Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PDF On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements Nick Braae Ebook Full Chapter
PDF On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements Nick Braae Ebook Full Chapter
PDF On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements Nick Braae Ebook Full Chapter
https://textbookfull.com/product/popular-music-in-america-the-
beat-goes-on-5th-edition-michael-campbell/
https://textbookfull.com/product/popular-music-critique-and-
manic-street-preachers-mathijs-peters/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-cambridge-companion-to-
electronic-music-cambridge-companions-to-music-second-edition-
nick-collins/
https://textbookfull.com/product/popular-music-scenes-and-
cultural-memory-1st-edition-andy-bennett/
Connecting Sounds The Social Life of Music 1st Edition
Nick Crossley
https://textbookfull.com/product/connecting-sounds-the-social-
life-of-music-1st-edition-nick-crossley/
https://textbookfull.com/product/creative-autonomy-copyright-and-
popular-music-in-nigeria-mary-w-gani/
https://textbookfull.com/product/gender-branding-and-the-modern-
music-industry-the-social-construction-of-female-popular-music-
stars-kristin-lieb/
https://textbookfull.com/product/rockin-out-popular-music-in-the-
u-s-a-garofalo/
https://textbookfull.com/product/blacksound-making-race-and-
popular-music-in-the-united-states-1st-edition-morrison/
POP MUSIC, CULTURE AND IDENTITY
On Popular Music
and Its Unruly
Entanglements
Edited by
Nick Braae · Kai Arne Hansen
Pop Music, Culture and Identity
Series Editors
Steve Clark
Graduate School Humanities and Sociology
University of Tokyo
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Tristanne Connolly
Department of English
St Jerome’s University
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Jason Whittaker
School of English & Journalism
University of Lincoln
Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK
Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial
and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually
evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various
forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class,
gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates
how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an
ever-expanding archive for generational memory and accelerates the
impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global market-
ing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary approaches
that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed testimony
of the fan alongside academic methodologies.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
As with any book, there are a number of people deserving of our gratitude
for their contributions in making the publication of this collection possible.
First of all, thanks to Ralf von Appen, André Doehring, and Dietrich
Helms for organizing the summer school in popular music analysis where
the two editors first met, in the wake of which the idea for this collection
was conceived. Thanks also to the other lecturers and participants at that
event, several of whom are included in this volume.
We are grateful for the support we’ve received from our publisher,
Palgrave Macmillan. Particular thanks go to their editorial team, who have
been helpful and encouraging throughout this process. We are also appre-
ciative of the feedback we received from the anonymous reviewers of the
volume, which has contributed in many ways to improving the end result.
Many thanks to those who have aided us in assessing the quality of
individual chapters of the book: Eirik Askerøi, Stan Hawkins, and
Jeremy Mayall.
We are thankful to our colleagues, friends, and family for their encour-
agement and support.
And lastly, special thanks to all of our contributors. It has been a joy to
work with you on this project.
Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
13 Afterword257
Allan F. Moore
Index263
Notes on Contributors
ix
x Notes on
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors
xiii
CHAPTER 1
“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself,
incredible and inconceivable,” wrote American composer and conductor
Aaron Copland in 1959. By wilfully misreading him, we can consider how,
60 years later, music flows unstoppably through our lives—and, indeed,
our lives flow unstoppably through music—in ways that would have been
unimaginable for Copland at the time. Music is ubiquitous on a day-to-
day basis: it pervades urban spaces (cafés, restaurants, shops, street cor-
ners, and subway stations) and contemporary broadcasting channels
(radio, TV, web), and provides a soundtrack for our commutes, chores,
and exercise routines; it can be recorded and produced by “anyone” using
software pre-installed on our devices, and distributed freely through open
global platforms; and, it is organized in vast sonic libraries found on smart-
phones, tablets, and watches, tailored to our specific tastes via complex
algorithms. As clichéd as it may sound, music is instantly available with the
K. A. Hansen (*)
Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied
Sciences, Hamar, Norway
e-mail: kai.hansen@inn.no
N. Braae
School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand
click of a button (and, often, a small monthly fee).1 Now more than ever
before, it is easy to see (yet, possibly, all the more difficult to fully grasp)
the myriad forms that musical experiences take.
On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements presents a selection of
essays that aims to capture something of the way in which popular music
weaves into our society, culture, and lives. As already implied, one central
aspect of this relates to the implications of new media technologies.
However, as Henry Jenkins observes (2006, 2–3), our contemporary
media culture is defined not only by technological developments, but also
by changes in social and cultural practices, in modes of consumption and
listening, and in relations between artists and fans. As listeners today, we
grapple with making sense of music at a time when new musical forms
appear seemingly out of nowhere, bringing with them additional ques-
tions with regard to ethics and aesthetics; the boundaries between differ-
ent genres and styles can appear increasingly fluid, or even non-existent;
and music frequently, if not primarily, operates and develops meaning in
conjunction with other media and art forms. Put bluntly, the magnitude
and velocity of recent technological and cultural developments—in popu-
lar music practices and more generally in the Western world—challenge
our “ability to keep pace with meaning in our time” (Richardson and
Gorbman 2013, 32). This collection recognizes this issue not as an oppor-
tunity for singling out any one aspect or function of popular music that
necessitates further study, but, rather, as a platform for mobilizing popular
music as the focal point for a plurality of investigations into its various con-
nections, intersections, and entanglements. Yet, while current circum-
stances put into stark focus the ways in which popular music is entwined
with other cultural and social forms, this is not a new or technologically-
dependent phenomenon. Many of popular music’s connections are, to be
sure, historical or abstract, as some of our authors demonstrate.
Popular music itself, both as a general category and as an object of
study, is notoriously difficult to pin down (Moore 2007, xi; Scott 2009,
5). Partly, this is because it never exists in isolation, cannot be encountered
outside of discourse, and is invariably produced and consumed in relation
to vast networks of meaningful connections and relationships. It follows
that, as Richard Middleton points out, the musical worlds that we inhabit
“are not clear sets, filled with autonomous entities which are foreign to
1
For more on the ubiquity of music in contemporary culture, see Kassabian (2013) and
Quiñones et al. (2013).
1 TO BEGIN UNTANGLING POPULAR MUSIC 3
each other and connected only via neutral ‘links’; rather, they are half-way
worlds, without clear boundaries, filled with transient knots of variable
meaning, practice and status” (2000, 10). Middleton’s argument sets the
stage for untangling popular music, by shedding light on its entwinement
with diverse historical, cultural, and social circumstances and practices,
and assessing how it intersects with other idioms and media forms. In
undertaking this task, we recognize that popular music is not any one
thing, but, rather, can be defined according to a broad range of (admit-
tedly unstable) criteria (see, for example, Tagg 2012, 43ff.).
Inquiring into the state, significance, and function of popular music, in
its many guises, On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements explores
a wide range of music—both recent and older—with an aim to reflect the
plurality of potential meanings and understandings that underpins all musi-
cal encounters. As such, the collection is informed and shaped by the diver-
sity and eclecticism that has taken hold within the broad academic discipline
of popular music research. In following on from the strides made in previ-
ous decades by scholars within critical musicology and adjacent fields (see
Hawkins 2012; Moore 2007; Scott 2009), we would like to think that the
days of disciplinary hand-wringing and the almost-apologetically or defiant
justifications of researching popular music are coming to an end. Indeed,
while earlier scholars had to grapple with popular music’s seemingly “low”
status as an object of academic study (Moore 1993, 9), the last few decades
have seen popular music gain recognition in numerous scholarly fields.2
There remains a strong interest in studying popular music’s relation to
different aspects of identity, including age (Bennett 2013; Bennett and
Hodkinson 2012; Jennings and Gardner 2012), gender and sexuality
(Hawkins 2016, 2017; Lee 2018), race and ethnicity (Maultsby and
Burnim 2016; Stoever 2016), and religion (Ingalls 2018; Partridge and
Moberg 2017). Recent collections have ambitiously aimed to tackle popu-
lar music in its breadth (Bennett and Waksman 2015), have elucidated its
articulation in music video (Burns and Hawkins 2019), or have expanded
analytical approaches (Burns and Lacasse 2018; Scotto et al. 2018; Spicer
and Covach 2010). Scholarship on the production aspects of popular
music is proliferating (Bennett and Bates 2018; Frith and Zagorski-Thomas
2
This is not to say that the study of popular music, or the humanities more broadly, lack
for antagonists. Even within the broad field of popular music studies, battles are still being
fought for disciplinary boundaries, the validity of various approaches, and over the purposes
and obligations of music research. See Moore’s Afterword in this collection for further reflec-
tions on the significance of changing ontologies and paradigms for the study of music.
4 K. A. HANSEN AND N. BRAAE
chapters and sections, these distinctions serve to frame the individual con-
tributions vis-à-vis the central objectives of the collection. The first part of
the book, “Broad Strokes,” deals with the breadth of particular concepts
in relation to music, as well as issues of broad temporal, cultural, and theo-
retical significance. Kyle Devine’s chapter looks outside of the musical text
to explore questions about music in relation to matters of identity, infra-
structures, and industry, as well as the flows of media. In what might be
viewed as a bold move, he proposes the viability of a “musicology without
music,” not in an effort to discredit or oppose existing approaches to
music analysis, but rather as a way of opening up various “politics of exclu-
sion” in order to access some of the less investigated ways that music plays
a constitutive role in the world. Primarily concerned with what he calls the
“technosocial conditions” of music, Devine demonstrates how a mediatic
approach can unveil histories of ecology, industry, war, gender, and labor
exploitation. Moving from histories to stories, Alexander C. Harden adds
to the growing body of literature on narrative in popular music (Liu-
Rosenbaum 2012; Negus 2012; Nicholls 2007; Watson and Burns 2010)
by accounting for the ways in which listeners narrativize popular music.
Bringing a cognitive conception of narrativization to bear on popular
song, Harden engages with a range of theories and methods to think
broadly about the sensemaking activities involved in interpreting musical
experiences. His chapter provides a starting point for adding further
nuance to understandings of musical narrativity, and encourages the con-
tinued systematic development of its study.
Matthew Bannister looks broadly at a practice that is under-represented
in popular music scholarship, namely amateur music-making. Bannister
brings an ethnographic survey of ukulele groups into contact with theo-
ries of musical participation, making new incursions into a sphere of music
that has received little scholarly attention.3 He raises questions regarding
the purposes of musical performance for its participants, and the connec-
tions between amateur musicians and broader social and musical worlds.
Furthermore, he provides us with a reminder that for many musicians,
there are a variety of ways of knowing a text, whether in terms of technical
details (structure, harmonic language), an experiential state, or simply
imitation of others, with all of these providing equal opportunities
3
Recent studies that address aspects of amateur music-making include Finnegan (2007),
Eisentraut (2013), and Turino (2008), the latter of which forms the impetus for Bannister’s
research.
6 K. A. HANSEN AND N. BRAAE
for participants to create personal and musical meanings. In the final chap-
ter of the section, Nick Braae investigates notions of temporality as per-
taining to popular music, with a specific focus on linear or goal-directed
time. These enquiries are prompted by discussions with contemporary
performance, songwriting, and composition students, in which such ideas
are often informally invoked, but with little precision as to how they relate
to musical techniques. This is unsurprising given scholars have been
divided over the articulation and relevance of linear time in a popular
music context, especially vis-à-vis the classical idiom, in which this tempo-
ral state has been extensively addressed. Braae’s chapter points to a variety
of different performance techniques that may foster a sense of linear nar-
ratives in popular music, thereby offering a fresh perspective on both the
nature of popular music, and indeed its underlying connections with the
practice of storytelling.
The chapters in the next part of the book, “Second Takes,” present
new perspectives on familiar material, or question commonly held
assumptions about researching particular idioms, genres, and texts. The
former approach is demonstrated by Susanna Välimäki’s investigation
into the representation of war and trauma in the songs of Bruce
Springsteen. Välimäki identifies, in existing research on Springsteen’s war
songs (Harde 2013; Neiberg and Citino 2016; Schneider 2014, 2018), a
lack of engagement with the musical elements that contribute to the rep-
resentation of trauma. She redresses the balance by focusing on the musi-
cal means that contribute to constructing a discourse of trauma in
Springsteen’s songs, illustrating that popular music can serve as a shared
sonic space of collective mourning. The following chapter, written by
Erik Steinskog, is also concerned with shared concepts and frames of ref-
erence, exploring connections between Richard Wagner and Jimi Hendrix
through the lens of the “thingness of sound.” Embedded in Steinskog’s
proposition that listening to Hendrix might teach us how to listen to
Wagner, is a statement about the significance of technologies and
resources for the production (and reception) of musical sound. In differ-
ent ways, Steinskog argues, Wagner and Hendrix contribute to sound
becoming material, which in turn facilitates new perspectives on music
and its place in the world.
The two remaining chapters of this section argue for alternative ways of
addressing the musical persona (Auslander 2006, 2009; Hansen 2019; Moore
2012), albeit with very different foci and outcomes. Engaging with the com-
plexities of musical expressivity, and providing an alternative to scholarship
1 TO BEGIN UNTANGLING POPULAR MUSIC 7
4
Intertextuality has long been a central concept for popular music analysts: there exist
many studies that richly demonstrate how artists frequently reference previous works through
lyrical, compositional, and sonic qualities, whether for purposes of critique and commentary,
alignment with musical traditions, or creating a web of aesthetic associations (Butler 2003;
Covach 1995; Holm-Hudson 2001; Middleton 2000; Spicer 2009, 2018). Such investiga-
tions have expanded outwards to place further emphasis on visual and extramusical media as
part of the intertextual equations, with authors revealing the richly layered artistic meanings
that can emerge from a confluence of audiovisual references (Burns and Woods 2018;
Hawkins 2018; Williams 2018).
8 K. A. HANSEN AND N. BRAAE
5
See Blake (2012), Heidemann (2016), Van Elferen (2018), and Zagorski-Thomas
(2018).
1 TO BEGIN UNTANGLING POPULAR MUSIC 9
References
Auslander, Philip. 2006. Musical Personae. The Drama Review 50 (1): 100–119.
———. 2009. Musical Persona: The Physical Performance of Popular Music. In
The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott,
303–315. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bennett, Andy. 2013. Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Bennett, Andy, and Paul Hodkinson, eds. 2012. Ageing and Youth Cultures:
Music, Style and Identity. London: Bloomsbury.
Bennett, Andy, and Steve Waksman, eds. 2015. The Sage Handbook of Popular
Music. London: Sage.
Bennett, Samantha, and Eliot Bates, eds. 2018. Critical Approaches to the
Production of Music and Sound. New York: Bloomsbury.
Blake, David K. 2012. Timbre as Differentiation in Indie Music. Music Theory
Online 18 (2).
Burns, Lori, and Stan Hawkins, eds. 2019. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular
Music Video Analysis. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Burns, Lori, and Serge Lacasse, eds. 2018. The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in
Recorded Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Burns, Lori, and Alyssa Woods. 2018. Rap Gods and Monsters; Words, Music, and
Images in the Hip-Hop Intertexts of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West. In The
Pop Palimpsest, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 215–251. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Butler, Mark. 2003. Taking it Seriously: Intertextuality and Authenticity in Two
Covers by the Pet Shop Boys. Popular Music 22 (1): 1–19.
Copland, Aaron. 1959. The Pleasures of Music. The Saturday Evening Post.
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/
the_pleasures_of_music_by_aaron_copeland.pdf
Covach, John. 1995. Stylistic Competencies, Musical Humor and “This Is Spinal
Tap.” In Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytic Studies,
ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, 399–421. Rochester:
University of Rochester Press.
Daughtry, J.Martin. 2015. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival
in Wartime Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
10 K. A. HANSEN AND N. BRAAE
Maultsby, Portia K., and Mellonnee V. Burnim, eds. 2016. Issues in African
American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation. New York: Routledge.
Middleton, Richard. 2000. Introduction. In Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual
Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton, 1–19. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Moir, Zack, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith, eds. 2019. The Bloomsbury
Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Moore, Allan F. 1993. Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock.
Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.
———. 2007. Introduction. In Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, ed. Allan
F. Moore, ix–xxii. Aldershot: Ashgate.
———. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Negus, Keith. 2012. Narrative Time and the Popular Song. Popular Music &
Society 35 (4): 483–500.
Neiberg, Michael S., and Robert M. Citino. 2016. A Long Walk Home: The Role
of Class and the Military in the Springsteen Catalogue. BOSS: The Biannual
Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 2 (1): 41–63.
Nicholls, David. 2007. Narrative Theory as an Analytical Tool in the Study of
Popular Music Texts. Music & Letters 88 (2): 297–315.
Partridge, Christopher, and Marcus Moberg, eds. 2017. The Bloomsbury Handbook
of Religion and Popular Music. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Pieslak, Jonathan. 2009. Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq
War. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Quiñones, Marta García, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi, eds. 2013. Ubiquitous
Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice. Farnham: Ashgate.
Richardson, John, and Claudia Gorbman. 2013. Introduction. In The Oxford
Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia
Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 3–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schneider, Jason. 2014. Another Side of “Born in the U.S.A.”: Form, Paradox,
and Rhetorical Indirection. BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen
Studies 1 (1): 9–35.
———. 2018. “Bring ‘em home!”: The Rhetorical Ecologies of Devils & Dust. In
Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Rhetoric, Social Consciousness, and
Contemporary Culture, ed. William I. Wolff, 163–177. London: Routledge.
Scott, Derek B. 2009. Introduction. In The Ashgate Research Companion to
Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 1–21. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Scotto, Ciro, Kenneth Smith, and John Brackett, eds. 2018. The Routledge
Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches. London:
Routledge.
12 K. A. HANSEN AND N. BRAAE
Smith, Gareth Dylan, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil
Kirkman, eds. 2017. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music
Education. London: Routledge.
Spicer, Mark. 2009. Strategic Intertextuality in Three of John Lennon’s Late
Beatles Songs. Gamut 2 (1): 347–375.
———. 2018. The Electric Light Orchestra and the Anxiety of the Beatles’
Influence. In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, ed.
Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 106–136. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Spicer, Mark, and John Covach, eds. 2010. Sounding out Pop: Analytical Essays in
Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics
of Listening. New York: New York University Press.
Tagg, Philip. 2012. Music’s Meanings: A Modern Musicology for Non-Musos.
New York and Huddersfield: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press.
Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Van Elferen, Isabella. 2018. Dark Timbre: The Aesthetics of Tone Colour in Goth
Music. Popular Music 37 (1): 22–39.
Watson, Jada, and Lori Burns. 2010. Resisting Exile and Asserting Musical Voice:
The Dixie Chicks Are “Not Ready to Make Nice.” Popular Music 29
(3): 325–350.
Williams, Justin. 2018. Intertextuality and Lineage in the Game’s “We Ain’t” and
Kendrick Lamar’s “M.A.A.D. City.” In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in
Recorded Popular Music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 291–312. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2014. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2018. Timbre as Text: The Cognitive Roots of
Intertextuality. In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular
Music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 273–290. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
PART I
Broad Strokes
CHAPTER 2
Kyle Devine
K. Devine (*)
Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: kyle.devine@imv.uio.no
sizzle of shellac, the crackle of vinyl, the slosh of MP3. These textures stem
from the technical capacities and limitations of a given recording format
and its media channels. Such textures are of course themselves patterned
in particular ways, while their characteristics can certainly be made mean-
ingful in both listening experiences and production practices.1 Yet these
textures also exist as pre-textual conditions of possibility that underwrite
all of a given format’s musically patterned sounds. The argument in this
chapter is that we can learn as much from seemingly meaningless textures
as from evidently meaningful texts.
Attending to the textures and surfaces of recording formats—regardless
of the meaningfully patterned sounds they contain—does not invalidate or
replace existing analytical approaches to music. It is as essential as ever to
analyze the forms, meanings, and politics of representation and identity in
self-evidently musical texts and contexts. It is as necessary as ever to
research the political economies and cultural policies that define recogniz-
ably musical practices of leisure and labor. But these are not the only ways
of approaching music as an object of study, and they do not access all of
the ways that music plays a constitutive role in our world. This chapter
highlights how meaningless surface noises index broader and apparently
unmusical technosocial conditions that actually function recursively as
both the grounds of and fellow actors in more apparently musical efforts
to shape sounds in meaningful ways. I define these technosocial conditions
in terms of a mediatic approach to music—a term and an approach that I
will explain more fully below. For now, the important thing to note is that
mediality informs the ways that texts are created as well as heard (even
though mediatic conditions are not dependent on experiential revelation
or meaningful interpretation). This means that an understanding of
1
Surface noises and textures, in the senses I am discussing them here, are not equivalent to
the “sonic signatures” discussed by Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen (2016).
These authors develop their notion by outlining, for example, how “the sonic signature of
the phonograph” arises from a “combination of characteristic background noise” (i.e. “the
physical contact between stylus and cylinder”) and “limited sonic range” (Ibid., 63, 64).
Brøvig-Hanssen’s and Danielsen’s main interest is in how such sonic signatures work as
experiential properties in musical consumption as well as aesthetic imperatives in musical
production. I am speaking of the distinctive textures of formats in terms of their nonherme-
neutic and nonphenomenological mediatic conditions (a perspective from which observers
and horizons of shared meaning are irrelevant but where such conditions do index broad
social frictions; cf. Tsing 2005). It is also worth noting that the perspective developed here
participates in a broader attention to surfaces that is emerging in cultural theory (e.g.
Coleman and Oakley-Brown 2017).
2 MUSICOLOGY WITHOUT MUSIC 17
music’s mediatic conditions can also inform the ways that texts are inter-
preted and analyzed (even if such conditions are not normally observed
and are not normally understood to be “musical”). While the ultimate
payoff of such a perspective may be to discover “new stories about music
and its many allies” so that “‘the music itself’ returns with a difference”
(Piekut 2014, 212, 213), this chapter pursues a musicology without music
as an initial step toward that goal.
The phrase “musicology without music” is not a call to abandon music
or musicology. Rather, it is a call to expand and multiply those domains by
highlighting the ways that they are not only necessarily tied to but also
constituted by a variety of distributed and ostensibly non-musical condi-
tions. Indeed, a musicology without music suggests that researchers
should not be so sure that they know in advance what counts as a “prop-
erly” musical practice or a “properly” musicological object of study. The
word without, then, here connotes less its everyday prepositional meaning
as lack than its archaic adverbial meaning as outside—although, as I show
in this chapter, the latter (musicology that begins from a position that is
exterior to “music”) authorizes the former (musicology that proceeds in
the absence of “music”). The point is to develop a version of music
research that does not begin as a musicology of music—that does not
begin in a tautology whereby the force of pre-constructed definitions of
either music or musicology delimit what music or musicology can be or
should do. Antoine Hennion clarifies the reflexivities and recursions at
play here:
[W]e will have a much better understanding of what [music] can do and
cause to be done … if we do not start from the hypothesis that music … is
‘already there.’ … [I]f, on the contrary, we advance the hypothesis that we
do not know what music is, and if we adopt as objects of study the variable
mechanisms through which it appears at different times … it becomes clear
that the previous position is an anachronism, for it evaluates musical reality
retrospectively using the very criteria that music history has created. …
[M]usic and taste should not be the resources of our analysis, but its topics.
They have written the history which is our source for claiming to write
theirs. (2007, 330–31, italics preserved)
of public order, other sociologists say that this approach confuses question
and answer. It is not “the social” that explains a phenomenon. Rather, it is
precisely “the social” that needs to be explained as a phenomenon.2 The
parallel proposition of a musicology without music is that we should not
begin our research projects with the assumption that we know what music
is or what counts as musical. Instead, we should observe those actions and
conditions that allow something called music to emerge.
From these perspectives, a chapter that is not about “music” as conven-
tionally understood is also inherently suspicious of the category of “popu-
lar music” as a starting point for musical thought and scholarship. This is
not to deny the fact that, as a cultural form, popular music has arisen from
historically specific conditions of possibility. It is not to deny that, as a
label, popular music clearly serves as a compass for vast areas of musical
practice. Nor is it to deny that it was necessary, admirable, and enormously
productive (politically, intellectually, institutionally) for a generation of
scholars to work to put the field of popular music studies on the map. The
point here is that the term “popular music,” like music more generally, can
be seen less as a group of already linked practices than an act of grouping
that performs the category (cf. Piekut 2011, 10). The broader point is
that there is no pre-existing domain called popular music that then gets
tangled up with other domains. Rather, popular music—as with all music—
consists only in its performative entanglements. The act of grouping per-
forms certain delimitations, which carry political and epistemological
consequences. As Patrick Valiquet notes: “Genre, like gender, is not a
property of things but a complex political apparatus that uses bodies,
behaviours and machines to construct relations of belonging” (2018, 97).
Valiquet goes on to detail the work that genre categories do to create poli-
tics of exclusion in relation to a variety of others—other forms of music,
other means of making music, other people who make music. If Valiquet
stands as a representative of some of the subtlest thinking on genre today
(cf. Drott 2013; Brackett 2016; Born and Haworth 2017), I want to push
this scholarship further by understanding the work of “music” as itself a
kind of meta-generic political apparatus that relies on ideological distinc-
tions between “properly” musical and apparently non-musical practices
that are, in reality, constitutive of music. A musicology of music, which
assumes a certain definition of its object of study in terms of categorical
2
I am here offering a simplified summary of Latour (2005). For a helpful application of
Latour’s actor-network-theory in music research, see Piekut (2014).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
1899:
"These are the links in a long and very strong chain of gold
uniting the colonies with the Mother Country. Quite recently,
large quantities of German capital have been invested in
various industries. The Empire's capital in United States
railroads is put down at $180,000,000. In America, Germans
have undertaken manufacturing. They have used German money to
put up breweries, hat factories, spinning, weaving, and paper
mills, tanneries, soap-boiling establishments, candle mills,
dye houses, mineral-water works, iron foundries, machine
shops, dynamite mills, etc. Many of these mills use German
machinery, and not a few German help. The Liebig Company, the
Chilean saltpeter mines, the Chilean and Peruvian metal mines,
many of the mines of South Africa, etc., are in large part
controlled by German money and German forces. Two hundred
different kinds of foreign bonds or papers are on the Berlin,
Hamburg, and Frankfort exchanges. Germany has rapidly risen to
a very important place in the financial, industrial, and
mercantile world. Will she keep it? Much will depend on her
power to push herself on the sea."
{248}
GERMANY: A. D. 1899.
Military statistics.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900.
Military and naval expenditure.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900.
Naval strength.
R. Sohm,
The Civil Code of Germany
(Forum, October, 1800).
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (January-March).
The outbreak of the "Boxers" in northern China.
{250}
W. C. Dreher,
A Letter from Germany
(Atlantic Monthly, March, 1901).
"The new Elbe and Trave Canal, which has been building five
years and has been completed at a cost of 24,500,000 marks
($5,831,000)—of which Prussia contributed 7,500,000 marks
($1,785,000) and the old Hansa town of Lübeck, which is now
reviving, 17,000,000 marks ($4,046,000)—was formally opened by
the German Emperor on the 16th [of June]. The length of the
new canal-which is the second to join the North Sea and the
Baltic, following the Kaiser Wilhelm Ship Canal, or Kiel
Canal, which was finished five years ago at a cost of
156,000,000 marks ($37,128,000)-is about 41 miles. The
available breadth of the new canal is 72 feet; breadth of the
lock gates, 46 feet; length of the locks, 87 yards; depth of
the locks, 8 feet 2 inches. The canal is crossed by
twenty-nine bridges, erected at a cost of $1,000,000. The span
of the bridges is in all cases not less than 30 yards and
their height above water level about 15 feet. There are seven
locks, five being between Lübeck and the Möllner See—the
highest point of the canal—and two between Möllner See and
Lauenburg-on-the-Elbe."
{251}
"Germany has lately taken a step to clear off the haze from
her financial horizon by calling in the outstanding thalers
which are full legal tender, and turning them into subsidiary
coins of limited legal tender—a process which will extend
over ten years. At the end of that time, if no misfortune
intervenes, she will be on the gold standard as surely and
safely as England is. Her banks can now tender silver to their
customers when they ask for gold, as the Bank of France can
and does occasionally. When this last measure is carried into
effect the only full legal-tender money in Germany will be
gold, or Government notes redeemable in gold."
W. C. Dreher,
A Letter from Germany
(Atlantic Monthly, March, 1901).
{252}
W. C. Dreher,
A Letter from Germany
(Atlantic Monthly, March, 1901).
"But though Germany has only one city of more than one
million, and one more of more than half a million, and the
United States has three of each class, Germany has, in
proportion to its population rather more cities of from 50,000
to 100,000 inhabitants, and decidedly more of from 100,000 to
500,000, than the United States. In the United States
8,000,000 people live in cities of over 500,000 inhabitants,
against some 3,000,000 in Germany; yet in the United States a
larger percentage of the population lives in places which have
under 50,000 inhabitants."