School of Music

This piece has been specially composed for the composer and jazz flautist Richard Worth. To create an improvising framework for Richard to work with, the piece uses modal scales, but in no systematic way. The various sections, melodies and chords are built from specified modes, but these interchange freely to give a sense of modulation, although the piece has a relatively restricted range of tonal centres. Whilst writing the piece, I took inspiration from the Ferdinand Léger exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Richard and I performed an improvised set there in early March 2019, taking cues from the exhibition to suggest sound material and provide inspiration. I was particularly interested in the pieces that featured scenes of construction workers on skyscrapers.

"The research presented in this volume is very recent, and the general approach is that of rethinking popular musicology: its purpose, its aims, and its methods. Contributors to the volume were asked to write something original and, at the same time, to provide an instructive example of a particular way of working and thinking. The essays have been written with a view to helping graduate students with research methodology and the application of relevant theoretical models.

The team of contributors is an exceptionally strong one: it contains many of the pre-eminent academic figures involved in popular musicological research, and there is a spread of European, American, Asian, and Australasian scholars. The volume covers seven main themes: Film, Video and Multimedia; Technology and Studio Production; Gender and Sexuality; Identity and Ethnicity; Performance and Gesture; Reception and Scenes and The Music Industry and Globalization.

The Ashgate Research Companion is designed to offer scholars and graduate students a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research in a particular area. The companion's editor brings together a team of respected and experienced experts to write chapters on the key issues in their speciality, providing a comprehensive reference to the field. "

Dr. Nicola Smith Relatively little has been written about the physical act of dancing within popular music cultures. Angela McRobbie recognised this in 1991 yet there is still a clear lack of direct engagement with the specifics of dance in popular music studies.

This paper recounts an academic journey into fandom undertaken to enable the exploration of an underground British music scene (Northern Soul). Situated within an ethnographic methodology, this project conveys the significance of submerging oneself within the object of study beyond the mere search for data but as a necessity to gain trust and subsequent research participation of members of a subterranean fan community. Explored here is the nature of fandom via the process of achieving fandom.

Told from the perspective of the researcher-turned-fan, the submersion into fan ritual, shared experience and subcultural capital proved the only pathway to unearthing the meaning behind the learnt practices deemed essential for fandom. This paper will outline the problems faced during this process, including the visibility of age as exposing the non-fan, the fan distrust of 'outsiders', and the ethically-loaded duality of one's own new-found fandom alongside the expectations of the researcher. These issues are all played out in a secretive music scene which spans two localities (UK and USA) and five decades (1960s to the present day).

With a post-subcultural theoretical framework and an auto/ethnographic approach, this paper investigates both an under-explored music fan culture and the wider significance of research methodology to fan studies.

Presentation type:
Paper

Topic area:
Fan Culture and Theory (Larsen)