Musical Genre Distinction and the Uniculture
A Reply to Simon Frith’s “Is Jazz Popular Music?”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v1i2.153Keywords:
jazz, popular music, genre, unicultureAbstract
Simon Frith’s stimulating “Is Jazz Popular Music?” raises broader issues than the generic relations between these forms of musical experience. Even the specifically musical correlations transcend genre, involving the general history of dance energy. Moreover, both labels have comprised and designated very different musical experiences throughout their institutional, discursive, and social histories. These differences are reflected in the consistently contrasted perspectives of jazz and pop scholars, and by important shifts in the very definition of ‘music.’ In the contemporary context, jazz and popular music present contrasting but related faces in relation to the all-embracing uniculture of recent years.
References
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Lambert, Constant (1966) Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. 3rd ed. London: Faber.
Leonard, Neil (1962) Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——(1972) ‘Jazz and the Other Arts’. In American Music: From Storyville to Woodstock, ed. Charles Nanry, 152–67. New Brunswick, NJ: transaction books.
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——(2007) Culture-on-Demand: Communication in a Crisis World. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Panassié, Hugues (1973) The Real Jazz. Rev. and enl. ed. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
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Van Der Merwe, Peter (1989) Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press.
——(1973) Ästhetische Theorie. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. 11th ed. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
——(1976) ‘Zeitlose Mode. Zum Jazz’. In Prismen; Kulturkritik Und Gesellschaft, 144–61. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
——(2004) Theodor W. Adorno Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz. Berlin: Suhrkamp and Directmedia Publishing.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Robert Hullot-Kentor (2006) Philosophy of New Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Becker, Howard (1951) ‘The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience’. American Journal of Sociology LVI: 136–44. doi:10.1086/220913
——(1953) ‘Some Contingencies of the Dance Band Musician's Career’. Human Organization 12 (Spring): 22–26.
Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson (2004) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cameron, William Bruce (1963) Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking. New York: Random House.
Dahlhaus, Carl (1974) ‘Was Ist Eine Musikalische Gattung?’ Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 8: 620–25.
Frith, Simon (2007) ‘Is Jazz Popular Music?’ Jazz Research Journal, 1. http://tinyurl.com/2akuq3.
Hentoff, Nat (2004) ‘Things Ain’t What They Used to Be: At Long Last, You Can Win a Pulitzer for Improvising’. WSJ.Com Opinion Journal, July 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT, http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005313.
Hobson, Wilder (1939) American Jazz Music. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Hodkinson, Paul, and W. W. Deicke, eds. (2007) Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno (1969) Dialektik der Aufklärung Philosophische Fragmente. Bücher Des Wissens. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
Lambert, Constant (1966) Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. 3rd ed. London: Faber.
Leonard, Neil (1962) Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
——(1972) ‘Jazz and the Other Arts’. In American Music: From Storyville to Woodstock, ed. Charles Nanry, 152–67. New Brunswick, NJ: transaction books.
——(1975) ‘Some Further Thoughts on Jazzmen as Romantic Outsiders’. Journal of Jazz Studies 2 (June).
Lull, James (2000) Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
——(2007) Culture-on-Demand: Communication in a Crisis World. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Mizrach, Steve (1997) ‘Iterative Discourse and the Formation of New Subcultures’. Anthropology of Consciousness, 4. http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/subculturaldiscourse.html.
Nicholson, Stuart (2005) Is Jazz Dead? : (or Has It Moved to a New Address). New York: Routledge.
Panassié, Hugues (1973) The Real Jazz. Rev. and enl. ed. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Seeger, Charles (1977) ‘Music and Class Structure in the United States’. In Studies in Musicology 1935–1975, 222–37. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stahl, Geoff (1999) ‘Still “Winning Space?”: Updating Subcultural Theory’. In Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 2. http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue2/stahl.htm.
Van Der Merwe, Peter (1989) Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press.
Published
2008-04-06
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Morse, M. W. (2008). Musical Genre Distinction and the Uniculture: A Reply to Simon Frith’s “Is Jazz Popular Music?”. Jazz Research Journal, 1(2), 153-172. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v1i2.153
