Studying Popular Music

(Preface)

and that change happens within periods of MODERNIZATION.

(p. 4)

4)Technologico-economic definitions (Popular music is disseminated by mass media and/or in a mass market.)

(p. 5)

It treats songs solely as OBJECTS, neglecting their role in culutral practice or ‘way of life.’

(p. 5)

‘Popular music’ can only be properly viewed within the context of teh WHOLE MUSICAL FIELD, within which it is an active tendency; and this field, together with its internal relationships, is never still-it is always in MOVEMENT.

(p. 6)

SOCIETY (in class societies) is always CONTRADICTORY, and it’s popular music is a dichotomy/ a STRUGGLE…

(p. 6)

Not a musician, but wrote one important item about music that Middle spends a whole chapter on…RELATIVE AUTONOMY of cultural practices…the relationship between ACTUAL culture, ideas, experience & ECONOMICALLY DETERMINED FACTORS like class position always form an ideological dichotomy that becomes an object of STRUGGLE.

(p. 8)

(p. 8)

Musical (he says cultural) change is a a product of the PROCESS by which the relationships of dominance and subordination are articulated. (not his words…)

(p. 8)

In this theory, cultural forms and practices (Antonio Gramsci’s superstructure and Richard Middleton’s instance or level of practice) have relative autonomy; socio-economic structures of power do not determine them, but rather they relate to them. “The theory of articulation recognizes the complexity of cultural fields. It preserves a relative autonomy for cultural and ideological elements (…) but also insists that those combinatory patterns that are actually constructed do mediate deep, objective patterns in the socio-economic formation, and that the mediation takes place in struggle: the classes fight to articulate together constituents of the cultural repe[r]toire in particular ways so that they are organized in terms of principles or sets of values determined by the position and interests of the class in the prevailing mode of production.”

-example 3: the ‘classlessness’ around the early Beatles, political ideals combined with swinging Britian ideas and working class/boy next door/man in the street notions.

Like: Victorian music halls’ ballads, Elvis, the early Beatles, and the 1970s & 80s chart hits (think Eurovision & mainstream rock…)

(p. 9)

Like: early 1900s syncopated dance music, 1950s early rock and roll, 1970s punk music.

(p. 9)

-The theory of articulation recognizes teh complexity of culutral fields. It preserves a RELATIVE AUTONOMY for culural and ideological elements (like musical structures and song lyrics) but insists that those combinatory patterns that are actually constructed do mediate deep, objective patterns in teh socio-economic formation, and taht the mediation takes place IN STRUGGLE!

(p. 10)

(p. 10-11)

-The theory of articulation means that the musical field is not undetermined, but OVERdetermined.
(The ruling interests in the social formation take the lead in setting the predispositions which are always try8ing to constitute a recieved shape.

(p. 11)

(p. 11)

-i.e. Elvis related to proletarian, black & poor white, young males in the American South when he started…this ‘constellation’ was appropriated by THEM. People related Elvis to them, not the other way around, because they took his romantic-element lyrics, and an underview of the working class of the South on the American Dream, and a new awareness of freedom in adolescent leisure behavior…

(p. 12)

3) POP CULTURE (Post WW2, global rock & roll popular & the AVANT-GARDE movement)

(p. 18)

(p. 18)

Like in: HEARTBREAK HOTEL

(It’s that early rock and roll sound that makes part of the body want to move.)

[He’s an Elvis predecessor to how COUNTERCULTURE music became mainstream.]

*Suggests that this is music created in a recording STUDIO using quite complex equipment and recording techniques and that is it is music for LISTENING to, rather than dancing. (The Beatles had in fact just given up live performance.)

3) AVANT-GARDE
-surrealist/through composed-
(example: Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine”)

Building extended forms over drones is an element of the blues that was used.

The idea of a riff, like in Cream’s “Spoonful” was to state the position of individualistic elaboration over the collectivism of drone and repetition.

There was a basic 4-chord harmonic structure intentionally taken from Baroque music. The basic materials in “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procul Harum are taken from a cantata by J.S. Bach. There was a complementary trend of influence of older art as music sources.

*Both were considered countercultural in their eras!

They are defined in this way primarily because hippies said they should be!

(Rachel thought: Beethoven is loved by rock musicians because he is seen as connecting programmatic ideas…which they can relate to. And, they love Bach’s harmony because it’s predictable, but also because they grew up in a culture based on music based on his theory, and for this reason it subconsciously sounds good to them and they connect to it. Mozart is obvious…melodies popular and bawdy yet still beautiful…he can go from holy to heady in 2 seconds…what pop musician can’t connect to that. These are the main 3 I hear in typical rock music, and ALL 3 were counterculture in their time! I think they vibe it, but don’t know why they connect…)

(p. 32)

He also wanted to examine the political economy of music and askied if in a CAPITALIST SOCIETY, is a really POPULAR MUSIC in fact POSSIBLE?

In 1933 his credential was revolked by the Nazis due to his Jewish decent, and he and his wife fled to Oxford in 1934.
He lived in America (NY and LA) from 1937-1949, and then went back to Germany.

He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances.

-Differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that “the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods” but this is concealed under “the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism”.

*Remember, this guy was a pro-socialist, protestant of Jewish descent, who fought the Nazis intellectually, and who basically thought that too much human reason and rationalization led to totalitarianism, and that the utopian key was individualism. That being said he was a mild mannered fellow, loved how open he thought American society was, and really wanted to retain a sense of WHOLENESS in musical processes!

music which AFFIRMS or ACCEPTS the status quo
&
Music (of the avant-garde) which REFUSES such AFFIRMATION

split apart after Beethoven. (Music became standardized, formulaic, and fetisheized in both serious and popular musics.)

production is reduced, in effect, to reproduction. He believed only Schoenberg and that lot resisted this situation at the price of soical isolation and deliberate incomprehensibility: the only way left to refuse the market!

It is the big producer’s task to have ‘the ear of the public,’ therby representing in the music the feelings and values of a ‘kind of imaginary democracy.’ But, he needs the little producers to find the individuals to feed change to that machine.

(p. 40-41)

-Adorno’s Beethoven image objectifies those musical tendencies Adorno wants to privilege. (You can negate his theory just using examples from Beethoven’s later life and works.)

(p. 41)

(p. 42)

-The mid-1980s in CZECHOSLOVAKIA saw the persecution of the JAZZ SECTION as politically subversive or alternative(which included jazz, punk, and rock)

(p. 43)

-commitment to ‘authentic’ self-expression

(p. 43)

-Adorno says that avant-garde COMMODITIES are an impossible combination (Zappa is an example of that…something avant-garde but yet a commercially viable commodity.)

he is embarrassed by them because of their ‘archaic’ elements but he is unable to deny their authentic power…he explains it away by saying they come from ‘backward’ Eastern European countries.

PSEUDO-INDIVIDUALIZATION-a song must not only be ‘familiar’ but also seem ‘new’ to succeed in popular music.

MAJOR EXAMPLE: Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, & Roll”

-VERSE-AND-REFRAIN SONG [derived from folk music elements](ex: anything by Bob Dylan!!!)

(He thinks these are a cliche facade!)

5) improvisations and ‘breaks’

(EVEN THE NEW MODERN “ANTI-VOCAL” OF PUNK MUSIC)

(pgs. 55-57)

(for example: he puts dissonance as breaking the rule, where in some cultures which influenced popular song forms it is a part of the correct, just from a different system…there are lots of examples but you get the idea…)

There seems to be a kind of “Ur-pop” song in Adorno’s mind – to which no actual song, however standardized, could totally conform.

the world has many tunes (even from European ‘folk’ traditions) which follow predictable, well-knonw melodic and rhythmic patterns. [Remember MAQAM? and RAGA?]

The caused the use-value to be destrocyed

The caused the use-value of music to be destroyed.
Middleton says:
We have become an age of background music, listening is often distracted, and popular music is often used as a drug or as a ‘switch’ to trigger preplanned narcissistically comfortable sensations or as an instrument of group conformity. (But he thinks Adorno has good ideas but goes too far to the extreme.)

(p. 59)

DECIPHER IT!

Weaknesses: (2 major ones) USE of ‘immanent method’ and his own historical location!
The immanent method assumes that the ‘truth’ of a work is to be found within the work itself, and you must read Adorno in the context of a reaction to Facism to understand him.

(it’s a concept of everything we were as a culture pre-capitilization…)

The two debated, and the “Benjaminin” tradition points perhaps “beyond mass culture” and he likes concrete cultural and social detail over Adorno’s tendency towards abstraction of social process.

things are assimilated by habit. He writes about film, but it can be applied to popular music. The idea is of shifting art from the sphere of ritual or disinterested contemplation to that of everyday life and political struggle.

(p. 67-68)

–

(p. 68)

-a new social and aesthetic meaning to the music itself.

(p. 69)

characteristic of the musical original!

Cutler=there are 3 modes of production, and INTERPLAY between modes is important. Talks a lot about recording technology

I HEAR MARX in all of these guys mentioned so far…ALL!!!

*Notation negated folk music, and emphasized the eye over the ear. This makes music a potential commodity or personal property, and regocrding negates the negation and returns us to the ear, registering sound rather than notational schemes. (So all the main characteristics of of recording echo those of the folk mode, but transformed now because ANY sound is available.)

*Liszt, Paganin, Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton…

Middleton says NO WAY! Bourgeois adopted black elements and they were part of the system.

John SHEPHERD: argues that consciousness, hence cultural forms are largely conditioned by the media through which reality is perceived and organized. Also a McLuhan acolyte. His most original contribution: ANALYSIS of the how the 2 ‘world views’ (oral and industrial) contrast and are ‘encoded’ in music.

Graham VULLIAMY: links between musical media and structures of society, culture, and consciousness. Non-literate music making almost demands repetitive or traditional frameworks.

It’s propensity for large-scale, visually organized construction, abstraction of symbol from sound, co-ordination of multiple events and voices (through bar lines for example), and ‘spatialized’ chord structures and progressions.

*these were centered on the GUITAR and NON-LITERATE modes of production!~

Middleton thinks that we need to rethink how musicology relates to popular music…he thinks it should be reworked completely.

invention is sought, but innovations can be taken over and used for other purposes than their original intent.

new skills
hi-fi stereo & LPs developed

Synthesizers, because of particular usages, have acquired connotations of ‘modernity’ and the ‘future’ or ‘space-exploration’ and ‘rational control.’

The critical:shock/protest

Which science does Middleton believe should study popular music?

3) an ideology slanted by the origins and development of musicology itself…it is not historically neutral.

…he notes that Jewish culture did not have any negative connotations of black culture like their WASPy neighbors…

He sees the Beatles as standing between different musical methods and traditions.

Janos MAROTHY-from the late Middle Ages to the early 20th century, gives a cross section of how musicians have taken over ‘high’ techniques and transformed them.

Van der Merwe: (the folk styles of Britan guy…we read this for other class)…connecting techniques of traditional African musics, of ‘folk’ styles in Britan, and of the offspring of both in America. He says some blues/rock bass patterns can be traced back to 16th-century dance music. The ‘passamezzo moderno’ is one of 2 popular harmonic formulae in the Renaissance period, divided into 2 complementary strains and turns into the 12-bar blues. (Shock to the conventional view, but Middleton and Rachel both think he’s right.)

He thinks that the main task at hand is to “REMAP THE TERRAIN” and hopes that promise in a REFORMED MUSICOLOGY lies in the inevitable reorganization of the WHOLE OF WESTERN MUSICAL HISTORY.

Middleton thinks that rather than pulling to one side, with the traditional musicologists, or the other with the ‘total critics’ or musicology it would be better for the popular musicologist to LOOK BOTH WAYS, LIVING OUT THE TENSION…it offers an opportunity to develop a CRITICAL musicology which could provide a vastly increased analytical power.

the epistemology of a musician or a scholar must be considered as a variable.

this past of applying classical musicology to jazz affects HOW the music is heard and interpreted and also WHAT PART of the corpus is privileged for study

There is a struggle in popular music creation, and likewise a struggle to write about it in an academic way. Therefore, Middleton thinks the best way would be to holistically think about the situation, and in a generative way use the best from each point of view…because that’s how the music’s creation functions…but also remembering and realizing that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is from the same world as the ‘art’ music of it’s time. (Rachel’s words)

(Middleton is kinda uncomfortable with the term folk, but uses it… I think your teacher likes him a lot so tread lightly and put a positive spin on it. Seeger is a good enough guy…he analyzed how people tried to define folk music, Sharp is an okay dude but dated…said that folk music is of the poor and lower classes socially, and Lloyd, as you know, is a socialist commie pinko who takes up where Sharp left off, and believes ‘primitive’ song belongs to the urban working class.

*[Middleton advocates this but says it’s necessary to understand the other two.]

3-rejects rigid boundaries – varying practice within one field – music (Middleton’s favorite)

[I like Lomax, FYI :)]

Lloyd romanticizes ‘worker’ as Sharp romanticizes ‘peasant.’

“There were never any ‘folk’ except in the minds of the bourgeoisie. ‘High art’ vs. ‘folk art’ represents a dialectic that is almost completely contained within bourgeois ideology.

Form refers to vaguely to tune-families, structure of musical form, and whether music is put out on tape, LP, or by oral presentation only. (To be honest, Middleton kind of goes off on a transmission tangent and forgets about defining what he meant by form…it’s my major complaint of him in general…he does this a lot. Sets up what he’s going to talk about, hits one part really big, and then either quickly dismisses the other concept(s) he listed in the intro, or simply wanders into another tangent and leaves you hanging…I just gave you my a priori knowledge on form from Bonnie Wade and Bruno Nettl…okay…so I just went off on a tangent…yikes…back to Middleton-land)

[Carl von Sydow calls dialect ‘ECOTYPE’]

FUNCTIONAL ones: a Jimi Hendrix single was not the same as a concert version of the same song

Tune-family variations can be grouped by PERSON (idiolect), PLACE (geographical dialect or ecotype), THING (FUNCTINAL ecotype…two versions by the same artist for different uses concert and recording) & IDEA (Sociological ecotype…fits into what society wants at the time and place…even if it makes not sense.)

JIMI HENDRIX’s recording of ‘Gipsy Eyes’ is an example. The entire performance is put together from variants of 5 stock ideas…which are listed on page 137: two drum licks, a complex of riffs, a basic melodic falling pattern, and an electric guitar effect.

While repetition is a feature of all music, a high level of repetition may be a specific mark of “the popular.”

* politically they derive from teh bourgeoise’s attempt to make critique comfortable. The judegement of ‘authenticity’ is always directed at the practice of someone else, and the ‘purity’ of folk society is a supposed idea of what is acceptable to the upper crust and “lower class but wholesome”…whatever the hell that means!

This idea is used by Janos MAROTHY.

*This is called APPROPRIATION!

-automatic response

For example, folklorists almost always take it as asiomatic that ‘folk’ music and ‘folk’ society are linked…they are COMMUNAL rather than PERSONAL. (This is the ideal that Sharp and Lloyd went after.)

*Remember this is Lloyd!

i.e. They are thought of as in the past, old-fashioned, and from that other group that isn’t us…and therefore the whole concept is complete BUNK!

politics: ‘folk blues’ was always about to die out and needed rescuing…Rachel’s 2 cents: some folk music or other is “always about to die out.”…rubbish…

Ethnomusicologists commonly have a “cultralist” viewpoint as music is analysed and understood as expressions of human experience.

(This is an important card…make sure you can THINK through these concepts, not just memorize them, and you can answer any question on this test!)

While etnomusicologists have traditionally studied ‘primitive’ cultures, they could find the same ideas of culture linked to music easily in the popular music subcultures of the developed societies of the Western world.

————————————–
This argument derives from its large behavioral (as against symbolic) component: the link between culture and music is seen by Lomax as partly physiological.
At the same time, it ignores teh extent to which style is a CODED distillation of a COMPLEX of cultural factors. (Middleton thinks this is a mistake…Rachel doesn’t…Rachel likes Lomax on lots of topics)

[Conversely, as social cohesion declines, and individual male assertiveness grows, SOLO singing increases, and with it raspy, nasal, narrow vocal tone.

*While this may concern actual social structure, Lomax asserts that musical performance is a SPECIFIC SOCIAL SITUATION and that alone is what he is describing in this schema…

-Middleton doesn’t agree with me…he thinks Lomax starts off well but ends up in circular reasoning…I think Middleton doesn’t understand Lomax’s homology theories…but you better side with Middleton and pass your exam before I jade you.

CHECK OUT PAGE 151 at least once if you have time.

(Basically it’s pages 152-154 but don’t bother…I don’t like Middleton’s take on any of this, I think he’s just plain wrong, missed the boat, and didn’t read the books that he should have before reading Keil and Lomax and took what they meant totally out of context…so I skimmed…you get the idea…this is where Middleton and I diverge…

(Okay, Rachel tangent on this topic: how can Middleton keep using the term cultural history, but then say you can’t have cultural homologies…just the way he talks ASSUMES some homology of culture in an UNDERSTOOD way…he’s talking himself out of his argument from page 150 on…but he doesn’t seem to notice…ack)

Connection-The peer-group to which I belong rates the tunes and we collectively select for the members in a subtle way what is to be ‘heard’ in each tune. [These ideas are from a guy named Riesman writing in 1950.]

(These are indicators of youth subculture music.)

Homology is the process whereby the group’s ‘focal concerns,’ group structrues, and collective self-image is brought together into a distinctive and coherent ensemble, in which members can see their central values held and reflected. Give two examples of youth subcultures from Britan and explain their style homology.

For skinhead culture, the cropped hair, half-jeans, and big ‘working’ boots went along with male chauvinistic masculinity, football violence, and racist scapegoating from old working class biases in a type of collectivity based in their own collective economic and social problems.

INTEGRAL: when the relationship between lifestyle and cultural item (in this case music) comes into being, develops and becomes two way, where each begets changes in the other

-‘OVERCODED’: a piece may be so tightly bound to socialized conventions as to be ‘about’ its code.

grammar-orientated style derives often overcoded texts from a pre-existing system of rules and conventions.

WORKS AND PERFORMANCES.

————————————–
The SP level comprises codes concerned with the relationships between all the social practices of a culture, including musical life.
The MT level is open to those versed in this particular cultural practice…i.e. all speakers of the ‘musical mother tongue of Western people’.
The SP level is open to all members of the social group concerned.
The GC level covers all basic categorization schemas, applying to music and other modes of symoblization…this ‘anthropological’ level is theoretically open to all members of the human species.

’emic’ – means the product of cultural knowledge

‘PARADIGMATIC ANALYSIS’: (1960s) Nicolas Ruwet developed this analytic method, based on the concept of ‘equivalence’. Ruwet argued that the most striking characteristic of musical syntax was the central role of REPETITION – and by extension, of varied repetition or TRANSFORMATION.

Imagine the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’ and substitute any single pitch or duration, change the modality, change the harmonies to sound like soul, change to a different meter like the waltz, double the tempo or make the dynamics fortissimo, change a lyric line to ‘ice cream runs down my chin’, get Placido Domingo to sing it instead of John Lennon, or change the instrumentation to gamelan ensemble with Wagnerian tubas. Any one change is made and played to see HOW the meaning is changed…this is ‘hypothetical substitution.’

————————————
Middleton thinks that however far the general run of popular musical practice may be from this condition, Blacking’s statement sketches a picture of the semiotic economy which all study of the music can use as a starting point.

4) ballad (highly conventionalized language forms with rhymes like moon/June for example)

The ideological structuring of pleasure and value in music has both institutional and discursive supports. From the researches of Pierre BOURDIEU and other sociologists of culture, how does musical ‘taste’ function?

(Rachel’s title: What makes music successful…i.e. something people want to listen to…it has to click ‘yes’ on all four of these items.)

—————————————
(Rachel’s thoughts:)
The last puts the first three together…it’s
Context + Location + Acceptance + all three put together and it still works = how listening is organized in the mind of the listener.

(Rachel’s title: How does the listener FIT INTO what they’re hearing and connect to it?)

-BODILY PARTICIPATION: the invitation to map, trace, or fill out the patterns of movement offered by the rhythmic structure and texture.

There is now a ‘global village’ and Middleton’s last page concludes with the ideas of a ‘new subject’ in popular music who is locally rooted but a world citizen and will continue to struggle “for the people” as against the “power bloc” as it makes music in struggle.