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.

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.

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).

Ethnography and popular music studies

Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Popular Music Studies

Simon Frith (1982) once bemoaned the fact that students would rather sit in the library and study popular music (mainly punk) in terms of the appropriate cultural theory, than conduct ethnographic research which would treat popular music as social practice and process. Ten years later the literature on popular music is still lacking in ethnography.

Getting into the groove?

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-402
Author(s):  
Jill Halstead
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Music And Gender

Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender.Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London and New York: Routeledge, 1997, 353 pp.Sex, sexuality and articulations of gender are well-established components in the production and performance of popular music. Hence, Sexing the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley, is a very welcome addition to this vital and growing area of popular music studies and cultural theory more generally. The collection reflects the reality that studies of gender and sexuality in popular music are born of a hybrid lineage; accordingly the book approaches its subject from a range of disciplines such as sociology, cultural theory, media studies, sychology and musicology, and as such is a vibrant mix. Despite its relative diversity, the book's structure and progression is fluent and focused.

Music, culture and interdisciplinarity: reflections on relationships

Popular Music ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
Department Of Music ◽  
Academic Study

This special issue of Popular Music honours the contribution of a distinguished musicologist to the study of popular music. It was Wilfrid Mellers who, together with Charles Hamm, pioneered the study of popular music as a respectable undertaking within musicology before popular music studies itself began to become a continuing and critical intellectual tradition in the late 1970s. As with Charles Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music has not been restricted to scholarship alone. As founding Chair of the Department of Music at the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers created an intellectual and institutional environment within which it was possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike to undertake the serious academic study of popular music. Without this environment it is possible that the careers both of Richard Middleton and myself would have turned out differently.

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.

Female Christian prose today: A failed search for new women’s subjectivity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
E. Chelpanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social System ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In her analysis of books by Maya Kucherskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva, and Yulia Voznesenskaya, the author investigates the history of female Christian prose from the 1990s until the present day. According to the author, it was in the 1990s, the period of crisis and transformation of the social system, that female Christian writers were more vocal, than today, on the issues of the new post-Soviet female subjectivity, drawing on folklore imagery and contrasting the folk, pagan philosophy with the Christian one, defined by an established set of rules and limitations for the principal female roles. Thus, the folklore elements in Kucherskaya’s early works are considered as an attempt to represent female subjectivity. However, the author argues that, in their current work, Kucherskaya and other representatives of the so-called female Christian prose tend to choose different, objectivizing methods to represent female characters. This new and conservative approach may have come from a wider social context, including the state-imposed ‘family values’ program.

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