FRITH, Simon. org. Popular Music - Critical Concepts in media and cultural studies. Vol.1 (2025)

Popular Music Studies

International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy

To trace the connections between popular music studies and communication research is to recognize the nebulous, interdisciplinary, and often uncertain character of both fields of study. For sure, the study of both existed long before there were defined disciplines dedicated to either. As such, tracing their linkages requires thinking about the place of music in a number of adjacent fields—sociology, psychology, journalism, American studies—as well as how communication has conceived of popular media such as television , film, and radio, which are intrinsically musical even if not always understood that way. This makes for something of a " secret history " of popular music and communication theory, and there is little room in this brief treatment to uncover it all. What follows will therefore mark, in broad strokes, some revelations that arise from thinking about these two areas of academic inquiry in tandem, as well as a few notes toward what popular music studies has offered—and may offer in the future—to the field of communication, especially in the American context.

What is popular music? And what isn’t? An assessment, after 30 years of 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.

Twenty First Century Popular Music Studies

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.

Syllabus: Popular Music

Contemporary Popular Music Studies (Front Matter)

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.

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches

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.

Towards a cultural sociology of popular music

Journal of Sociology, 2008

Key terms in popular music and culture

1999

ROUNDTABLE: THE FUTURE OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 1999

Perspectives in Popular Musicology

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.