Lecture 1 What is popular music? Frans Birrer’s 4-Part Definition (1985) 1. Normative Definitions: Popular music is an inferior type 2. Negative Definitions: Popular music is that is not something else (usually “folk” or “art music”) 3. Sociological Definitions: Popular music is associated with (or produced for or by) a particular social group 4. Technological-economic Definitions: Popular music is disseminated by mass media and/or in a mass market -Print dissemination as early as the late 15th century -Earliest stages of modern commodification of popular music through print and performance traced to Tin Pan Alley -Occupied a space somewhere between folk and art music “low” and “high” culture “Low” or folk musical culture: Agrarian and later proletarian poor oral dissemination Simple Produced and consumed outside of economic exchange “High” or art musical culture: -associated with high(er) classes nobility, church, and bourgeoisie -print and professional performance dissemination -musical/cultural literacy required -more complex -produced and consumed in conditions of economic exchange Popular music: -occupies a space between “high” and “low” -borrowed from both -positioned itself in opposition to high culture often in problematic ways -borrowed (parodically and parasitically from high and low) -African-American and other non-western styles “superficially” adopted for novelty -print and professional performance dissemination -musical literacy required Print -> Recorded Music -> Film “Mass Culture”: -Emerges with invention of recording, radio, film and mass print dissemination Pre-mass culture popular music -may be seen as growing from same source as folk -a kind of music by and of the people -much grew out of and came to replace local practices -displaced with newer popular music Post-mass culture popular music -created by often geographically distant professionals expressly for consumption -music explicitly created for the masses (cannot have specific appeal) -active engagement replaced by passive engagement -music has been privatized and no longer “culturally” owned -Popular music (in its mature form) is both commodity and culture -It shapes and is shaped by developments in culture and commerce -“The culture industry is the central agency in contemporary capitalism for the production and satisfaction of false needs” Theodore Adorno (1903-1969) -Member of the “Frankfurt School” of cultural theorists -“Broadly” Marxist -With Horkheimer, criticized capital’s control over social life and resulting inequalitites -Culture industries a central tool of political domination -Adorno and Horkheimer pioneered the field of “critical theory”
