The Göteborg connection: lessons in the history and politics of popular music education and research

Abstract

BothPopular Musicand the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) have been in existence for almost a generation. Given the radical social and political changes affecting the general spheres of work, education and research since the establishment of those two institutions in 1981, it is perhaps time for popular music scholars to review their own historical position and to work out strategies for the brave new world of monetarism facing those who will hopefully survive another generation after we quinquagenarian baby boomers of the rock era have disappeared from the academic scene. Of course, such a process of intellectual and ideological stocktaking requires detailed discussion of a wide range of political, economic and social issues that cannot be covered in a single article. I will therefore restrict the account that follows to a discussion of one particular set of historical strands affecting the development of popular music studies. This part of our history is virtually unknown in the anglophone quarters that have, for obvious reasons of language and music media hegemony, dominated the international field of popular music studies. It is, however, as I hope to show, a story of considerable relevance to more general problems of music education and research at the turn of the millennium. I shall return to these broader issues at the end of the article.

Music and the sociological gaze

“…Musicological and sociological perspectives, then, are to be considered as emerging from, and grounded in, distinctly different academic discourses; as a consequence the way in which 'music' is constituted in each will be different. With a recognition of these differences, though, may come an awareness of complementary strengths, and to the extent that the work of the 'Gothenburg School' (Tagg 1998), is committed to ethnographic studies of the use and significance of music in real-life settings, it is certainly compatible with the sociological approach outlined above.…”

“…It follows from what has been said above that the sociology of music will in principle be concerned with all 'kinds' of music, which means in practice that popular music will be a topic of particular interest, since it is both 'used' (in the utilitarian sense mentioned above) in a wide range of social settings, and 'listened' to (in the more musicological sense of knowledgeable and active engagement). Clearly this is another source of divergence between sociological and musicological concerns, with the latter concerned primarily with Western 'art-music' -though some musicologists, including members of the 'Gothenburg School', have come to realise the limitations of this preoccupation (Tagg 1998). Of course, there is no such entity as 'popular music', but the enduring use of the concept is suggestive of the power relations that obtain in this particular discourse -it is a 'catch-all' term for an array of heterogeneous styles and traditions which have not been classified authoritatively as 'serious' or 'art' music, a means of demarcating an important symbolic boundary.…”

Caught on the Back Foot: epistemic inertia and visible music <br>http://dx.doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2011)v2i1-2.2en

“…It's thirty years since the Cambridge University Press journal Popular Music first appeared, thirty years since IASPM was founded. This isn't the first time I've felt the need, to comment on the development of popular music studies (Tagg, 1981(Tagg, , 1985a(Tagg, , 1985b(Tagg, , 1998a(Tagg, , 1998b(Tagg, , 2001a(Tagg, , 2001b(Tagg, , 2001c. My question today is: what sort of issues do I think IASPM, aged thirty, needs to address and what sort of constructive suggestions, if any, can I come up with?…”

Call and Response: Music, Power, and the Ethnomusicological Study of Politics and Culture "New Directions for Ethnomusicological Research into the Politics of Music and Culture: Issues, Projects, and Programs"

“…Brutally critical of popular culture in much of his work, Adorno is more or less dismissed by some writers as an unredeemable elitist, while others see his writings as invaluable for clearing away the obfuscations of social life that capitalism fosters. For a critical analysis of the place of Adorno in the history of popular music studies, see Tagg (1998).…”