, due to a lack of resources and technological change. The authors offer case studies of the British Archive of Country Music, a physical archive, and an online Facebook group Upstairs at the Mermaid, to exemplify how and why such groups must strategize their practices in order to remain sustainable. By including both online and physical community archiving in the scope of this research, the authors find that despite key differences in practice, both archival communities face similar threats of closure. The article concludes with an overview of the general outlook for community archives, and possible solutions to this ongoing issue of sustainable practices and processes for this sector.

Early Country Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Musical Styles

Chapter 1 explores the theatrical context of 1930s country music on radio, specifically daily and weekly shows, including the National Barn Dance, on Chicago’s WLS. Similar to vaudeville, radio programmed the diverse strands of vernacular expression with music (including Western art music) that pointed to the high and popular aesthetics of the middle-class mainstream. With an emphasis on reception, this chapter demonstrates that listeners debated the merits of early country music as well as other musical styles and genres with a class-based understanding of aesthetics. The syncretic nature and theatrical characters of early country music (such as the singing mountaineer, the crooning cowboy, and the rustic buffoon) fit radio’s attempts to negotiate the crossing and blurring of the serious and the popular, the urban and the rural, and the sentimental and the parodic. Thus, through the technology of radio, early country music first secured a place in the American consciousness by rubbing against other styles and genres that transgressed cultural and musical divides.

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