Is there popular music out there?

Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 2014

This book is about Italian popular music. But how would its subject be referred to in Italy? Which terms do Italians use to designate the concept usually referred to, in English, by the expression "popular music?" A minority of Italian speakers actually uses the English term: academics and students (not all of them), music critics (not all of them), musicians and people in the music business (just a few). But it can be said that the number of Italians who understand the meaning of this expression-as intended by popular music scholars around the world-is increasing. "Popular music" began to appear in Italian in the 1980s and 1990s, when the first wave of international popular music studies found its way into Italian journals such as Musica/Realtà, and when some early "classics" were translated into Italian. The proceedings of the Second International Conference of IASPM (Italian version) were published in 1985, with the title What Is Popular Music? 41 saggi, ricerche, interventi sulla musica di ogni giorno; the translation of Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music was published in 1994 as Studiare la popular music; a collection of essays by Philip Tagg, which came out the same year, was titled Popular Music. Da Kojak al rave; and the 2002 second edition of Franco Fabbri's Il suono in cui viviamo was subtitled Saggi sulla popular music. Of course, at least since the 1960s many Italians had been aware that "pop music" (in Italian: musica pop) was an abbreviation of "popular music," but they understood it as a foreign genre that some Italian musicians were copying. Starting from the 1970s, and especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, there was an attempt to use the expression musica popolare, a literal translation of "popular music," to designate the same semantic area covered by the English term-a symptom of the growing influence of Anglophone music journalism and popular music studies. Yet musica popolare had been widely used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to refer to folk music (orally transmitted, traditional music), and as such it had been appropriated by folklorists and ethnomusicologists. 1 To avoid possible semantic and academic conflicts, the term musica popolare contemporanea was introduced, and enjoyed some support by music critics and politicians. It was used in the text of a legislative proposal presented to Italian Parliament, aiming to modify existing regulations on the public

Music History and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Anastasia Belina, Kaarina Kilpiö and Derek B. Scott, Routledge, 2019

What we now call ‘popular music’ isn’t simply the Anglo-American mainstream from the Tin Pan Alley era (or even the 1950s) onward, with the optional addition of a handful of local genres, styles, and scenes: it’s an extremely varied set of music events that became visible and audible almost simultaneously in many places around the world since the early decades of the Nineteenth century. If we accept this idea, then a popular music historian has to face a number of challenging questions. Which sources are available? How reliable are they? In which languages were they conceived, written or recorded? Within which theoretical framework can they be studied? It’s a huge work, but it must also produce a manageable output, in the form of handbooks, audiovisual products, web pages, and other material suitable for teaching and dissemination.

2011

An immediate problem facing anyone committed to the task of mapping out a conceptual territory for cultural sociology in the field of popular music studies is where to begin. Part of the issue here relates to popular music studies' status as a field of academic study already overlain with a rich diversity of disciplinary approaches.

Contemporary Popular Music Studies: Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 2017, 2019

This is the second volume in the series that documents the 19th edition of the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. The volume contains contributions on the variety of musical genres from all over the world. Authors engage with the role of popular music in contemporary music education, as well as definitions and conceptualizations of the notion of ‘popular’ in different contexts. Other issues discussed in this volume include methodologies, the structure and interpretations of popular music scenes, genres and repertoires, approaches to education in this area, popular music studies outside the Anglophone world, as well as examinations of discursive and technological aspects of numerous popular music phenomena.

To open the fourth volume of the Journal of World Popular Music, we present a rich issue that brings together a significant number of scholars working on different areas related to popular music studies in the world, and who offer their expertise from a variety of academic disciplines. We see this issue as further demonstrating the contemporary wealth of research in the interdisciplinary study of world popular music, and the essential work conducted around the globe to shed light upon the vital role that popular music takes in contemporary societies and cultures. Thus, besides the geographical reach of JWPM, which here materializes through the investigations of the processes of production, distribution, dissemination and preservation of popular music in Mali, Madagascar, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Turkey, the US and Hungary, the journal is deeply committed to the publication of research that generates innovative perspectives on different fields and areas of research in world popular music. Issue 4.1 demonstrates this commitment, exploring such current and diverse issues as the role of the internet, the state, identity, citizenship, heritage, museum and archive studies in the construction and circulation of world popular music. The range of contributions featured in this issue of JWPM further posits the journal as an essential outlet for scholars interested in (world) popular music studies, or enthusiasts who wish to hear about and engage in current and cutting-edge debates surrounding popular music forms worldwide.

2012

Latin American scholars of the 1980s generation have been strongly criticised for their supposed uncritical adoption of models from European and North American musicology. Thirty years after the start of IASPM, and after a little more than ten years of Latin-American IASPM, it might be fruitful to examine this assumption and offer a reassessment. This is even more appropriate considering the fact that the "founding fathers" of Latin American IASPM received their doctorates in the late 1980s and early 1990s in North America and Europe, which means that they were aware of the establishment of popular music studies, and of the classic texts of the field, especially those in ethnomusicology, musicology, history and anthropology, with some touches of literary criticism and sociology. However, after receiving their degrees, Latin American music scholars rolled up their sleeves in order to plan and initiate graduate courses and, more importantly, establish research groups in order to construct a field for popular music studies within the academy. The results of this endeavour form the essential focus of this paper.

There can be little doubt that the usage of the concept of genre remains widespread in discourses around music, cinema, theatre, literature. However, for a long period of time, musicologists have paid little attention to genre, which is considered to be an outdated legacy of positivism: a concept belonging to amateurish criticism or daily musical practice – and incompatible with the hegemonic ideology of ‘absolute music’. In the commentary that follows, the history of my own efforts to bring genre back to the theoretical core of musicological debate is outlined, and intertwined with the work of other scholars (sociologists, cultural theorists, anthropologists) who helped re-define genre as a useful concept in the scholarly study of music. Popular music, as a set of genres from which paramusical elements – and related social conventions – were never expelled as spurious (as formalist musicology did with respect to Western art music), was obviously my main focus, although in some writings I deal with classical music, electronic music and traditional (folk) music. After examining at some length the development of my theory of genre (definitions, ‘rules’ and conventions, inter-genre relations and intra-genre diachronic development), the commentary focuses on a number of studies of specific (mostly popular) genres, music scenes, forms, artists, where genre is an underlying concept. One of the most delicate aspects of any theory about genre, and one that has been at the centre of my investigation for so long, is that of diachronic development; as a consequence, the history of popular music became at some point a favourite subject for my study – my contributions are outlined in the commentary which can be read in conjunction with my writings on the subject. Finally, a section is dedicated to my writings on music technology, music industry, and media. In the conclusions my work on genre is contextualised nationally and internationally, with some considerations on linguistic issues; the commentary ends with a brief outline of my future research plans.