Popular Music Vol[1]. 2 Theory and Method

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2003

Symbolic Interaction, 2006

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.

Ph. D. dissertation defended at the University of Huddersfield, U.K. A commentary on my publications on 1) Music and Society in Italy; 2) A psychoanalytical interpretation on myths on the origins of music, and the minimalist turn of the 1980s; 3) Bob Dylan and American culture; 4) Italian singer-songwriters; 5) Popular music as a planetary experiment.

Routledge, 2017

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music by taking the perspective of developments in contemporary art music as a point of departure to open up multiple new paradigms. " Expanded approaches " for popular music analysis is broadly defined as any compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept outside the domain of common practice tonality that shapes the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic com-monalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.

IASPM@Journal, 2013

Using as its platform Philip Tagg's 2011 article 'Caught on the back foot: Epistemic inertia and visible music', this essay identifies gaps in the literature of popular music studies. In particular it discusses aspects and forms of music-making which do not fit the model of popular music based on modern mediations and commodification, but which are nonetheless crucial to an understanding of the history and present state of the relationship between music, affect and society. These are discussed under the headings 'vernacular music' and 'corporeality', both of which are largely occluded by theoretical models that deploy conceptual categories inappropriate in the analysis of sonic phenomenologies. The essay proposes a greater interdisciplinary and historical range, and a closer link between the study of music and the physiology and physics of sonicity and noise.

2016

In the mid-1970s, my approach to popular music was shaped by aesthetical categories developed in the fields of Euroclassical music and continental philosophy. In fact, my interest in the avant-garde movements of the 20th century predated my involvement with popular music. In 1980, however, when I completed my philosophy thesis on Arnold Schonberg at the “Universita degli Studi” in Milan, Italy, I had already been working for years in the field of rock, jazz, and folk music. Now that the borders between musical languages have become more porous, my double background in classical and popular music would not be unusual. In late-1970s Italy, it was. Yet in my mind, the two worlds co-existed and have co-existed since. From this dual commitment to the intellectual reasons of criticism and the raisons du coeur of passionate involvement with all genres of music, four themes have emerged in my scholarly production: Section A. The 1977-1982 sociological phase now revived thanks to the new edi...

Contemporary Popular Music Studies: Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 2017, red. Marija Dumnić Viltijević, Ivana Medić. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019

In this paper, I argue that the implicit or explicit dependence on hegemony theory within popular music studies has resulted in diminishing the relevance of the aural dimension of culture and neglecting a wider consideration of the political effects of sound. Instead, I advocate a turn towards posthegemonic theory which employs vocabularies of "affect," habit," and multitude" to account for the physical effects of sonic intensities without trying to collapse them into meanings. Offering a brief analysis of two contrasting examples of popular music practices in a corporate environment-company song and lip dub-I demonstrate how posthegemonic approach might extend the analytical capacities of popular music studies by providing ways of thinking and doing politics that are not dependent on establishing consent or exercising coercion, but rather on immanent processes that are activated and reproduced beneath consciousness.

International Journal of Cultural Studies

Pop music is an important symbolic good, the advent of which in the 1950s and 1960s is not well understood. In this article I argue that this is due to the fact that its consumption is not usually analyzed. I therefore analyze survey and group interviews material to argue that pop music was not just an instrument in conflict between generations, but that it increasingly came to be associated with socio-cultural meanings such as success, independence and sexuality. In understanding the life world of consumers of pop music, I find that it is essential to know whom it represents but also what it represents. q K E Y W O R D S q consumption q consumption institutions q life world q pop music q symbolic goods 'Look around and choose your own ground.' Pink Floyd

Context: A Journal of Music Research, 2007

Facing the 'Crisis' In the original invitation to the constructively titled colloquium 'Renegotiating Musicology,' of which this article is a result, organisers suggested that participants should feel free to think as broadly as possible about their particular places in the discipline. This is an unusually fraught request with regard to the musicological study of popular music. For as several respected scholars have noted, the field of popular music studies has quite simply failed to craft a coherent and cohesive body of theories and methods for the analysis of its chosen objects of study. Further, for some, this lack of coherence constitutes a full-blown disciplinary crisis. 1 As Lawrence Grossberg has noted in a scathing essay-in which he registered his disappointment with the entire field-we have a lot of theoretical problems, but not a lot of theories to solve them. Worse, according to Grossberg, few of the explanations we do have are specific to a discipline that lacks a common analytical language. While Grossberg might rightly criticise a familiar array of trans-historical, de-contextualised, apparently universal concerns for a field he seems to suspect may not actually exist, his existential angst is ultimately misleading. The distinction 'popular music' upon which so many of his careful ruminations are based is itself a false analytic category. There is no unifying process, principle or set of common materials that anyone can point to that all versions or iterations of what we call popular music share. Significant exceptions to the standard array of definitions can always be found within music that is nevertheless broadly recognised to be firmly within the family. Too often social categories such as 'popular music' masquerade as aesthetic facts reinscribing essentialist notions of music.