Popular Music Studies Today

Frontmatter

Natural Highs: Timbre and Chills in Electronic Dance Music

Abstract

The composition of contemporary electronic dance music (EDM) requires considerable technical expertise and finesse in the creation and manipulation of sound timbre. The function of timbre in this type of music is critical for creating dynamic structure, tension and release in a work to provide the conditions for a listener to be emotionally moved in the manner intended by the composer.

The analysis of existing compositional works will seek to gauge the extent of emotional impact through the psychophysiological response to music known as musical chills or frisson. This response is often felt by the listener as a tingle or shiver which may spread down the back, neck, arms or legs. Current research into physiological responses to music and their relationship to emotions, along with traditional musical analysis of chill response sections of music, rarely takes timbre into account. This paper intends to draw attention to and explore the relationship of timbre to the chill response in EDM, with reference to specific sound creation and manipulation production techniques.

Nino Auricchio

The Monkey is Amused to Death: Roger Waters’ Masterpiece and its Commercial Failure

Abstract

Despite the compelling concept, music, and the scope of Roger Waters’ 1992 solo album Amused to Death, the critics and the public received it negatively. In fact, Waters’ polemical approach to the cultural and social consequences of the technological developments demonstrated a poor commercial performance, compared with Pink Floyd’s projects such as Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall. Disputing the opinions of the pundits and the fans, in this paper I argue that the foremost reason for the negative reception of Amused to Death was Waters’ unprecedented socio-political criticism of the mass media and warfare, where he articulates that the broadcasting of war has become a form of entertainment in the television news. Following his path in writing Pink Floyd’s seminal concept albums, in Amused to Death Waters declares his harshest and gloomiest pacifistic and socialistic messages, which have evoked the adverse reactions to it. He not only denounces the superficial entertainment industry, but also tears apart the idea of war. Exploring Waters’ conceptual, lyrical, and compositional genius, as well as album’s Grammy-winning mix and sound-effects, I assert that Amused to Death stands out as Waters’ highest achievement both in the musical content and its extra-musical manifesto.

Navid Bargrizan

Popular Music Studies in the Context of Post-Communist Historiography in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The contribution focuses on the transformations of the field of Popular Music Studies in the Czech Republic within the transition to a post-communist historiography, both in academic and non-academic discourse. Attention is paid to the changes of the contents of the field of Popular Music Studies, specifically its conception and interpretation of popular music history, including thematic preferences and evaluative standards. In this respect, the paper will discuss the key determinants of Czech post-communist popular music historiography, especially in the form of the impact of authority figures, such as a dissident, writer, philosopher and president Václav Havel, who strongly influenced Czech humanities by his holistic concept of the function of art and music, based on the dialectical relation of aesthetic, noetic and ethical aspects, namely, relation of an artistic beauty, a true reflection of a specific reality and a service to a moral good.

Jan Blüml

Popular Music Analysis and Social Semiotics: The Case of the Reggae Voice

Abstract

Social semiotics is a new school of semiotics that has over the years been applied to the study of visual and multimodal communication in particular. As the study of signifying practices within certain cultural groups is one of the main fields of interest within social semiotics, it appears safe to assume that these ideas will be of interest in the analysis of popular music. In this article, I will present some preliminary results of my ongoing doctoral research on reggae and dancehall aesthetics as negotiated in Germany. Using methods drawn from cultural sociology, social semiotics, and musicology, I aim to empirically describe the genre’s discursive, visual, and sounding phenomena. In this context, musical diversity is identified as an essential part of the aesthetic discourse – both generally speaking as well as with regard to the singer’s voice. Using the song “Taking Over” by the vocalist Sizzla as an example, I would like to show how vocal expression can be interpreted aesthetically. In general, the intent of this article is to illustrate ideas of popular music analysis as inspired by social semiotics.

Benjamin Burkhart

The Presentation of the Self in the Popular Song

Abstract

This work aims to explore the potentialities of Erving Goffman’s theory about the presentation of the Self in everyday life for the sociological study of popular song. Our argument is that, as other social expression forms, the popular song operates a stylization of every day’s life materials to create representations of social characters and situations. As Goffman identified self-representation codified forms in quotidian situations, there is in the popular song arrangements of representational codes to give a convincing form to the Self that is depicted in popular songs. Therefore, we can analyze the procedures used to create an “illusion of real” in the song (in the sense of convincing the listener of the authenticity of feelings and facts depicted) by using Goffman’s concepts such as “definition of the situation”, “performance”, “expression equipment” and “behavior display”. This way, it is possible to observe the popular song under the perspective of a reconstruction of the social life through the organization of expressive resources, which can consist of sounds, words or gestures. That makes from it a rich resource for the sociological study of self-representations.

Pedro Cesar Pires

“Chinese Got Talent”: Popular Music Singing Competitions in Taiwan and China

Abstract

Popular music industries in Taiwan and China were once disconnected when the Chinese Civil War separated the republican and communist leaderships. It wasn’t until 1987 that both leaders signed the agreement allowing people from opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait to reconnect. Afterward, musicians in Taiwan and China have cooperated to dominate this new Chinese mass market. However, only few musicians were able to succeed in both places. When “British got Talent,” the singing competition, became internationally popular, similar programs were replicated in Chinese society. Those competitions soon received overwhelming success in Taiwan and China because they were the first live television shows that invited singers from Taiwan and China to compete alongside one another. Consequently, more than ten million views and discussions were registered on Youtube. Furthermore, singers from those shows received rapid national success. Scrutinizing performances from those competitions, this paper discusses the way they reflect the altered social structures from Taiwan’s republican and China’s communist governments. Through categorizing those performances into: Chinese Rock, Pentatonic song, Folk music and Hip Hop, I argue that social background acts as a catalyst to transform the way singers interpret music. It also affects the way audiences respond to the live performances.

Ya-Hui Cheng

Unpacking Performance in the Pop-Rock Biopic

Abstract

Pop-rock biopics have developed a range of strategies to render historicized performances, especially those considered as pivotal in a musician’s biography. The goal of such films is not merely to narrate the historical impact of live events, but to “re-perform” them for a composite audience, partly familiar with, yet partly experiencing the music for the first time. By highlighting that performance scenes have constituted moments of technical virtuosity throughout the genre’s history, I suggest that pop-rock biopics be regarded as witnessing devices to shifting paradigms of performance affordance in film. In translating live musical experience into an audio-visual narrative medium, these films reactivate the performative potential of past events and allow us to reflect on their intermedial constituents. I draw on examples taken from different stages of the genre’s history, showing how they variously include combinations of constructive devices, which, going beyond issues of verisimilitude, conjure up hyper-real experiences that trigger notions of presence, memory, and nostalgia.

Maurizio Corbella

From Earth Angel to Electric Lucifer: Castrati, Doo Wop and the Vocoder

Abstract

The transformed, angelic voice is in a precarious position—between corpus and void, heaven and earth. As “sacred monsters” of the Baroque, the castrati had voices described as otherworldly and “strangely disembodied.” An amalgam of male, female and childlike qualities, the castrato voice is angelic in its liminality, a kind of tonal apotheosis. The 1950s, a time preoccupied with heaven, from winged cars to airwave Earth Angels, saw a curious renaissance of this Baroque ideal. With doo-wop, the seemingly sexless voice of the singer shares the trait of sounding angelic with the mythic androgyny of the castrati—both blur gender lines through vocal manipulation. Technology also allows the transformed voice to lose all traces of the body, as in Bruce Haack’s psychedelic song cycle The Electric Lucifer, “a battle between heaven and hell” which employs a voice put through a prototype vocoder to represent both angel and devil. Here, the voice is free to achieve multiple unearthly identities. This presentation will examine the imbrication of heavenly narrative and transformed voice in popular music, focusing on how this disjunct between voice and body can be understood as prism through which to explore shifting socio-political anxieties and desires.

Virginia Dellenbaugh

Crowdfunding is Not for Everybody: Performance in the Art of Asking

Abstract

This paper has as main goal to understand the importance of performance inside a process of crowdfunding, from the video produced by the independent musician Amanda Palmer, for the platform Kickstarter, to promote the project for launching her album, Theater is Evil. One of Kickstarter’s main requirements are audiovisual productions that assist in the dissemination of artists and their projects. Such videos seem to be the leading engagement products to attract “backers”. However, the hypothesis is that this is not the ultimate persuasion of this model. Resorting to Reception Studies as methodological basis and using internet ethnographic as inspiration, comments relating the video of Palmer’s project, present at the Youtube and Kickstarter platforms, were analyzed. Thus, it was possible to observe that not only the audiovisual performance is important to move “backers”, but also there’s a need of previous knowledge of the artist by these financiers.

Beatriz Medeiros, Natalia Dias

When I’m (Not) ‘Ere

Abstract

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno repeatedly posits what might be called the place-holder thesis; the notion that autonomous art keeps open a space for ‘a praxis beyond the spell of labour’ (AT 12) or functions as a ‘plenipotentiary of a liveable world’ (AT 40). Popular music, of course, for Adorno, has no such function, merely affirming the ever same of domination.

In this paper, I would like to suggest that

1)

Certain places, both as locations and as names, have functioned as metonyms for the utopian in popular music: the locations we go to, or go back to, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cali etc. and

 

2)

Despite Adorno’s strictures, we can use his notion of the ‘non-identical’ as exemplified in the place-name to interrogate this power.

 

Stan Erraught

Binaurality, Stereophony, and Popular Music in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

Stereophonic headphones were first marketed in the USA in 1958. Binaural listening (via headphones) became one of the favorite ways for fans to listen to rock albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Stereophonic mixes, however, were not meant for binaural listening. Sound engineers rarely used headphones, and generally refused to mix wearing headphones, explaining they couldn’t get a proper balance if they didn’t listen to the studio monitors. Often they would listen to the result of a mix with cheap shelf loudspeakers, or even car loudspeakers, claiming that those would be the most common sound sources used by the audience; strangely enough, headphones were not used for this purpose in the studio. While the association and historical overlap of stereophonic mixes, advances in studio technology and consumer audio, and the rise of psychedelia and progressive rock have been commented (more in accounts on or by individual artists/bands/producers than in general terms) the issues of binaurality, of stereophony, and of their relations with popular music has seldom been explored. The paper focuses on the musicological aspects of binaurality and stereophony, both at poiesic and aesthesic levels.

Franco Fabbri

Adele’s Hello: Harmonic Ambiguity & Modal Inflection in Contemporary Pop

Abstract

Composed by Adele Adkins and Greg Kurstin, Hello displays a highly developed semiotic aesthetic, through which nuanced emotional messages are passed. This emotional subtext is sophisticated and signifies a departure from earlier conventions by the continued abstraction of its cultural references. Not only is the language of contemporary pop straying from earlier forms, it is establishing new lexicons of emotional signification, which draw on aural references interior to the genre to transmit and qualify emotional meaning. Attributes of this new language include:

1.

The diminishing role of the V chord and conventional V-I cadence

 

2.

The weakening presence of Major Diatonic Tonality or Ionian mode

 

3.

The increased importance of tonic and subdominant relationships

 

4.

The increased use of modal inflection and secondary harmonic colour

 

In this paper, I will explore ways in which the harmonic and melodic language of Hello creates an emotive subtext, imbuing the vocal narrative with heightened feeling, enhancing the sense of intimacy between artist and listener and ultimately acting as a filter through which the educated listener interprets the song and gauges its authenticity. In the process, I will attempt to rationalize these semiotic aspects of the music in relationship to global pop’s evolving aesthetic.

Grant Davidson Ford

Mapping Popular Music Studies in Turkey Onto Studies in the Anglophone World

Abstract

This paper tries to map studies in Turkey onto studies in the Anglophone world. First, we briefly discuss the historical differences between studies based on shift from the sociology of arabesk in Turkey and the sociology of rock in Anglophone popular music studies to the sociology of popular music. Then, we mainly focus on similarities by a critical look toward a parallel shift in theoretical premises from various Marxisms to postmodern theories, gradually from the 1990s onwards. We try to argue that such a shift corresponds to a discernable lack of critical discourse on the destructive results of neoliberal political, economical and cultural policies in popular music studies. Neo-Ottomanism as the new official ideology of Turkey has been applied for the neoliberal transformation and Islamization of society, for more than a decade. However, popular music practices neither supporting this process nor resisting it could hardly find their place within studies. Similarly, studies in the Anglophone world have also been far from its past critical discourses in a certain degree which could be regarded as a point of convergence between studies in Turkey and the Anglophone world.

Ali C. Gedik

Power and Resistance in Iranian Popular Music

Abstract

The case of popular music of post-revolution Iran is believed to be so controversial since being advocated as a challenge towards religious structures, political power and social injustice and gender issues by some officials, media and academics. This paper looks at wider opportunities of studying popular music – as a form of popular culture – with respect to the social relationships of power and resistant in comparison to some other literature that were limited to state political conceptualisation of power and resistant, amalgamation of popular music and art music, Eurocentric analysis over popular music in the Middle East as the production of social classes, as well as other pathological studies inside Iran concerning generation gap and youth culture. Alternatively, this paper revises repeatedly mentioned facts and events in literature and then (re)contextualises and reinterprets the concept of popular music, power and resistance in contemporary Iran. The result is a wider understanding of the social struggles over several discursive representation of popular culture beyond politics, social classes, religion, etc.

Amin Hashemi

‘Gear Acquisition Syndrome’ – A Survey of Electric Guitar Players

Abstract

In 1996, Steely Dan guitarist Walter Becker coined the term ‘guitar acquisition syndrome’ to describe the guitarist’s compulsive and unrelenting urge to buy and own instruments. As this tendency applies to other musicians as well the term soon became what now is called G.A.S. – Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Although popular music research has emphasized the relevance of music technology, this cultural practice, shared by amateur and professional musicians alike, has not found any considerable attention yet.

By following a quantitative design with a sample of 418 electric guitar players, this article contributes to an empirical foundation of G.A.S. from a music technology perspective. It evaluates the dimension of the syndrome and explores the musicians’ intentions and aesthetic ideals behind their use of technology. The study found indications for the guitar players’ tendency to be afflicted with G.A.S., and provides insights into person-related factors like age, experience, professionalism and genre affinity.

Jan-Peter Herbst

Performing Disorder

Abstract

The presentation is focusing on the dialectics of agency and structure, encompassing social and cultural practices in the context of popular music studies. The idea of this contribution is to highlight a cultural anthropologist’s perspective on collective interactions. We want to exemplify this methodology on the situations of heavy metal and hard rock concerts. Our approach is centered around German and Anglophone enquiries and literature on metal and hard rock shows. Concerts are highly performative events combining practices of creativity, attention and recognition that manifest in the synergies between artists and audience. The evocation of atmospheres through sound and motion produces a space for distinction and identification. Thus the concert as a cultural event allows to observe the processes of signification and subjectification. This approach can be seen as an orientation for ethnographic works in qualitative research.

Peter Hinrichs, Oleg Pronitschew

From Psychedelia to Djent – Progressive Genres as a Paradox of Pop Culture

Abstract

Progressive rock has, as a popular music genre from the very beginning, separated itself from pop culture extensively. It wanted to be the elite, the modern, and the innovative in new forms of art. Ideas of “art rock” do not expire and with time gave rise to the new, transgressive trends: neo-progressive in the ‘80s, progressive metal and mathcore in the ‘90s, and, recently, djent. At the expense of greater commercial success, many bands still cut off from the rock-metal mainstream and operate independently, incessantly exceeding stylistic and aesthetical boundaries. Moreover, poetics of their music often reveal a tension between elitism and egalitarianism, intellect and corporeality, individuality and convention.

During the last few decades, classical music has also crossed the limits of the traditional, even modernistic aesthetics. If nowadays we were to consider music that is minimal, electronic, neoromantic or containing other postmodern trends as “classical”, how should we regard progressive genres? Can they be seen as synthesis of two worlds – classical and rock, or are they being created amidst a thick frontier between art and pop culture?

Andrzej Mądro

The Resonances of Political Disputes in Hong Kong China – Case Studies of Canto-pop

Abstract

Albeit technically in a more convenience way than previously, the production of Cantonese popular songs in Hong Kong, also known as Canto-pop in international context, has demonstrated its geographical uniqueness.

Hong Kong, located at the southern tip of China, is believed to be a place where ‘East meets West’. Such feature lends it great versatility in the handling of different situations including the production of popular music. While Chinese Confucian belief and Buddhist philosophical idea are in the heart of local people, the westernized value of democracy and freedom still exert great influence.

Focusing on the crucial political crisis experienced in Hong Kong, namely, the Sino-British negotiations in the Eighties, the transformation of sovereignty in the Nineties and the recent pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in 2014, the paper attempts to reveal how Canto-pop has made cultural references to a changing political situation as well as adding to its repertoire about the political changes with local cultural and musical sentiments.

Ivy Man

African Manifestations in Brazil: The Crioula Drum Dance

Abstract

This study analyses the musical manifestation of African origin in Rio de Janeiro, the Crioula Drum Dance, presented at the Quilombo Samba School’s Recreational Black Arts Association in Acari, in the city’s metropolitan area. The Quilombo, founded by the composer Candeia promotes artistic activities at its headquarters such as capoeira, jongo dance, percussion music for the community, handicrafts, academic support for public school students and the alphabetization of adults. Residents consider it a place that is theirs, a social space where they share the sociocultural activities it promotes, such as samba and drum dances held at the birthday celebrations of Candeia, at the party and prayers night for Saint George and other festivities. The Crioula Drum Dance is a circle dance that includes singing and drum playing by afro-descendents to honor Saint Benedict. Brought to Brazil in the eighteenth century by slaves from different ethnic groups, it is a form of entertainment or the paying of promises to the saint or to entities in the sites where Afro-Brazilian cults are celebrated. Currently, the Crioula Drum Dance is the expression of a social and ethnic group: the representation of an ethos seeking to keep its identity in Brazilian society.

Regina Meirelles

Mach Schau!: The Contribution of The Beatles to the Development of Visual Music in Magical Mystery Tour

Abstract

The Beatles are recognized mainly by their successful musical production and business in the global music industry. However, their use of visual and audio-visual expressions forms a constant and important catalyst for their wide outreach and sales, as their music acquired a visual dimension, functional primarily for promotional purposes. The early training of the Beatles in Hamburg, where they met a high-level photographer Astrid Kirchherr, and were required to ‘make a show’ in the clubs (Mach Schau!), contributed to their treatment of the visual act as a vehicle for experimentation distinctly from the mass-marketing strategy. As a result, they produced video-art such as Magical Mystery Tour (1967), among many other audio-visual forms for TV and feature films. The specific experimentation in this ‘failure’ film with the music Flying is contextually analyzed within the framework of contemporary achievements in visual music.

Emilio Mendoza Guardia

Shaping the pancadão: Improvisation and Studio Creativity on Rio Funk Independent Recordings from the Early 1990s

Abstract

The Rio Funk movement emerged from the hands of disc jockeys who worked on a thriving dance scene in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1989, some of them decided to try producing original tracks instead of merely spinning foreign music. Whilst DJ Marlboro, one of the pioneers, moved towards the big national media and the mainstream record industry, a group of DJs composed of Angelo “Grandmaster” Raphael, Clay Chavarri and Carlos Machado chose to go independent. They taught themselves the basics of their work – synthesizer and computer programming, digital sampling, audio tracking, mixing, editing, mastering and vinyl cutting – while making records. And counted on sound systems and dedicated radio shows for promoting the music. This paper explores the making of their records between 1989 and 1995, focusing on the original techniques and solutions developed out of improvisation and creativity in the studio and also on their contribution to establish an independent recording scene and shape the distinctive pancadão sound. It is mostly based on interviews conducted by the author with the two remaining members of the team.

Alexei Michailowsky

“What Difference Does it Make?” Studying Urban Popular Music from Before the Generalization of the Gramophone: The Example of the First World War Repertoire

Abstract

Popular Music Studies has often concentrated on music since 1945, and a wide range of tools and concepts have been developed to aid in the analysis of text, music, production, reception, performance, scene or star. How far can these approaches also be applied to the commercial musical practice of earlier times? This paper will look at my own specialized field: music hall from 1880 to 1918, mostly in Britain but also elsewhere, and particularly at the First World War period. It will examine the work which has been done on musical repertoires, industrial processes and ideological constraints, and compare and contrast this work with various Popular Music Studies approaches. The limits of our sources, and differences in the nature of the musical material will be examined. In addition, the similarities and differences between the study of songs and of other objects of cultural history from the same period will be examined.

John Mullen

Hearing Sexism – Analyzing Discrimination in Sound

Abstract

Sexism is obviously relevant in popular music, still until now no theory or method exists to analyze sexism in the sound of popular music itself. In this paper I argue that and how sexism can be analyzed in the sound of popular music, especially in voices, applying the concept of the “male gaze” developed by Laura Mulvey for feminist film critique. Therefore different “auditive pleasures” that relate to the “visual pleasures” discussed by Mulvey are analyzed in popular music. My findings suggest that popular music not only partakes in the reproduction of sexism but also that it communicates cultural conceptions of gendered embodiment, meaning the relation of the gendered subject to her/his own body. All this is exemplified in the analysis of parts of the current popular song “Closer” by the DJ-Duo The Chainsmokers featuring Halsey (Disruptor Records/Columbia 2016).

L. J. Müller

Genre Modulation as Sectional Divider

Abstract

Recent scholarship on popular music has emphasized the importance of sectionality, analyzing formal, metrical, tonal, and timbral contrasts between the sections of songs. While these approaches have yielded considerable insight into structural compositional techniques, such focused and disparate approaches invite the ques-tion of overarching stylistic or generic contrasts within songs. Genre modulation—the practice by which a number of musical parameters within a song may signal a change in genre—can be perceived in much popular music since 1950, and may be an important factor in perceptions of sectionality within popular music.

In this paper, I argue that analysis of genre modulations within songs may lead to a more comprehensive understanding of sectionality in popular music. Through examples from the Beatles and Taylor Swift, I show how genre modulations may be identified through a variety of musical parameters, and discuss how these genre modulations effectively create contrast between the sections of a song. These analyses challenge the convention of classifying songs by genre, suggesting instead that there may be considerable fluidity of genre within a single song, and that artists may consciously exploit genre modulation when seeking distinctive sectionality in their songs.

Taylor Myers

Groenemeyer – A Case Study on Situative Singing Styles

Abstract

From personality psychology it is known that certain traits appear to be stronger in certain situations. The same might apply to the personal style of musicians. The aim of this paper is to present the situative singing styles of German singer Herbert Groenemeyer regarding the distinctions studio – live, German – English and early – late career phase. Twenty four snippets of approximately 10 to 15 seconds each been analysed that have been considered typical for the singer after a phase of immersion into the material. The analysis was using the vocalmetrics software version 1.1 and nine dimensions of singing traits. Results show differences be-tween studio and live performances as well as differences in the use of roughness in regard to articulation and increased articulation over time.

Hendrik Neubauer, Tobias Marx

The Music of Samba Schools: A Challenge for Popular Music Studies

Abstract

The music of the samba schools of Rio de Janeiro, the samba-enredo, is a topic of much interest to the popular music studies. One of its most striking features is the fact that most of the composers who are dedicated to this genre does not have any formal musical education, which provides fertile ground for studies on music learning processes and oral memory. At the same time, this music has a prominent position in the brazilian phonographic market, besides being broadcasted by the country’s major television station, which lead us back to the reflections of Theodor Adorno on standardization in popular music. Added to this, the samba-enredo have its own performance circuit (the samba schools) and media coverage (blogs and websites specialized in Carnival), which contributes to the existence of a mode of production and reception that has no parallel anywhere else in Brazil and, I believe, abroad. Therefore, this article aims to discuss the challenges of analyzing this music genre, whose uniqueness lies precisely in being in the middle ground of a mass production and a musical craft still strongly marked by orality and self-taught.

Yuri Prado

Who said we were over it? On Nationalist Nostalgia and a Specter Haunting Europe: Popular Music and the Melancholic Presence of the Past

Abstract

As Europe is facing its most severe crisis since the end of World War II Second World War, populist nationalism is on the rise again all over the continent. Parties like the AfD, Ukip, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Front National refer to nostalgic imaginaries of their respective countries, while emphasizing the divisive character of national idiosyncrasies. Simultaneously, a shared European heritage and cultural values are mobilized as uniting factors against a shared Other: Islam. These constructions of both, disjunctive and shared European pasts, however obliterate rather forgotten memories of its origins – memories of colonialism and fascism. By referring to the German context in particular, and by drawing on and expanding Homi Bhabha’s conception of national temporalities, this article argues for a melancholic character of Europe in its relationship to the past – a Europe that is nostalgic for its lost Empire(s) and anxious about its fragile territorial as well as ideological borders. Giving the example of the popular song “Wir sind Wir (Ein Deutschlandlied)” by Paul van Dyk and Peter Heppner, utilized as its anthem by the German AfD in its 2015 election campaign, I will exemplify how the unresolved past is tantamount to the present, both on a national as well as the European level.

Melanie Schiller

What Lessons can Higher Popular Music Education Learn from Art School Pedagogy?

Abstract

The first UK based Popular Music degree courses appeared in 1993 and there are now forty-seven different UK universities or institutes who run popular music degree courses (Cloonan and Hulstedt, 2012). Have these courses helped or attempted to develop creatively successful artists who have had an important impact on the popular music industry? From the 1960’s to the 1990’s one of the main academic pathways for aspiring musicians was through Art School (AS) education. These have produced luminaries such as David Byrne, Brian Eno, David Bowie, John Lennon, Pete Townsend and I have listed other key graduates (Appendix 1). This research is the first part of my PHD thesis, where I will ascertain whether there are elements of AS ethos and pedagogical practices that helped to develop this rich vein of creative popular music artists. The study will examine specific practices of AS pedagogy that appear to be key to the development of creative popular music practitioners, with creatively successful musicians being defined as those who have managed to sustain a career within music, while regenerating and maintaining a key voice in the culture. Are these practices and institutional ethos replicated in Higher Popular Music Education (HPME) and could they be developed and implemented within popular music departments? As outlined in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World:

A number of the teaching and learning methodologies traditionally employed in Art Schools are transferable and mirrored in the process and production of pop – for example, practical studio-based, project-centred work, experimental approaches to media and exploration of the self, presented for critique by the peer group. (Shepherd et al., 2003: 153)

Simon Strange

Global Patchbay: Developing Popular Music Expertise Through International Collaboration

Abstract

The practice of music production is by nature, collaborative (Negus 1992, Kealey 1979). Furthermore, the connection which emerging technology now facilitates means that increasing numbers of practitioners collaborate with others around the world (Watson 2014). The way in which they do this is in keeping with Tapscott and Williams’ (2006) concept of peer-production. The collaborative and technological skills to do this are now needed to work in Popular Music production. Furthermore, learning through collaboration with others is an established and effective concept (Bruffree 1999, Gaunt et al. 2013). However, it is rarely practiced in Universities due to a variety of organisational and cultural barriers. This paper shares the practice of Global Patchbay, an initiative aimed to bring together Universities and practitioners around the world and to exploit the potential of collaborative learning in music. The project initially involved partners in the UK and the US, and continues with others from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Learners have collaborated on recording projects, mixing projects, acoustic design projects and sound design projects using cutting edge participatory technologies as well as common audio production technologies.

Mark Thorley, Gerhard Roux

Musicology of Listening – New Ways to Hear and Understand the Musical Past

Abstract

Research in music from the perspective of musicology has in listening its main tool for knowledge production. When the object of research is the music of the past, we are talking about a chain of successive receptions to which the musicologist needs to exert some “historical imagination” (Treitler 1989), that is, to explore the signs of “presentification” - music is always listened to in the present – recorded in (usually written) documents they have access to. Additionally, successive receptions mean also a chain of listening practices or “audile technique” (Sterne 2003) that historically mediated what is music or noise. My hypothesis is that new listenings can be made by an “acoustically tuned” (Ochoa Gautier 2014) investigation, not only of canonized historical narratives, but also by revisiting primary sources. The case study is entertainment related musical practices recorded in Rio de Janeiro nineteenth century newspapers, especially after Brazilian proclamation of independence from Portugal. Preliminary results show the imperial capital as a cosmopolitan city, consuming a wide variety of music, among them waltzes and exotic dances such as the Spanish Cachucha. The transmission/reception of the later will be the focus of the presentation.

Martha Ulhôa