Popular Music Studies and Ethnomusicology in Australasia

Abstract

A characteristic of the field of popular music studies in Australia and New Zealand (Australasia) is the strong and enduring presence of ethnomusicology and allied ethnographic approaches to popular music research in this region. In Australasia, ethnomusicology offers popular music researchers the opportunity to engage in a meaningful and direct way with a range of musical practices by Indigenous and migrant performers. Meanwhile, popular music studies provides ethnomusicologists with a way of demonstrating that they are interested in more than just traditional or ancestral musical practices. This article will provide a history of the interdisciplinary relationship between ethnomusicology and popular music studies in Australasia, and will examine the role of Indigenous and migrant music research in fostering links between these two disciplinary fields.

Government agency interventions in Australia and New Zealand’s indigenous popular music industries and indigenous empowerment

“…Although New Zealand-centric in focus, this article compares and contrasts New Zealand ethnographic and literary data with extant literature concerning government interventions in Australian Aboriginal popular music industries. This article thereby responds to Stephen Wild's 2006 call for a revival of comparative ethnomusicology in these two nations, and marks a contribution to Australasian music research (see Bendrups 2013). New Zealand and Australia are comparable in their colonial histories, in that both have Dominion status 2 and are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, and both nations have indigenous populations that are minorities 3 in societies where the hegemonic group is of European descent.…”

Ethnomusicology in Australia and New Zealand: A Trans‑Tasman Identity?

“…Kartomi 1984;Jones 1974) and have been rearticulated by others who have sought to more recently define ethnomusicological practice in the trans-Tasman context (e.g. Corn 2009;Bendrups 2013;Bendrups, Barney, and Grant 2013;Johnson 2010Johnson , 2013. In this chapter, which celebrates Stephen Wild's contribution to our field, we take the opportunity to reflect anew on Wild's invocation of identity, focusing on two broad questions: where did trans-Tasman ethnomusicology come from, and where is it now located?…”

A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes: Essays in Honour of Stephen A. Wild

“…The authors would like to thank the 10 respondents based at New Zealand tertiary education institutions for taking part in the project, each of whom provided invaluable information not only on their own knowledge of ethnomusicology in New Zealand, but also their own contribution to the discipline. ethnomusicological topics account for a substantial proportion of papers presented or published within the context of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), especially its Australia-New Zealand chapter (Bendrups 2013). Timothy Rice has repeatedly urged the ethnomusicological community to do more to define the discipline's theoretical and methodological frameworks, while Henry Kingsbury, whose doctoral research was a noteworthy example of turning the ethnomusicological gaze towards a Western art music setting, somewhat provocatively asked if the discipline should be abolished.…”