Thom Andrewes
Manchester-based, starting a PhD at Queen Mary University of London in performance studies approaches to musical performance.
I'm interested in the song form, both live and recorded, and its relationship to speech, fiction, narrative and theatre within certain listening cultures. My long-term project is to help develop an approach to pop musicology that draws on narratology, performance theory and pragmatics, bringing 'formal' analysis into line with 'vernacular' listening practices and 'metaphorical' pop music discourses.
Other research interests include political music; music theatre and music video; live music as theatre/ritual; music and failure; music writing as literary genre; queer negativity in music and film; 'Culture' as commons (and communist logics in mainstream cultural policy); camp, kitsch and twee aesthetics; and Christmas as popular utopia.
I write on pop music, music theatre and aesthetics on my blogs: the Biting Point (www.thebitingpoint.wordpress.com) and the Night Mail (www.thenightmail.blogspot.com). I curate an archive of video-music called States of Exception (www.statesofexception.tumblr.com). I'm also active as a theatre-maker, performer and composer.
I'm interested in the song form, both live and recorded, and its relationship to speech, fiction, narrative and theatre within certain listening cultures. My long-term project is to help develop an approach to pop musicology that draws on narratology, performance theory and pragmatics, bringing 'formal' analysis into line with 'vernacular' listening practices and 'metaphorical' pop music discourses.
Other research interests include political music; music theatre and music video; live music as theatre/ritual; music and failure; music writing as literary genre; queer negativity in music and film; 'Culture' as commons (and communist logics in mainstream cultural policy); camp, kitsch and twee aesthetics; and Christmas as popular utopia.
I write on pop music, music theatre and aesthetics on my blogs: the Biting Point (www.thebitingpoint.wordpress.com) and the Night Mail (www.thenightmail.blogspot.com). I curate an archive of video-music called States of Exception (www.statesofexception.tumblr.com). I'm also active as a theatre-maker, performer and composer.
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Masters Dissertation by Thom Andrewes
Papers by Thom Andrewes
The bulk of the essay constitutes a thematic review of the online discourse surrounding Lemonade—as led and curated by black female commentators, critics and academics—on the premise that writing about a musical phenomenon involves making a decision regarding what that phenomenon ‘is’. I attempt to demonstrate the political stakes of such a decision, both for the minoritarian group excluded from full membership of a ‘universal’ public sphere (i.e., black women) and for the class of professional critics whose claim to authority relies on the concealment of such a decision.
I conclude by arguing that Lemonade facilitates the strategic construction of a meta-discourse, equating music writing with public speech more generally. The legitimisation of this discourse allowed black female writers to lay claim to the centre of the public sphere, and thus—via the construction of Beyoncé as star, artist and individual—to the ‘universal’ category of generic, rational human subject, from which black women are routinely excluded.
The first essay confronts the unstable and dissatisfactory category of 'music theatre', via a book review of Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi's The New Music Theatre (2008). Through the course of the next two essays, I then attempt to reconstruct a sturdier definition of music theatre, on the basis of newly posited definitions of 'music' and 'theatre', inspired by Richard Schechner and Alain Badiou. My listener-oriented definition of 'music' relies on a concept derived from theatre: becoming-music as a dramaturgy of sound. This means that both 'theatre' and 'music' are defined according to the same basic operation—presentation-as-world—yet, while the 'world' of theatre is always mimetic, the 'world' of music-qua-music is always exceptional to the 'real' world. Thus, the operation of theatre can be considered a solution to the impossibility of musical reality: music theatre is the 'presentation-as-world' of the musically possible.
The picture of 'music theatre' that emerges from this framework is a very broad one, which necessarily includes all live musical performance. In the third essay, I outline a theory of musical genre that differentiates between the various aesthetic criteria that arbitrate within this wide field, making different demands of different performances on the basis of different genres. At the heart of this theory is a notion, borrowed from Schechner and Victor Turner, of music theatre as ritual. The result is a quasi-anthropological survey of genre rituals (from pop and jazz, to opera and experimental music) as they relate to the 'worlds' of music and theatre, the modality of music's 'appearance' within the fictional world presented, and the 'aesth-ethic' criteria of success within each ritual performance.
The bulk of the essay constitutes a thematic review of the online discourse surrounding Lemonade—as led and curated by black female commentators, critics and academics—on the premise that writing about a musical phenomenon involves making a decision regarding what that phenomenon ‘is’. I attempt to demonstrate the political stakes of such a decision, both for the minoritarian group excluded from full membership of a ‘universal’ public sphere (i.e., black women) and for the class of professional critics whose claim to authority relies on the concealment of such a decision.
I conclude by arguing that Lemonade facilitates the strategic construction of a meta-discourse, equating music writing with public speech more generally. The legitimisation of this discourse allowed black female writers to lay claim to the centre of the public sphere, and thus—via the construction of Beyoncé as star, artist and individual—to the ‘universal’ category of generic, rational human subject, from which black women are routinely excluded.
The first essay confronts the unstable and dissatisfactory category of 'music theatre', via a book review of Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi's The New Music Theatre (2008). Through the course of the next two essays, I then attempt to reconstruct a sturdier definition of music theatre, on the basis of newly posited definitions of 'music' and 'theatre', inspired by Richard Schechner and Alain Badiou. My listener-oriented definition of 'music' relies on a concept derived from theatre: becoming-music as a dramaturgy of sound. This means that both 'theatre' and 'music' are defined according to the same basic operation—presentation-as-world—yet, while the 'world' of theatre is always mimetic, the 'world' of music-qua-music is always exceptional to the 'real' world. Thus, the operation of theatre can be considered a solution to the impossibility of musical reality: music theatre is the 'presentation-as-world' of the musically possible.
The picture of 'music theatre' that emerges from this framework is a very broad one, which necessarily includes all live musical performance. In the third essay, I outline a theory of musical genre that differentiates between the various aesthetic criteria that arbitrate within this wide field, making different demands of different performances on the basis of different genres. At the heart of this theory is a notion, borrowed from Schechner and Victor Turner, of music theatre as ritual. The result is a quasi-anthropological survey of genre rituals (from pop and jazz, to opera and experimental music) as they relate to the 'worlds' of music and theatre, the modality of music's 'appearance' within the fictional world presented, and the 'aesth-ethic' criteria of success within each ritual performance.