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Music, culture and interdisciplinarity: reections on

relationships

John Shepherd

Popular Music / Volume 13 / Issue 02 / May 1994, pp 127 - 141

DOI: 10.1017/S0261143000006991, Published online: 11 November 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143000006991

How to cite this article:

John Shepherd (1994). Music, culture and interdisciplinarity: reections on relationships. Popular
Music, 13, pp 127-141 doi:10.1017/S0261143000006991

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 Popular Music (1994) Volume 13/2. Copyright (€) 1994 Cambridge University Press

Music, culture and

interdisciplinarity:
1
reflections
on relationships
JOHN SHEPHERD

Introduction
This special issue of Popular Music honours the contribution of a distinguished
musicologist to the study of popular music. It was Wilfrid Mellers who, together
with Charles Hamm, pioneered the study of popular music as a respectable under-
taking within musicology before popular music studies itself began to become a
continuing and critical intellectual tradition in the late 1970s. As with Charles
Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music has not been
restricted to scholarship alone. As founding Chair of the Department of Music at
the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers created an intellectual and institutional
environment within which it was possible for undergraduate and graduate stu-
dents alike to undertake the serious academic study of popular music. Without
this environment it is possible that the careers both of Richard Middleton and
myself would have turned out differently.
There is therefore a link between the career of the scholar being honoured
in this special issue and the genesis of popular music studies as a tradition with
its own problematics and trajectories. Mellers' role as an advisory editor of Popular
Music is emblematic of this link. Popular Music has itself played a central role in
establishing popular music studies as an independent and continuing tradition.
But Mellers' career and the genesis of popular music studies as a discipline
were born of different moments in English cultural and intellectual life. Wilfrid
Mellers' orientation as a thinker and writer was fundamentally influenced by the
Leavisite tradition which made such an important impact on intellectual and cul-
tural life in England during the 1930s and 1940s. The establishing of popular music
studies as a continuing and critical intellectual tradition was born of the cultural
contradictions of the 1960s, not only in England but, equally and as importantly,
in the USA and continental Europe.
The honouring of a scholar such as Wilfrid Mellers provides an opportunity
to look back and take stock of a long and distinguished career. It is interesting,
for example, to go back and read again Mellers' contributions to Scrutiny and
other early work such as Music and Society (Mellers 1946). Re-reading this work
emphasises that Mellers' later concern with the study of popular music grew out
of and formed an integral aspect of wider interests to do with relations between
music, culture and society.
127

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 128 John Shepherd

Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music forms part of a more

fundamental contribution to musicology in attempting to draw that discipline away
from its preoccupation with narrative and analysis for their own sake and from its
powerful assumption that music ('good', 'classical' music) is autonomous in its
relations to culture and society. Mellers assumes that music, culture and society are
integrally related, and this assumption, in informing his own work, has resulted in
a distinctive and most valuable contribution to musicology.
It is not, however, the purpose of this article to consider in depth the charac-
ter of that contribution. Given the link between Mellers' own career and the gen-
esis of popular music studies, a re-reading of his earlier work prompts reflections
also on the cultural and intellectual circumstances of the 1960s and the critical
tradition of popular music studies which these circumstances spawned. It is
because of this link that this special issue of Popular Music seems to provide an
appropriate forum for these reflections.
In embarking on these reflections, it is important to remember that, although
an independent tradition, popular music studies has maintained strong links with
musicology and, it can be argued, has had an important influence on its more
recent development. Symbolic of this influence is Middleton's Studying Popular
Music (Middleton 1990). The book is, indeed, about the study of popular music.
However, it is difficult for any musicologist to read this remarkable intellectual
achievement and take seriously its messages without realising that, in a deep and
profound way, it is also more generally about the study of music - any music.
As with the Leavisite tradition of the 1930s and 1940s, the cultural contradic-
tions of the 1960s made possible new ways of thinking about music as a whole.
Since popular music itself contributed to these contradictions, it is hardly surpris-
ing that these new ways included the assumption that all popular music was as
deserving of serious musicological study as 'classical' or 'folk' music, and that
something might be learnt about the study of music as a whole from the study of
popular music. The study of all popular music is an undertaking of intrinsic worth.
It is, however, more than that. Because of popular music's inescapably social
character, its study also becomes a case study for the study of other forms of
music whose sociality has been more easily elided by musicologists. The principal
purpose of this article is to consider the relations between the cultural contradic-
tions of the 1960s and new ways of thinking about music. The article remains
relevant to the study of popular music in that popular music was at the centre of
the cultural contradictions of the 1960s, and in that the critical study of popular
music that ensued from those contradictions has become emblematic of important
changes in musicology (Shepherd 1993). While the disciplinarity of musicology
depends upon what Middleton has referred to as 'the forbiddingly special charac-
ter of music' (Middleton 1990, p. v), its success as a discipline depends upon its
willingness to be unremittingly interdisciplinary in its theories and methods.
It is difficult to embark on these reflections independently of a consideration
of my own personal and intellectual biography. I suspect that my own experiences
were not that different from those of a whole generation of scholars interested in
popular music and the sociology and aesthetics of music born between approxim-
ately 1944 and 1947. However, I cannot speak for these other scholars. I can only
speak for myself. And in my own case, the experiences of the 1960s were inflected
by my move to Canada in 1967 and through my exposure to the intellectual tradi-
tion of Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinarity 129

Cultural dislocation
What I brought with me to Canada was the experience of growing up as a middle-
class teenager in Britain during the early and mid-1960s. This period in Britain
was in some but not all respects equivalent to that of the mid-1950s in the United
States. This period in the United States - the years of Eisenhower - saw the advent
of rock 'n' roll, the musical and cultural phenomenon which has been assumed
by so many to have shaken to the core both the music industry and the established
cultural, moral and social norms of the American mainstream. With the benefit of
hindsight, it is now possible to understand those years in a rather more balanced
manner. Lawrence Grossberg has recently observed that'. . . it is simply mistaken
to assume that rock was, in any significant way, outside of the political mainstream
of American culture'. Rock, he continues, 'did not challenge the ideological con-
sensus of American life but it did attempt to escape the quietism of culture and
everyday life'. This, concludes Grossberg, 'has in fact always been the limits of
rock's politics' (Grossberg 1991, p. 359).
Grossberg's observations apply equally well to the Britain of the early 1960s.
The post-war period in Britain witnessed some major cultural realignments. Britain
was divesting itself of its empire and needed to expand its home markets. I dis-
tinctly remember the advent of consumer credit in the form of the hire-purchase
agreement, and my parents' distaste for this latest form of American commercial-
ism designed specifically to lead the helpless working classes astray. Britain,
indeed, was experiencing an incursion of American mass culture and American-
style mass consumerism at this time, partially as a consequence of the presence
of American troops during the Second World War.
Working-class culture in Britain has a history extending back at least as far
as the nineteenth century. As Iain Chambers has observed, urban popular culture
in Britain had 'borne all the signs of a modern entertainment industry for quite
some time. All the tendencies evident in the contemporary situation', concludes
Chambers (in writing of the 1950s), 'in particular those that go under the rubric
of "commercialism", were already present in urban British popular culture by
1880' (Chambers 1985, pp. 6-7). Credit - and a changing economic situation that
later led Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to observe that the British had never
'had it so good' - resulted in British working-class popular culture becoming more
public and open to middle-class scrutiny. And it became more public in alliance
with the colourful and brash American popular culture which was being fed to
the British through the mass media and the increasingly multinational character
of capital. The working classes in Britain had since the turn of the century
embraced and enjoyed American culture, whether through Hollywood, music or
dance. The middle classes had consistently resisted and denied it, as the history of
the British Broadcasting Corporation to this point illustrates. There was therefore
nothing new about this alliance in the 1950s except its increasingly public character.
It was this alliance, involving the culture of Elvis, rock and jive that led to 'acid
but apprehensive' rebuttals from middle-class cultural critics. In the opinion of
Conservative Charles Curran, the life of the working classes was:
. . . without point or quality, a vulgar world whose inhabitants have more money than is
good for them, barbarism with electric light . . . a cockney tellytopia, a low grade nirvana
of subsidised houses, hire purchase extravagance, undisciplined children, gaudy domestic
squalor, and chips with everything (quoted in Chambers 1985, p. 4).

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 130 John Shepherd

It was in the context of this shifting cultural terrain that my own generation and
class of young people entered adolescence in the early 1960s. We had two things
in common with our American peers of the mid-1950s. We entered adolescence in
a period of new prosperity and in the presence of a unified discipline and cultural
homogeneity that was the legacy of the Second World War and not of our own
making. I remember the 1950s as cold, grey and depressing. My father and other
men like him went to work in dark grey suits, white shirts, subdued monochrome
ties, polished black shoes and short back and sides as if public morality itself
depended on it. The breakthrough was in the early 1960s, when my father was
allowed to wear a sports jacket, grey flannel trousers, brown shoes (polished, of
course), checked shirts and slightly brighter ties to attend work - but only on
Saturday mornings. The short back and sides remained.
The conservative attitudes and conservative values of our parents' generation
seemed curiously out of step to us. There was little biographical experience in
terms of which to understand the traditional British middle-class reaction to Amer-
ican culture and to the attraction it held for the British working classes. There
seemed to be nothing intrinsically wrong with colour and fun, and no need to be
so unremittingly serious. For many of us there was a curious feeling of cultural
dislocation. The cultures of other classes and other societies held more attraction
for us than the culture of our parents' generation. This was the dislocation that
fuelled the marketplace for the Beatles, Carnaby Street and Twiggy. Life's ques-
tions and life's experiences did not seem to be addressed adequately by the diet
of unexceptionably 'highbrow' culture fed to us by the education system and the
British Broadcasting Corporation. Another form of expression was required that
would relocate the mainstream of British and, more specifically, English life to
accommodate the shifting cultural terrain of the late 1950s and early 1960s. That
was what the Beatles achieved with a musical and cultural synthesis rooted so
cleverly in the safety and sentimentality of British music hall and the colour and
sexuality of recent American culture. The scale of the Beatles' success, observes
Chambers:
not unconnected to their rapid acceptance into the existing canons of taste, was built upon
a tangential jolting of the public musical cliche. They did not dramatically tear up Tin Pan
Alley and previous popular music. Their music was described as 'fresh' and 'exciting', not
'alien' and 'offensive'. Masterfully working through black and white pop traditions they
offered a novel, synthetic focus: an altered perspective, not a foreign landscape. (Chambers
1985, p. 63)
The Beatles, concludes Chambers, quickly became 'a symbolic embodiment of the
healthy, zany exuberance of British youth, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and the
Establishment' (ibid., p. 68).

Intellectual consequences
The 1960s provided a powerful but contradictory context for any young man for
whom music formed an important aspect of both his intellectual and personal
lives. It is as a consequence of this context that, while music has always been a
part of me, the study of music has not. I was one of the first people at my second-
ary school to study music as a graduating subject. This, at a British public school
in the early 1960s, was liable to mark one out as a certain kind of person. I did
not fit the mould. For a start, I played rugby. My experience of studying something

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinary 131
that was an important part of me, therefore, has always involved a tension
between living in the 'real' world, and inhabiting a world that seemed marginal,
peripheral and cloistered. That sense of tension was heightened dramatically in
the 1960s with the advent of British rhythm and blues. On the one hand, there
was the 'official' music that I studied - and liked. On the other, there was the
music that constituted a large measure of the commonsense reality of myself and
my peers. Those who taught the former - belonging as they did to an older genera-
tion with different values - either ignored or denigrated the latter.
These, essentially, are the experiences I brought to Ottawa and Carleton
University in 1967. These experiences resulted in a love-hate relationship with the
academic study of music, a relationship that caused me to study first political
science and then French before easing gingerly back into music. It was possible to
move back into music for three reasons. First, English-Canadian academic life at
the time did not seem to be characterised by the intellectual cliquishness that was
a hallmark of European academic life. It was not necessary to be identified with a
particular intellectual approach to 'count' and be taken seriously. There seemed
to be a healthy eclecticism about English-Canadian intellectual activity that permit-
ted the space for movement and creativity. Second, this feeling of breathing fresh
intellectual air was reinforced by studying in a university where being a young
person with certain preoccupations and aspirations also 'counted' and seemed to
be taken note of. Finally, this feeling of space, of being able to breathe, became a
concrete reality in belonging to the first generation of students in a brand new
department of music. We were taught the established canon, to be sure. But in
those days, music professors and music students were in an institutional sense
more like colleagues, both at the beginning of a new adventure, both concerned
that the adventure would turn into a success. It was this atmosphere, both general
and specific, which allowed different attitudes - born of different times and
places - to rub off on one another in a pleasant and collegial fashion.
It is important to stress this, because if Music at Carleton provided the institu-
tional space and atmosphere for the cultural contradictions in my biography to
begin to work themselves through, it also provided - as importantly and as neces-
sarily - the irritant and the catalyst. The cultural experiences of the 1960s, mediated
as powerfully as they were through 'popular' music, led me to the belief that while
music spoke perhaps more concretely and immediately than many other media to
the world of personal experience, it was also intensely political in the way that it
mediated that world. I wanted to know what the basis of music's subjective and
social power was, yet the academic world I had just re-entered seemed as ill-
equipped as it always had to answer that question. As a student of 'classical'
music, I found it particularly curious that the vast majority of music historians
seldom connected the music about which they were writing to the social and
cultural circumstances of its creation and use in any more than a superficial fash-
ion. I found it equally curious that music theory and music analysis - the discip-
lines of music concerned with 'how the notes work' - never left the closed technical
circuits of their professional worlds to theorise the connections between the sounds
of music and music's subjective and social power. The problem that became
increasingly explicit for me as I neared the end of my music degree was how to
relate questions of music history and music biography to those of music theory
and music analysis. The symbol of my problem was a series of volumes published
by J. M. Dent in England during the 1950s entitled The Master Musicians. The first

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 132 John Shepherd

half of each volume was a biography of the great composer, and the second half
a technical analysis of his music. There was never any explanation of how the
reader was supposed to connect the two halves of each volume. I have a suspicion
that such an explanation did not exist. As I left Carleton, I became increasingly
aware that the absence of the social in academic music was a symptom of the
solution to my problem. The social was the absent ground that would join history
and theory and make each significant to the other. Music and the individuals who
practised it were, in other words, both to be regarded as constituted socially.
If the question was formed at Carleton, then the answers began to come as
I undertook doctoral work in Britain. When I went to the University of York I was
lucky enough to live in the college that housed the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology. I did not know it at the time, but I could hardly have arrived in a
more propitious intellectual and cultural environment. The early 1970s were the
heady days of the National Deviancy Conferences, the new sociology of education
and the rise to pre-eminence of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
the University of Birmingham. My love-hate relationship with academic music
surfaced once more. I spent more time talking to graduate sociology students and
reading books on sociology and anthropology than I did in the Department of
Music or reading books on music. I did not know it at the time, but I had disco-
vered cultural studies.

Music and cultural theory

I have emphasised the biographical as the ground of my own research because I
do not think that what I have to say will make much sense without it. I do not
intend to become involved in a history or justification of cultural studies for its
own sake. Although I believe cultural studies to have its own intrinsic merits, I
think it is more important to stress that the allegiance of many English-speaking
scholars of my own generation to this kind of intellectual work was biographically
motivated, and meaningfully so. We did not take up cultural studies simply to be
vexatious to our elders or to others who continue to believe that the legitimate
study of art and culture can only be constituted through traditional approaches to
established canons. We took it up because it offered possibilities for answering
questions that were important to us.
What subsequently came to be known as cultural studies developed in fact
from English scholars of an earlier generation, the generation of Raymond
Williams, Richard Hoggart and E. P. Thompson. The intellectual roots of these
scholars went back well before the Second World War, although their concerns
were equally contemporary. In the case of Raymond Williams, they went back to
the Leavisite tradition of literary criticism on the one hand, and to the work of
Marxist literary critics on the other. For Williams, the problem was to reconcile art
and everyday life, 'high' culture and 'popular' culture, the 'high culture' critique
which sees art as a world apart, untainted by the everyday social world, and the
everyday world, which sees 'popular' culture as meaningful and empowering in
the concreteness of the here-and-now.
These were precisely the issues which faced my own generation, particularly
in relation to the validity of different genres of popular music and the youth
subcultures which espoused them. However, British subcultural analysis - as the
work which analysed these kinds of relations came to be known - moved away

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinarity 133

from the views of Williams by implicitly understanding cultural styles by reference

to extrinsic social and cultural processes. In the world of popular music and popular
music scholarship, 'authenticity' came to be measured according to how well
music's sounds were judged to express, as Simon Frith has put it, 'a person, an
idea, a feeling, a shared experience, a Zeitgeist'. Such music is 'good' music. Bad
music, on the other hand, 'is inauthentic - it expresses nothing' (Frith 1987a, p.
136). Consequently, continues Frith (in his critical examination of this particular
musical discourse), 'different groups [are taken to] possess different sorts of cul-
tural capital, share different cultural expectations and so make music differently -
pop tastes are shown to correlate with class cultures and subcultures; musical
styles are linked to specific age groups; we take for granted the connection of
ethnicity and sound'. This, concludes Frith, 'is the sociological common sense of
rock criticism', (ibid. pp. 134-5).
The 'sociological common sense of rock criticism' conflates a 'high culture'
or 'ideal' notion of culture in which, according to Williams, 'culture is a state or
process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal human
values', with a 'social' notion of culture in which, according to Williams, 'culture
is a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and
values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour'
(Williams 1965, p. 59). The 'sociological common sense of rock criticism', in its
attempt to validate forms of music so obviously social, became hijacked, as it were,
by traditional 'high culture' notions of 'what counts as good art'.
Williams' resolution of this tension between 'the social' and 'the good' was
somewhat different, however. In a classic passage from The Long Revolution, he
argued as follows:

It was certainly an error to suppose that values or art-works could be adequately studied
without reference to the particular society within which they were expressed, but it is
equally an error to suppose that the social explanation is determining, or that the values
and works are mere by-products. We have got into the habit, since we realised how deeply
works or values could be determined by the whole situation in which they are expressed,
of asking about these relationships in a standard form: 'what is the relation of this art to
this society?' But 'society', in this question, is a specious whole. If the art is part of the
society, there is no solid whole, outside it, to which, by the form of our question, we
concede priority. (Williams 1965, p. 61)

If art is social, in other words, it is social in its own way, on its own terms, and
by way of making its own distinctive yet contingent contribution within specific
social and historical circumstances.
This passage has always stayed with me as a leitmotif. While music has
formed an important part of the biography of many cultural theorists, and while
many of these cultural theorists have written extensively about music and its
attendant cultures and subcultures, it is a curious fact that the development of
cultural studies has been little affected by cultural theoretical analyses of music.
There are two reasons for this. Firstly, little cultural theoretical work in music
is concerned with music's sounds. Although cultural theorists are aware of the
traditional semiological model of how sound in language works, they feel insecure
confronted with 'the forbiddingly special character of music'. Second, a majority
of cultural theoretical writings on popular music have been stamped indelibly
with the hallmark of British subcultural theory and the concept of the structural

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 134 John Shepherd

homology, the concept according to which cultural styles and social groups are
taken to have a necessary connection. Within this tradition, the legacy of 'folk'
and 'popular' discourses can lead to the conclusion that the sounds of music
(which still remain unanalysed) are in a fixed relation to the external meanings
they articulate from within themselves. If the sounds change, then so must the
meanings. That is how music becomes inauthentic. Music, in other words, remains
answerable to extrinsic social and cultural forces.
Cultural theorists have since become rightfully suspicious of British subcul-
tural theory and the application of the structural homology to the analysis of music
as cultural style, and for two reasons. Firstly, the notion of the fixity of music's
meanings within music's sounds squares far too comfortably with the traditional
'high culture' view that music is an autonomous art form. According to this view,
both the meaning and value of music as a work of art are intrinsic to music's
sounds. Contact between the work of art and everyday social forces can result
only in the contamination of music's tonal values and therefore in inauthentic
music. This connection between the discourse of 'classical' music and the dis-
courses of the 'folk' and the 'popular' provides another illustration of the pervasive
influence of 'high culture' discourses on the understanding of other cultural forms.
As Frith has so rightly observed, 'a comparative sociology would reveal far less
clear distinctions between these worlds than their discursive values imply' (Frith
1990, p. 101).
The second reason for cultural theorists' distrust of the structural homology
is that it does not seem to allow for the negotiability of meaning necessary if
cultural style is to be understood as a social construct. The reason for this distrust
in the context of music is linked to cultural theorists' awareness of the traditional
semiological model of how sound in language works. According to this model,
the sound of a word has no necessary connection to the word's conventional
meaning. The sound of the word 'bird', for example, has nothing 'bird-like' about
it. The sound 'oiseau' calls forth the same generalised mental image with just as
much success. And it is possible to conceive of an international agreement whereby
English-language and French-language countries could arbitrarily decide to trade
the words without damage either to the underlying deep structures of the English
or French languages or the ability of these languages to successfully evoke images
of animals which fly in the sky. The sounds of language work fundamentally by
convention, in other words, and while the history of language carries with it an
imposing weight of the conventional, it nonetheless remains the case that human
worlds are constructed by people to a considerable but not exclusive extent
through language and through the way that they mutually decide to associate the
sounds of language with mental images. Language is heavily implicated in the
social. It is not separable from it, and is thus not answerable to society - to use
the words of Williams - as a 'solid whole, outside it, to which, by the form of our
question, we concede priority'.
The idea common to nearly all discourses on music - that the meanings and
values of music are somehow bound intrinsically to music's sounds - becomes a
problem for cultural theorists because this seems to imply that music's meanings,
as social constructs, are non-negotiable, a condition that paradoxically denies a
central characteristic of social behaviour. The only alternative to this idea has
seemed to be to treat sound in music as if it were sound in language. However,
to apply the traditional semiological model of how sound in language signifies to

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinarity 135

an understanding of how sound in music signifies inevitably renders music as a

special but, unfortunately, inferior case of language. The nature of this choice is
hinted at strongly by Frith in his discussion of musical discourses. 'What I have
been trying to suggest', says Frith:
is that arguments about the value of particular pieces of music can only be understood by
reference to the discourses which give the value terms concerned their meaning. Arguments
about music are less about the qualities of the music itself than about how to place it, about
what it is in the music that is actually to be assessed. After all, we can only hear music as
having value, whether aesthetic or any sort of value, when we know what to listen to and
how to listen for it. Our reception of music, our expectations from it, are not inherent in
the music itself - which is one reason why so much musicological analysis of popular music
misses the point: its object of study, the discursive text it constructs, is not the text to which
anyone listens. (Frith 1990, pp. 96-7)

'Ordinary' listeners are not concerned about the question of the supposedly
immanent meanings of music, in other words. They are concerned about what the
music means to them. What Frith seems to be suggesting is that if the meaning
and value of music are not located in the materials of music themselves, then the
only alternative is to locate them within the contradictory discourses through
which people make sense of and assign value to music. If the nature of this
assigning is as contentious and contradictory as it so often is, he concludes, 'if the
meaning of "good music" is so unstable how can we possibly assign it to the notes
alone?' (ibid., p. 101).
To return to the insight of Williams, it is difficult to see how music can be
social in its own way, on its own terms, and by way of making its own distinctive
yet contingent contribution within specific social and historical circumstances. A
solution to this conundrum has been provided by Peter Wicke (Wicke 1989, 1990).
Wicke has argued that music is a social medium in sound. What Wicke means by
this is that the sounds of music provide constantly moving and complex matrices
of sounds in which individuals may invest their own meanings. The critical ele-
ment in his theory is that while the matrices of sounds which seemingly constitute
an individual 'piece' of music can accommodate a range of meanings, and thereby
allow for negotiability of meaning, they cannot accommodate all possible mean-
ings. The meanings that can be successfully invested in a Beethoven symphony
would probably have a hard time with black rap music. This means that while the
meanings and values of music are not intrinsic to music's sounds - they are
intrinsic to the individuals who invest them in the sounds - music's sounds are
nonetheless heavily implicated in the construction and investment of those mean-
ings and values. The sounds of music are a medium in the scientific sense. They
do not cause meanings and they do not determine meanings. They do not even
carry meanings. The most that we can say is that they call forth meanings. How-
ever, no sounds, no meanings!
Wicke's formulation has a number of advantages. First, it dispenses with the
troublesome notion of 'authenticity', of original meaning, of the faithful expression
in sounds of something extrinsic to those sounds. In this sense, the sounds of
music communicate nothing. They can only be authentic to the particular moment
of meaning construction in which they are implicated. There can be no question
of an ultimate court of appeal for value located in the composer's presumed inten-
tions or the collective reality of a subcultural group. In this sense historical musico-
logy does have something to learn from ethnomusicology in beginning to carry out

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 136 John Shepherd

fieldwork into the various uses of 'classical' music in different social and historical
circumstances.
Secondly, Wicke's formulation makes it extremely difficult to conceive of any
music as a 'work of art', discrete and decontextualised from particular social and
historical circumstances. While the sounds of music can travel, their meanings and
values cannot. Wicke's formulation avoids the classic error made by the majority
of academic musicians and nearly all discourses on music, and pinpointed so
accurately by Frith. Wicke does not reduce music to the condition of its sounds,
thereby implicitly removing people from the musical process and turning them
into passive consumers, able only to accept or reject music's supposedly intrinsic
meanings. Music is not an object. It is a process which occurs between the sounds
of music and the people who invest in those sounds their own meanings and
values. No people, no music!
Thirdly, Wicke's formulation demonstrates how music can be so powerful
subjectively and socially, how this power is not made up of separate antipathies,
and how the subjective and social in music are mutually necessary complements
of one another. The sounds of music encourage and restrict both idiosyncrasies
and commonalities. They provide the ground on which negotiations between the
two can be played out. In this sense, it is helpful to reformulate our language,
and to think of the sounds of music as providing the ground on which negotiations
can be played out between the internal, which is to say, subjective social world,
and the external, which is to say, public social world. The sounds of music are
both inside us and outside us at the same time.

The power of music

Wicke clearly provides the theoretical protocol through which music can be
thought of as being social in its own way, on its own terms, and in making a
distinctive yet contingent contribution within specific social and historical circum-
stances. Middleton seems to be heading in a similar direction when, despite all
the well-taken criticisms he makes of the concept of the structural homology (see
Middleton 1990, pp. 127-69), he observes that 'I would like to hang on to the
notion of homology in a qualified sense'. He continues: 'it seems likely that some
signifying structures are more easily articulated to the interests of one group than
are some others; similarly, that they are more easily articulated to the interests of
one group than to those of another' (ibid., p. 10). However, neither Wicke nor
Middleton approach the question of precisely how the sounds of music can act as
the ground on which negotiations between the internal and external social worlds
can be played out. Understanding this connection is critical to understanding the
social character of sound in music.
Through its sounds music can evoke and give life to our internal bodily
existence. Our internal states are physiologically coded, physiologically manifest:
that is how we come to be aware of ourselves. Yet those internal states - struc-
tured, textured, visceral, concrete - occur in dialectical tension with the external
social world. We feel as we do overwhelmingly because of our relations to other
people, to the world outside. Yet the world is the way it is because of the manner
in which we collectively 'put out' into it and present ourselves symbolically in the
face of the meanings we assume the world has for us. One inescapable feature of
human, and therefore social, existence is that internal human awareness is ulti-

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinarity 137

mately the seat and the core of all social and cultural activity. The sounds of music
are ideally suited to coding homologously, and therefore to evoking powerfully
yet symbolically, the structures, rhythms and textures of the inner life of the
individual. Sound, the basis of music, reflects and articulates the internal physical
properties, the movements and the surface textures of the bodies that generate it,
whether these bodies are human bodies or bodies that result from human techno-
logy. As it goes out into the world, sound is further shaped by the structures,
movements and surface textures of the physical objects that reflect and amplify it.
The sounds of music are ideally structured to coding homologously, and therefore
to evoking powerfully yet symbolically, the structures, rhythms and textures of
the external social world. In connecting the structures, movements and textures
of the internal and external physical worlds, the sounds of music can act, homolog-
ously and symbolically, as a code, a concrete ground and pathway, for the evoca-
tion of the relationships between the inner and outer social worlds.
Our bodies, as generators and amplifiers of sounds, react sympathetically
and empathetically to sounds as produced by others. Sound is the only major
channel for human expression that vibrates actively within the human body. The
sound of the voice could not be amplified and projected were it not for chambers
or resonators of air inside the human body (the lungs, the sinus passages, the
mouth) that vibrate in sympathy with the frequencies of the vocal chords. Equally,
the human experience of sound involves, in addition to the sympathetic vibration
of the eardrums, the sympathetic vibration of the resonators of the body. Sound
is thus felt in addition to being 'heard'. As a consequence it transcends actual tactile
sensations in the sense that interpersonal tactile awareness and the particular form
of erotic experience that flows from it is generally an awareness at the surface of
the body which then finds internal resonance. Sound, however, enters the body
and is in the body.
It is possible to extrapolate from the relationship of sound and the human
body in creating music to the relationship of musical instruments and sound.
Afro-American musics have been instructive in this regard, as Middleton points
out:
One of the importances of Afro-American music lies in the fact that often the voice seems
to be treated more as an 'instrument' (the body using its own resources to make sounds) . . .
From work-song grunts through 1930s jazz styles (Louis Armstrong singing 'like a trumpet';
Billie Holiday 'like a sax') to the short mobile vocal phrases of funk and scratch textures
(used like percussion, bass or synthesiser), we hear vocal 'personality' receding as the voice
is integrated into the processes of the articulating human body. Of course, at the same
time, instruments in this tradition often sound like voices. But the often noted importance
of 'vocalised' tone is only part of a wider development in which 'instrumental' and 'vocal'
modes meet on some intermediate ground; while it is true that the instrument-as-machine
(technological extensions of the body) becomes a gesturing body (the 'voice' of the limb),
at the same time the voice-as-a-person becomes a vocal body (the body vocalising).
(Middleton 1990, p. 264)
Roland Barthes has recognised the special relationship of sound, the body and its
technological extensions in music's particular mode of articulation. However, I
find it difficult to agree with Barthes that in music the body 'speaks, it declaims,
it redoubles its voice, it speaks but says nothing: because as soon as it is musical,
speech - or its instrumental substitute - is no longer linguistic, but corporeal; it
only says and nothing else: my body is put into a state of speech: quasi parlando'
(Barthes 1975, p. 222). In referring to 'a second semiology, that of the body in a

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 138 John Shepherd

state of music' (ibid., p. 228), Barthes is pointing to something important: the

specificity of the social in music. However, that specificity must be allowed to
speak for itself, it must be allowed to speak substantially - not silently, and it
must not be made answerable to language, although it is doubtless entwined
inextricably with the world of language. I would like John Blacking to have the final
word on these issues. Unlike Barthes, Blacking, with his experience of fieldwork in
Africa, knew that the body, music and dance are as intrinsically important for
human awareness and expression as is language. Crucial factors in the develop-
ment of cultural forms, says Blacking:
are the possibility of shared somatic states, the structures of the bodies that share them,
and the rhythms of interaction that transform commonly experienced internal sensations
into externally visible and transmissible forms . . . The shared states of different bodies can
generate different sets of rules for the construction of behaviour and action by means of
repeated movements in space and time that can be transmitted from one generation to
another. (Blacking 1977, p. 9)
As a consequence, concludes Blacking:
If there are forms intrinsic to music and dance that are not modelled on language, we may
look beyond the 'language' of dancing, for instance, to the dance of language and thought.
As conscious movement is in our thinking, so thinking may come from movement, and
especially shared, or conceptual, thought from communal movement. And just as the ulti-
mate aim of dancing is to be able to move without thinking, to be danced, so the ultimate
achievement in thinking is to be moved to think, to be thought . . . essentially it is a form
of unconscious cerebration, a movement of the body. We are moved into thinking. Body
and mind are one. (ibid., pp. 22-3)

Music, culture and interdisciplinarity

What does this particular reading of music and its biographical roots have to do
with music, culture and interdisciplinarity? On the one hand, it demonstrates that
academic music does, indeed, constitute a legitimate discipline. Its legitimate
object of study is a characteristic use of sound by people as a form of mutual
awareness and expression. However, it also demonstrates that academic music
has to become a truly interdisciplinary undertaking if it is to understand music as
a human process and not as an inscrutable object reduced to the condition of the
sounds that make it possible. Academic music cannot be concerned solely with
works of the established canon as if these works were the repository of what
Williams has referred to as 'a state or process of human perfection . . . of certain
absolute or universal human values'. Susan McClary has been eloquent on this
point. If Frith has claimed that much musicological analysis of popular music
misses the point, then McClary indicates how much musicological analysis of just
about any kind of music can miss the point:
Most people care about music because it resonates with experiences that otherwise go
unarticulated, whether it is the flood of cathartic release that occurs at the climax of a
Tchaikovsky symphony or the groove that causes one's body to dance - that is, to experience
itself in a new way. Yet our music theories and notational systems do everything possible
to mask those dimensions of music that are related to physical human experience and focus
instead on the orderly, the rational, the cerebral. The fact that the majority of listeners
engage with music for more immediate purposes is frowned upon by our institutions.
(McClary 1990, p. 14)

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinarity 139

It is not the task of music as a discipline to protect 'good' music from commercial
forces. 'Good' music is not a sanctified icon requiring protection from the hostile
forces of industrial capitalism. As Frith has observed, 'the flaw in this argument
is the suggestion that music is the starting point of the industrial process - the
raw material over which everyone fights - when it is, in fact, the final product'.
' "The industrialization of music"', concludes Frith, 'can't be understood as some-
thing that happens to music, but describes a process in which music is made -
the process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical and musical
arguments' (Frith 1987b, p. 54).
The point here is not to valorise commercialism for its own sake any more
than it is to criticise it for its own sake. The point is that the discipline of academic
music must in principle be concerned with all the world's musics in both historical
and contemporary social circumstances. The point of value judgement is not to
decide which musics are worthy of study. Rather, the point of study is to lay an
informed basis for value judgement. In order to achieve this, the academic musi-
cian cannot restrict himself or herself purely to the notes, to biography or the
minutiae of historical circumstance. Music as opposed to its sounds can only be
understood by references to the whole range of human activity: political, eco-
nomic, religious, educational and so on. The academic musician needs to be a
polymath, not a pedant.
In becoming so, the academic musician needs to exercise a sense of the eth-
ical. In the field of ethnomusicology as in that of cultural anthropology and art
historical examinations of the work of aboriginal peoples, much has been written
and spoken on the responsibility of the scholar to his or her informants. If musico-
logists are to move from the historical to the contemporary in understanding the
social circumstances of the music they examine, then they must be equally respons-
ible. Ethnomusicologists have long since learnt that they cannot simply package
their work as what Charles Keil has termed ' "ethnographic presents" given from
one anthropologist to others in an endless kula ring of professional reciprocity'
(Keil 1979, p. 5). Equally, if we as musicologists are to understand the practice of
all kinds of music in contemporary and specific political and economic circum-
stances, then we must be prepared to be interrogated by those with whom we
work, be they in various levels of government, in technological industries or, for
that matter, in tourism. And we must be prepared to share the knowledge that
we gain, allowing the questions we ask and the answers we formulate to be shaped
by the everyday world as much as they are by the exigencies of our own
disciplines.
These observations bring the discussion close to the current rhetoric of 'social
usefulness'. This rhetoric originates from a different quarter and in a different time
from the 1960s rhetoric of 'relevance'. However, I believe they have much in
common. The notion of 'relevance' was one which tried to capture the need for a
new mainstream, for a new set of questions and for a different set of answers. I
trust I have been able to demonstrate that this need had secure roots in significant
shifts in major cultural formations. The need was not a temporary or superficial
one. This is not to say that much of a superficial nature did not come out of those
times. Nothing, perhaps, is worse than forms of interdisciplinarity which amount
to little more than mechanical mixes of seemingly common material from different
disciplines. Again, it is doubtful if students can benefit fully from interdisciplinar-
ity unless they have a secure grounding in the medium of at least one artistic or

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 140 John Shepherd

cultural medium which makes the need for interdisciplinarity that much more
clear and evident. One thing I hope I have been able to demonstrate is that areas of
intellectual activity such as cultural studies or semiotics with clear interdisciplinary
implications and uses have to be interrogated by the disciplines to which they are
applied if, indeed, they are to be genuinely useful. Indeed, they cannot develop
without such interrogation any more than disciplines can continue to grow and
flourish without external interrogation of an interdisciplinary character. Notwith-
standing these qualifications, the point nonetheless remains that the cultural shifts
which brought these areas to the fore in the academic world had lasting
implications.
If the irritant and catalyst of the 1960s was that of trying to understand and
develop these areas against a background of intellectual conservatism, that of the
1980s and early 1990s has been that of attempting to maintain them against a
background of populist conservatism. The rhetoric of 'social usefulness' originates
in this context. However, for the reasons I have indicated, I believe that in relation
to the study of music and culture it is a rhetoric that is well taken. Once again,
the work and activities that flow from this rhetoric cannot be allowed to become
superficial or a response to the moment. Yet there is no denying that the social
and cultural shifts we have witnessed over the last fifteen years have implications
which are just as lasting and which stand up to critical examination just as much
as those of ten to twenty years previously. The academy cannot expect to have a
monopoly in interrogation when it critically examines the artistic and cultural
world around it. It must be willing to open its doors, to allow critical examination
from the outside world, and to respond in a responsible and considered manner
to such interrogation.
This discussion has been grounded in the somewhat idiosyncratic and
curious relationship I have had to my own discipline. I do not know enough to
generalise with certainty to other disciplines in art and culture. I know enough,
however, to know that the issues I have raised will carry certain resonances. There
is one resonance of which I am certain. Music is not the only academic discipline
in the arts and humanities to deal with a form of human expression that is signific-
antly iconic and 'extra-linguistic'. Having said that, however, it is clear that the
majority of disciplines in the arts and humanities, and some well established and
powerful ones at that, have objects of study which reside overwhelmingly in lan-
guage. I would argue that unless there is a balanced and fruitful dialogue between
those disciplines and disciplines such as music, art history, film studies, theatre
and dance, a valuable dimension of human awareness will not receive the attention
it should. Analyses of human expressiveness will be focused too heavily on the
cerebral at the expense of the total person in their everyday existence. Interdiscipli-
narity is not only important in ensuring that the study of art and culture remains
related to the realities of the everyday world. It is important also in ensuring that
the study of these relationships can be of intellectual consequence in their own
ways and on their own terms.

Endnote
1 This paper was first given as the Davidson inviting me to give this lecture and thus provid-
Dunton Research Lecture, Carleton University, ing me with an opportunity to reflect on aspects
1992. I am grateful to Carleton University for of the current state of my discipline.

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 Music, culture and interdisciplinarity 141

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