Caught on the Back Foot: epistemic inertia and visible music

Abstract

This paper explores the position of popular music studies thirty years since the formation of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Founder member of the association, Phillip Tagg, discusses what issues need to be addressed in the field, and how could they be better understood. Areas investigated include interdisciplinarity, interprofessionalism, epistemic intertia and invisiblemusic. The paper concludes that musicologists working in popular music havefailed to make such inroads into conventional musicology that popular music and art music are treated equally. It also questions why researchers from non-musical backgrounds still struggle to address the music of popular music studies, and offers solutions. It finally suggests that we are in a new stage of musical culture, in which audio-only/visible music has been replaced with audiovisual/invisible music, and that as a result popular music studies needs to engage further with music and the moving image.

Ecomusicology, Music Studies, and the IASPM: Beyond “Epistemic Inertia”

“…What's more, these scholars were interested in what I had to say as a scholar of popular music, an ethnographer, and anthropologist. By no means was I the first non "muso" (Tagg 2011) to join their conversation. Representatives from each of the above perspectives were involved long before I showed up with hat in hand.…”

“…Pastoral ideology disarticulates rural-environmental (folk, classical) from urban-dystopic (popular music) contexts, rendering the latter "non-environmental" and beyond ecological hope, redemption, or interest. However, this does not diminish the importance of the ecological study of urbanity, including urban musics (Rosenthal 2006) and soundscapes (Tagg 1994). This work examines such obstacles to ecological inquiry (e.g., pastoralism), the relatively recent development of ecomusicology, and the contributions ecomusicology might make to IASPM's future.…”

Popular Music Studies and Ethnomusicology in Australasia

“…They are in I@J vol3, no.2 (2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2013)v3i2.4en some sense a "pidgin" musical language -simplifying, recombining and developing elements of both parent systems. (1981: 183-84) Finally, while this article is intended as a response to the questions raised by Tagg (2011), it sidesteps the four-theme framework that he outlines, and it is not specifically intended as a history of IASPM in Australasia. With regard to the former, Tagg's delineation of interdisciplinarity, interprofessionalism, epistemic inertia and invisible music as four core issues serves (in my reading) as a way of understanding popular music studies across a range of possible geographic and conceptual locations, whereas this article is specifically concerned with unpacking just one of these: the discipline of ethnomusicology and its relationship to popular music studies in Australasia.…”

Popular Music Practice: Music as Research

“…Many university music departments are still populated by a majority of staff whose principal research field is in classical music, for example in the UK or USA; in some countries popular music is mostly excluded from university music study, for example in Italy; music journals may in some cases accept popular music submissions, but are dominated by classical music content; and popular music journals sometimes reject submissions that are focused purely on musical content and do not contain contextual content. Tagg's conclusion was that there is a lack of music within popular music studies (Tagg 2011). He also proposed that alternative formats for popular music research would benefit the field, suggesting that he prefers video presentations to written text.…”

“…This publication was inspired by one of the keynote speakers at the IASPM Conference 2011 in Grahamstown, South Africa, Phillip Tagg, who discussed amongst other matters why cultures rather than music have been at the centre of popular music studies since its inception. That presentation was published in IASPM Journal (Tagg 2011) and another issue of IASPM Journal, entitled Popular Music Studies in the Twenty-First Century (IASPM Journal 3(2) 2013) was dedicated to responses to Tagg's ideas. Much of the initial growth of Popular Music Studies was within cultural studies and media studies, where scholars welcomed this study of popular culture.…”