Popular Music Studies A brief introduction Philip Tagg Montréal, March-July 2003, September 2004 Original version entitled Popular Music Studies: Progress

Popular Music StudiesA brief introduction

Philip TaggMontréal, March-July 2003, September 2004

Original version entitled Popular Music Studies: Progress or Falsification, The Rayson Huang Lecture, Music Department, University of Hong Kong, March 2003.

www.tagg.org

http://www.tagg.org/

Presentation overview

1. Popular Music — what is it?

2. Popular Music — why study it?

3. Popular music: problems of institutionalisation• Aesthetic prejudices• Pre-existing modes of institutionalising knowledge and

the imperative of interdisciplinarity• Scribal and oral traditions, notation and recording• Historically defined and ongoing (‘unfinished’) traditions• Tendency to replace old canons with new ones

4. Suggestions for the future

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‘Art’, ‘folk’ & ‘popular’: historical flowchart

MUSIC (society with minimal division of labour)

ART MUSIC (courts, official religion)

FOLK MUSIC (slaves & proletariat)

ART MUSIC (publicly funded institutions)

FOLK MUSIC (rural proletariat)

POPULAR MUSIC(industrial proletariat, middle couches)

slavery,feudalism

industrial capitalism

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Art, Folk, Popular music: distinguishing traits

Main current mode of storage and distribution in West

oral transmission

staff notation

audio(visual) recording

folk

art

popular

Main current modes of financing production and distribution in West

independent of monetary economy

public funding, patronage

‘free’ market

folk

art

popular

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Summary of popular music’s distinguishing traits

• a phenomenon of industrialised society• no formal training required to make or use• until recently excluded from officially

sanctioned institutions of learning• most commonly stored and transmitted via

audio(visual) recording• production and distribution most commonly

financed acc. to rules of the ‘free’ market• cannot be defined in terms of musical

structure• music that is neither ‘art’ nor ‘folk’ music

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1. Popular Music —what is it?


3. Popular music: problems of institutionalisation• Aesthetic prejudices• When and how did it enter the academy?• Pre-existing modes of institutionalising knowledge and



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Music’s Ubiquity & Omnipresencealmost ¼ of our waking life

for example (estimates in mins. per day)

• 35’ music in shops, restaurants, bars, public places, at religious or sporting events, etc.

• 30’ music on radio

• 30’ music at work

• 30’ music by conscious choice (home stereo, personal stereo, concerts, clubs, etc.)

• 10’ music in video games

• 5’ music on mobile phones; telephone ‘hold’ music, etc.

= 210 minutes = 3½ hours per day

• 70’ music on TV, DVD, VHS or at movies

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Music less important now?

• Inventory & artist investment cut by 25% (12,000 fewer releases to choose from), i.e more money made per release

RIAA & IFPI say recorded music sales down 6% 1999-2001

• Sales did not start declining until AFTER Napster was shut; freely uploaded ‘independent’ music excluded from figures

• CD prices increased while average disposible income for all but top 5% decreased markedly in Europe & N. America

• [1] Games sales $8.9 bn., movies $7.4 bn., music $13.7 bn. (USA, 1999); [2] Mario has made twice as much money as all 5 Star Wars movies combined (Wired magazine, 2003); [3] ave. US child: video games 49 mins/day; [4] UK: game sales 60% > box office sales, 80% > VHS + DVD rentals; [5] cellphone ring-tone download rights turnover $1 bn (2002)

• Veronis Schuler Stevenson (Aug. 2002) predict 6.5% annual rise in consumer spending on media 2001-2006 (6.3% 1996-2001), mainly due to proliferation of cable/satellite TV and to increase in cable rates 3 times > rate of inflation (USA & UK)P Tagg

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3. Popular music: problems of institutionalisation• Aesthetic and social prejudices• When and how did popular music enter the academy?• Pre-existing modes of institutionalising knowledge and



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Social and aesthetic prejudices about popular music in the academy

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• It’s not serious and it’s not art “Fun is never serious and serious art is never fun.”

• It’s too simple to be studied seriously “Some parameters and forms of musical expression are intrinsically more important than others.”

• Including it in university curricula would lower the standard and status of musical academe “The majority of people and their musical habits are not worth serious consideration: only the ‘chosen few’ and their musical habits should be studied at university level”.

Institutional inertia of nomenclature

New areas of study must be named and identified, for example:

1. Women (51% of humanity), whose lives and activities were largely excluded from conventional accounts of history and culture in the West, had to call studies of that excluded majority “Women’s Studies”, while the areas of study which excluded them needed no qualification as “history” or “culture”. 2. The music of the popular majority (much >51%), until recently excluded from (and still relatively marginalised in) institutionalised music studies in the West, had to be identified with a special qualifier — “popular” when it entered the academy, as if it were the exception, not the rule.

• Question. Under the apartheid régime it was the Asian and African majority who had to carry identity cards, not the white minority. Why do studies that include women or the popular majority still need to be identified with a special qualifier (“women”, “popular”)?




3. Popular music: problems of institutionalisation• Aesthetic and social prejudices• When and how did popular music enter the academy?• Pre-existing modes of institutionalising knowledge and



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Popular Music Studies: dates 1877-1931

1877 Edison invents phonograph

1888 Berliner invents flat disc grammophone

1892 1st million seller (sheet music – After the Ball)1898 HMV and DGG start mass production

1903 Caruso’s recording of Vesti la giubba sells 1 million

1914 ASCAP founded

1918 Original Dixieland Jazz Band sell 1 million of Tiger Rag

1920 1st electro-acoustic recording (London)

1921 Moving coil microphones invented

1922 BBC formed; 3 million radio sets in USA

1923 Bessie Smith: 1st million seller recorded by a black woman

1924 Western Electric patent electro-magnetic recording

1927 1st sound film (Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer) released

1931 127 sound films made (only 8 in 1929); Rickenbacker develops A model electric guitars

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Popular Music Studies: dates 1934-19601934 275,000 juke boxes installed in USA over next 5 years;

Bing Crosby most popular; Muzak corporation founded

1935 75% of BBC air time is music1936 1st tape-recorded concert (BASF/AEG)

1937 50% of record releases in USA are swing band recordings

1941 1st electric blues broadcast in USA

1947 Transistors invented; Fender start producing amplifiers

1949 RCA introduce vinyl 45 rpm records

1950 ‘Hillbilly’ (C&W) accounts for 1/3 of record sales in USA

1951 1st electric bass produced by Fender

1952 1st reel-to-reel recorded stereo tapes produced by RCA

1955 Bill Haley: Rock Around The Clock; LP sales > singles

Top 40 programming format introduced

1958 Mass production breakthrough for stereo

1960 200 million units of Crosby singing White Christmas (Irving Berlin) sold since 1942P Tagg

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Popular Music Studies: dates 1963-19841963 Philips demonstrate 1st compact audiocassette

The Beatles: She Loves You and 1st LP

1965 Rolling Stones: Satisfaction; Who: My Generation1966 Moog synth., Marshall amp., Fender Rhodes piano

1967 Beatles: Sergeant Pepper; Hendrix: Are You Experienced?

1968 Woodstock Festival (300,000 participants)

1971 Popular music starts in higher education at University of Göteborg (Sweden) and Berklee (Boston, USA)

1977 Philips show CDs at Tokyo audio fair

1980 Commercial breakthrough for video; Sony Walkman sells 5 million units in 1st year (USA)

1981 MTV starts in USA; International Association for the Study

of Popular Music (IASPM); 1st issue of Popular Music (CUP)

1983 CDs launched in USA and UK

1984 Cassette sales overtake vinyl LP sales; Forschungszentrum populäre Musik (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin) foundedP Tagg

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Popular Music Studies: dates 1985-2000

mid 1980s: CD ROMs, samplers, MIDI, digital synthesizers

1988 DAT recorders; CD sales overtake vinyl sales;

Institute of Popular Music (Liverpool University) founded

1st professor of Popular Music Studies (Berlin);

1989 recordable CDs available

1992 AoL stock listed on NASDAQ; Sony corp. announce 1st loss;

DCCs & MDs marketed; Michael Jackson’s Thriller 40 mill. units in 10 yrs; Madonna signs 7-yr $700 mill. contract

1994 Viacom buy Paramount (incl. MTV) for $10 billion;

Pavarotti’s audio & video sales top 50 million units

1995-… Mergers, ‘restructuring’: thousands lose jobs in music

industry; internet distribution increasingly important

music business courses (Edinburgh, Liverpool, etc.)

1998 Specifications for DVD agreed2000 AoL buys Time-Warner (incl. CNN, CompuServe, etc.)

1990 More people recognise Mario than Mickey Mouse from music

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Entrance of popular music studies into the academy: dates (1)

1930-32 Musik und Gesellschaft: music educators, ethnomusicologists, composers express social concern about culture in daily life of popular majority in pre-fascist Germany

1940s ‘Motivation research’ (USA): subsequently used to relate target groups to musical taste

1960s [1] Frankfurt school: Adorno, Marcuse, notions of authenticity in counter-culture (Rolling Stone, USA). [2] Cultural Studies: (a) conceptual broadening of ‘culture’; media scholars with background in literary theory, political science, sociology, etc.; (b) realisation of PMus music’s importance in constructing social identity of groups of young people subcultural theory (Birmingham, UK). [3] The Times: music critic suggests Lennon & McCartney as ‘composers of the year’ (London, 1964). [4] PMus on school curriculum (Sweden, 1969).

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Entrance of popular music studies into the academy: dates (2)

1970s [1] Teacher-training & university programmes start to include PMus (1st Sweden, Austria, Germany; later in many other nations). [2] Colleges of Music start to include PMus (USA, Germany, UK, etc.).

1980s [1] IASPM formed (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) (Amsterdam, 1981); [2] 1st issue of Popular Music (C.U.P.) published.

Popular Music Studies identified as interdisciplinary (and interprofessional) area of inquiry.

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1980s-90s [1] Increased presence of PMus in tertiary education (cultural/media studies, music(ology), perf. arts colleges); [2] music business courses established.





the imperative of interdisciplinarity• Scribal and oral traditions, notation and recording• Historically defined and ongoing (‘unfinished’) traditions• Temptation to replace old canons with new ones


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General types of musical knowledge

1. Music as knowledge (knowledge in music)

2. Metamusical knowledge (about music)

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1. Music as knowledge (knowledge in music)

1a. Constructional competence

involves: creating, originating, producing, composing, arranging, performing, etc.

institutionalised in: conservatories, colleges of music, etc.

1b. Receptional competence

involves: recalling & recognising musical sounds, distinguishing between them and between their culturally specific connotations and functions

institutionalised in: ……?

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2. Metamusical knowledge (knowledge about music)

2a. Metatextual discourse

involves: ‘music theory’, conventional music analysis, identification and naming elements and patterns of musical structure, etc.

institutionalised in: departments of music(ology), colleges of music, etc.

2b. Metacontextual discourse

involves: explaining how musical practices relate to culture and society, incl. approaches from semiotics, acoustics, business studies, sociology, anthropology, etc.

institutionalised in: departments of social science; literature, media, cultural studies.P Tagg

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Scribal/oral, notation/recording

1. Hegemony of number and written word in academe, of the scribal, of the scopocentric (=fixated on vision) and relative neglect of non-verbal sound (oral/aural).

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2. Tendency to privilege parameters of musical expression storeable in Western staff notation, developed to encode complexities intrinsic to various forms of Western art music, not those of other music cultures (timbre, micro-inflexion, cross-rhythm, etc.).







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‘Finished’ and ‘Unfinished’

Demands of established institutions: Recyclable study packages�

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Canonic repertoire � (e.g. classical, jazz…)

Why? Facilitate ‘consistent assessment criteria’ over time� Facilitate ‘league table’ comparison between institutions� Facilitate management control and quantification exercises�

PMus is subject to ongoing change in terms of

Technology Musical style Sociopolitical factors� � �

Meanings Economic factors Fashions & fads � � �







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‘Popular Music’: which music is studied? Examples

1. Johann Strauss (Jr.) (1867): An der schönen blauen Donau 2. The Beatles (1967): A Day In The Life 3. Les Baxter (1957): Jungalero 4. Zara (2000): Plenitsa (Bulgarian chalga music) 5. Madonna (1991): Justify My Love [12”] (prod. W Orbit) 6. Bernard Herrmann (1960): Psycho - The Shower 7. Sam Hui: Cheers!/Yum Sing (Cantopop) 8. The Brecker Brothers (1975) Some Skunk Funk 9. The SexPistols (1977): God Save The Queen10. Snog (1992): Corporate Slave

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In July 2000 I played ten short extracts of different sorts of music to about 100 participants at a conference of the UK branch of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music). I asked them to rate, on a scale from 0-5, their opinion on how suitable each extract would be considered as the object of ‘popular music studies’.

The extracts were played in the order listed below.

Results of this musical questionnaire are in the next slide which shows the extracts re-arranged in order of ‘suitability’, % values indicating how likely conference participants considered each extract to be the object of ‘popular music studies’.

10. Johann Strauss (Jr.) (1867): An der schönen blauen Donau — 27%

2. The Beatles (1967): A Day In The Life — 91%

7. Les Baxter (1957): Jungalero — 40%

6. Zara (2000): Plenitsa (Bulgarian chalga music) — 57%

3. Madonna (1991): Justify My Love [12”] (prod. W Orbit) — 86%

9. Bernard Herrmann (1960): Psycho - The Shower — 30%

8. Sam Hui: Cheers! (Yum Sing) — 36%?

5. The Brecker Brothers (1975) Some Skunk Funk — 61%

1. The SexPistols (1977): God Save The Queen — 92%

4. Snog (1992): Corporate Slave — 71%

Examples in order of ‘suitability’ to be studied

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Canonic quotes

Music excites the body to automatic movement, an exhilaration that defeats boredom and inspires insight… Music gives the body control over itself, granting personal freedom and revealing sexual potential’ (Lull 1992)

‘[T]he power of pop lies not in its meaning but in its noise,… the non-signifying, extra-linguistic elements that defy “content analysis”: the grain of the voice, the materiality of the sound, the biological effect of the rhythm, the fascination of the star’s body’ (Reynolds 1990).

‘Passions must be powerful, the musician’s feelings [must be] unfettered — no mind control,… no clever ideas…(Diderot: Le neveu de Rameau, 1762)

[Listening to music the right way means] ‘fully surrendering the spirit to the welling torrent of sensations and disregarding every disturbing thought’…(Wackenroder, 1792)

Institutionalisation processes (1)

classical music popular music

started mid C19 - 1970s-

education institutions created

conservatories, music(ology) depts.

media/cultural studies, performing arts colleges

canonic heritage

European ‘classical’ from C18 & C19 (esp. instr.)

first jazz, then Anglo-phone rock/pop

conservation tendencies

old music increasingly dominates repertoire

1960s: v few re-issues;1999: 60% of sales back catalogue

international mus. Idiom

Central European (mainly Germanic)

Anglo-N.American

global hegemony

European colonialism US corporate capitalism

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Institutionalisation processes (2)classical music popular music

liberties, attitude to pleasure

liberation of the ego, emotionality, postponed gratification

liberation of the id, corporeality, immediate gratification

hegemonic class movement

merchant class v. feudal aristocracy & 4th estate

financial/managerial élite v. old capitalism & new lumpenproletariat

buzzwords of ‘excellence’

high, sublime, superior, great, art, masterpiece, genius

cool, fun, moving, entertaining, hip, sexy, striking

examples of state appropriation

Händel (mass appeal) Handel, represents UK state power

Queen’s Jubilee (2002): Brian May, Eric Clapton, Brian Wilson, etc.

UK knighthoods bestowed

Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Arthur Bliss, William Walton, Michael Tippett

Cliff Richard, George Martin, Paul McCartney, Bob Geldof, Elton John, Michael Jagger (+ Dame Shirley Bassey + Van Morrison, etc., OBE)

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Future — General Measures

1. Increase awareness about the importance of non-verbal sound (incl. music) in modern society.

2. Raise the status of music in education and research to a level commensurate with its proven social and economic importance.

3. Make constructional competence in music (and visual arts) an essential part of general education in the same way as linguistic competence.

4. Demystify the role of music as a means of communication.

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Future — Some measures for consideration in higher education (1)

1. Ongoing stylistic & social change: teaching constructional competence through apprenticeship as well as through basic skills programmes.2. Core knowledge (all 4 types) of PMus required of every music(ology) student (incl interdisciplinarity).

3. Ethnomusicological method applied to study of musical practices of own (local) ‘ethnos’, not just to those of people in far-off places.

4. Time for staff to keep up with ongoing changes of style, technology, social formations, e.g. current need for music in new audiovisual media (incl. games, cable TV, etc.).

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5. Encourage young researchers to choose topics in PMus sphere, otherwise no-one to teach the subject!

6. Provide opportunities for ‘musicologists of the popular’ to publish findings without fear of copyright prosecution.

Future — Some measures for consideration in higher education (2)

7. Provide opportunities for general educational materials in PMus (incl. repertoire) to be produced and disseminated on a not-for-profit basis without fear of copyright infringement.

8. Encourage innovative research into Western classical music, e.g. how classical became ‘classical’, corporeal and popular aspects of classical music, crossovers between popular and avant-garde, etc.

9. Ongoing review of canonic repertoire in local and international PMus traditions

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10. Develop new and existing forms of international, interdisciplinary and interprofessional cooperation; important role for non-Anglo and/or non-’first-world’ nations.

End slide

Thank you for your kind attention.

All good wishes!

Special thanks to:

Manolete MoraAnders Nelsson

Wendy Leung

Jimi Wong

Anthony Cheng

and the staff of the HKU Music Department

Karen Collins

For further information, see www.tagg.org

Documents

Popular Music Studies A brief introduction Philip Tagg Montréal, March-July 2003, September 2004 Original version entitled Popular Music Studies: Progress