Popular Music Studies

Musiikki, 2. ISSN 03551059, 2010

‘What Is Popular Music’ was the title of the Second International Conference on Popular Music Studies, held in Reggio Emilia (Italy) in 1983. IASPM (the International Association for the Study of Popular Music) already existed then, but IASPM’s Executive Committee members didn’t find it inappropriate to ask scholars from many countries to reflect about ‘what popular music really is’. Later on, it appeared that the question had found an answer: not just in the names and titles of institutions and journals, but especially in the common sense of scholars. At some point, PMS (Popular Music Studies) became a familiar acronym, indicating an interdisciplinary practice that didn’t seem to need any further explication. ‘We all know what popular music studies are’, one could hear saying. So, there came to be not only a commonsense recognition of what popular music is, but also of the dominant practices involved in its study. However, under the thin crust of such an apparently wide agreement, magmatic currents are still moving and clashing, and emerge here and there during scholarly meetings, in blogs and mailing lists, in institutional debates. This article addresses a number of issues that seem to me to be related both to that surface agreement and to those deep streams of disagreement about the identity of the popular music universe. Here are a few examples: 1. The linguistic issue: how does the expression ‘popular music’ translate into other languages? Although it is clear that many communities of scholars accepted to use the English expression anyway, how do ‘local’ terms (like música popular, musica popolare, populäre Musik, musique populaire, musique de varietés, etc.) affect the perception of this/these ‘kinds of music’? 2. The ethnocentric vs. multicultural issue: is popular music just the Anglo-American pop-rock mainstream? What is ‘world music’, then? 3. The ‘popularity’ issue: is popular music just any kind of mainstream? Does ‘unpopular popular music’ really exist? 4. The ‘modern media’ issue: is popular music just media-related music? What about nineteenth century fado, Stephen Foster’s Ethiopian songs, ‘classic’ Neapolitan song? What makes ‘media music’ popular? And is the concept of ‘media’, accepted when the expression ‘popular music’ was adopted, still valid now? 5. The socio-conceptual issue: what is ‘the people’, and what is ‘popular’? My approach to these issues will be based mainly on: 1) a cognitive/semiotic critique of musical concepts and categories; 2) a close conceptual examination of the evolution of music dissemination (and/or ‘popularity’) in the past three decades. I don’t think that it would be easy (or useful) to find a new name for the music that until thirty years ago, and in some countries much more recently, wasn’t studied in academic institutions: ‘popular music’ for me is still probably the best conventional term to indicate such a complex set of musical cultures and practices. However, I suggest that its conventional character shouldn’t be underemphasized, and that quiet assumptions about what popular music is and what popular music studies are should be treated very carefully.

Journal of Sociology, 2008

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2003

Communication Research Trends, 2006

Popular Music - Critical Concepts in media and cultural studies. Vol.1. MUSIC AND SOCIETY, 2004

Popular music studies is a rapidly expanding field with changing emphases and agenda. This is a multi-volume resource for this area of study.

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2007

IASPM@Journal, 2013

21st Century Sociology: A Reference Handbook (Volume 2), 2007

The sociology of music has enjoyed a notable boom during the final decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. This is partly evident in the rising number of publications that address music in some capacity, be it the creation, dissemination, or reception of various musical genres. In this chapter, offer an overview that attends to the three domains of production, content, and consumption. These domains represent analytical stinctions that may blur in both sociological scholarship and contemporary experience. Nevertheless, distinguishing among these domains provides a convenient way to organize the vast works known as music sociology. To employ a musical metaphor, this chapter surveys substantive themes and variations that occur when sociologists turn to music.

This paper introduces the IASPM Journal special edition entitled Twenty-First Century Popular Music Studies (PMS), in which a number of papers respond to Philip Tagg’s paper “Caught on the Back Foot: Epistemic Inertia and Visible Music” (2011). Respondents discuss a lack of ethnographic methodology in three prominent journals, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society and Journal of Popular Music Studies; the success of PMS in Australasia and the role of ethnomusicology there; the potential of ecomusicology for PMS; the proliferation of PMS courses in new universities in the UK; gender and sexuality within PMS; differences between the concepts of invisible and of ubiquitous music; and the need for addressing corporeality within PMS. The common threads of these discussions are brought out, and a number of key issues emerge. Interdisciplinarity is emphasized and the interactions of classical and popular music, ethnomusicology as well as recording and production are examined. It is suggested that PMS might consider tactical alignments with other relevant bodies in order to overcome epistemic inertia, including ethnomusicology organisations, the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production, and academics and practitioners involved in teaching and making popular music.