Currents and Contradictions in the Ethnomusicology of Popular Music

Authors

  • Harris M. Berger Memorial University of Newfoundland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.40174

Keywords:

ethnomusicology of popular music, institutional history, critical and activist scholarship, populism, politics of culture

Abstract

The status of popular music research in North American ethnomusicology has changed significantly in the last 25 years. Expanding rapidly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, popular music research in ethnomusicology was part of a set of broader intellectual developments that challenged the liberal inclusionism that dominated the discipline during this period, developments that, as other writers have observed, included the growing prominence of critical approaches to humanistic inquiry, new ideas about media and culture, and the rise of the neoliberal university. This article tracks the shifting reception of popular music research in ethnomusicology during this period and the place that this work held in these wider transformations. Taking institutional history as its starting point, the article discusses the position of ethnomusicology among other music disciplines in the North American academy, the debates that surrounded the formation of the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology (PMSSEM) and the relationship between PMSSEM and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Examining the interplay between residual and emergent elements of intellectual culture in today’s discipline, the article explores the reciprocities and tensions between liberal inclusionism and radical cultural critique, the ethnomusicologist’s productive resistance to defining the notion of popular music, the charges of ethnocentrism that have recently been levelled at the ethnomusicology of popular music, and the differing approaches to the question of populism at play in contemporary ethnomusicology’s politics of culture.

Author Biography

  • Harris M. Berger, Memorial University of Newfoundland

    Harris M. Berger is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media and Place, and Professor of Music and Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland. In 1996, he founded the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and he has served as SEM president and as the president of IASPMUS. He is the author of Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (1999), Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture (2010) and Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (co-authored by Giovanna P. Del Negro, 2004). His edited books include Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Jeremy Wallach, Berger, and Paul D. Greene, 2011) and Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights (Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 2019).

References

Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

—2011 [1997]. “PMSSEM Mission Statement”. Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology Wiki. http://pmssem.wikidot.com/about (accessed 10 February 2011).

Berger, Harris M., and Ruth M. Stone, eds. 2019. Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315408583

Bradby, Barbara, and Brian Torode. 1984. “Pity Peggy Sue”. Popular Music 4: 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026114300000622X

Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dean, Jodi. 2017. “Not Him, Us (and We Aren’t Populists)”. Theory & Event 20/1: 38–44.

Finnegan, Ruth. 2007 [1989]. The Hidden Musicians: Music-making in an English Town. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon Books.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.

Mahon, Maureen. 2019. “Constructing Race and Engaging Power through Music: Ethnomusicology and Critical Approaches to Race”. In Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 2nd edn, 99–113. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315408583-5

Manuel, Peter. 2019. “Marxist Approaches to Music, Political Economy, and the Culture Industries: Ethnomusicological Perspectives”. In Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 2nd edn, 51–70. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315408583-3

Meizel, Katherine, and J. Martin Daughtry. 2019. “Decentering Music: Sound Studies and Voice Studies in Ethnomusicology”. In Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 2nd edn, 176–203. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315408583-8

PMSSEM Wiki. 2016. “The Annual PMSSEM David Sanjek Lecture”. Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology Wiki. http://pmssem.wikidot.com/pmssem-lecture (accessed 9 November 2016).

Sugarman, Jane C. 2019. “Theories of Gender and Sexuality: From the Village to the Anthropocene”. In Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 2nd edn, 71–98. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315408583-4

Wallach, Jeremy, and Esther Clinton. 2019. “Theories of the Post-Colonial and Globalization: Ethnomusicologists Grapple with Power, History, Media, and Mobility”. In Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, 2nd edn, 114–40. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315408583-6

Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1978. Marxism and Literature. Rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wong, Deborah. 2006. “Ethnomusicology and Difference”. Ethnomusicology 50/2: 259–79.

Published

2019-12-23

Issue

Section

Special Section

How to Cite

Berger, H. M. (2019). Currents and Contradictions in the Ethnomusicology of Popular Music. Journal of World Popular Music, 6(2), 216-222. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.40174