Call for Chapters: Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies

Notes, 2004

A collection of ten essays analyzing popular music from authors

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.

should be applauded for taking on the massive task of compiling the 35 specially commissioned essays for The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music. The authors include scholars in music, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, communication, media, literature, dance and sociology, most of them working in North America, Britain and Australia. Their essays are gathered under nine headings that the editors regard as the major themes in current popular music studies: Theory and Method; The Business of Popular Music; Popular Music History; The Global and the Local; The Star System; Body and Identity; Media; Technology; and Digital Economies. Much like other handbooks on specific scholarly fields, Bennett and Waksman aim to give a sense of the current state and future directions of the field, as well as to introduce the area of study to beginners. Also, much like other handbooks, this dual aim is hard to achieve, and while many chapters in this Handbook provide good overviews for beginners, few develop substantial discussions on theoretical or methodological 'frontlines' of their sub-fields.

Taking as a starting point the exploration of music itself, analysts of pop music have had to confront the experiences, ideologies and theories unique to the specific musical style under study.

This collection of eleven essays offers an assortment of approaches to popular music analysis and addresses some controversial issues within the growing field: the value, goals, and appropriate contexts and methods of analyzing popular music, what constitutes a musical text-explored earlier by Allan F. Moore in Rock: the Primary Text-and the construction of musical meanings. 1 Building on Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music, 2 the book is a coherent collection of essays concerning ways of interpreting music, interspersed with sample analyses that take into account the larger social, cultural, and historical contexts of the works considered. A wide variety of musical genres and styles are discussed: pop, rock, R&B, soul, rap, house, television and film soundtracks, and to a lesser extent, country, smooth jazz, and metal. Most of the songs considered were recorded in the last four decades of the twentieth century, with the majority dating from either the 1970s or the 1990s.

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.

Symbolic Interaction, 2006

Victoria University of Wellington, 2011

This was another paper that came from my Masters thesis, although it had more of a methodological bent. In this paper, I looked at what traditional methods from musicology could offer popular music analysts, while acknowledging the difficulty in reconciling these methods with the ‘un-trained’ nature of most popular musicians. For my thesis, I had interviewed a range of New Zealand songwriters; the last part of the paper presented some excerpts from the interviews about how their compositions related to the ‘rules’ of music theory. The anecdotes from Fane Flaws were a real highlight of that research.