Richard Middleton

The Cultural Study of Music : A Critical Introduction

What is the relationship between music and culture? The first edition of The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction explored this question with groundbreaking rigor and breadth. Now this second edition refines that original analysis while examining the ways the field has developed in the years since the book’s initial publication. Including contributions from scholars of music, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, this anthology provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of music and culture. It includes both pioneering theoretical essays and exhaustively researched case studies on particular issues in world musics. For the second edition, the original essays have been revised and nine new chapters have been added, covering themes such as race, religion, geography, technology, and the politics of music. With an even broader scope and a larger roster of world-renowned contributors, The Cultural Study of Music is certain to remain a canonical text in the field of cultural musicology.

Popular music analysis and musicology: bridging the gap

Since their beginnings, popular music studies have conducted an implicit (sometimes explicit) dialogue with musicology. To be sure, the musicological side of this conversation has more often than not been marked by insult, incomprehension or silence; and popular music scholars for their part have tended to concentrate on musicologys deficiencies. But musicology is changing (more about this later); at the same time, recent work on popular music suggests a new confidence, manifesting itself in part in a willingness to engage with and adapt mainstream methods. I believe each needs the other.

Pop, rock and interpretation

Everyone with an interest in pop has opinions about it - about its meanings, value, effects and significance. But some opinions - those of critics and academics, for example - claim more attention than others, largely because they have access to the public ear; and, actually, surprisingly little is known about ordinary fans’ interpretations. Does this matter? Articulate description of musical responses is always rare; but more is at stake here than the familiar ‘mystery’ of music. The announcement of the 1994 Mercury Music Award, by a panel chaired by noted pop music scholar Simon Frith, led trade magazine Music Week (6 August 1994) to bemoan the involvement of ‘egghead academics and journalists who think too much for their own good’. Thirteen years earlier, the first international conference of the recently formed International Association for the Study of Popular Music was greeted with mocking incredulity in a London Times feature (16 June 1981), as was the first issue of the Cambridge University Press journal Popular Music. There seemed, evidently, to be an obvious incongruity here - high-value educational capital invested in the study of worthless music, rationality applied to the obstinately irrational, articulate discourse to the wantonly dumb; and this incongruity runs deep through the academys involvement with pop. There are often suspicions that pop is being used. Thus male leftists, with the radical political commitments of the ‘1968 generation’, largely drive the shape of the early waves of scholarship, ‘rockist’, ‘masculinist’ and anti-establishment as it is.

Studying Popular Music

Part 1 Charting the popular - towards a historical framework: roll over Beethoven? - sites and soundings on the music historical map its all over now popular music and mass culture - Adornos theory over the rainbow? - technology, politics and popular music in an era beyond mass culture. Part 2 Taking a part - towards an analytical framework: change gonna come? - popular music and musicology I heard it through the grapevine? - popular music in culture from me to you popular music as message lost in music? - pleasure, value and ideology in popular music.