Andy Bennett
Cultural castaways? Thinking critically about ageing popular music audiences
In the study of popular music reception, ageing audiences have never been a major focus of attention. Occasional references to ageing audiences that are made, tend to cast them in a negative light. For example, in her otherwise highly compelling study of heavy metal, Deena Weinstien observes: ???Adults who continue to appreciate metal [appear] like wistful emigrants, living a continent away in another world than their own (2000: 111)???. Weinstien???s notion of ageing heavy metal fans occupying a cultural limbo land, unable to connect in any palpable sense with the contemporary metal scene and yet simultaneously out of touch with the reality of their adult lives is echoed in popular media representations of ageing fans as ???has beens???, ???overgrown teenagers??? and so on. At the same time, however, it could be argued that such representations of ageing fans, as cultural ???misfits??? or ???castaways???, is increasingly out of step with a world in which definitions of ageing and generational boundaries are radically shifting.
Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Deputy Director of the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Prior to his appointment at Griffith, he held posts at Brock University (Canada) and the Universities of Surrey, Kent, Glasgow, and Durham (UK) and spent two years in Germany working as a music teacher with the Frankfurt Rockmobil project.
Andy specialises in the areas of youth culture and popular music. He has published articles in a number of journals, including The British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Sociological Review, Media Culture and Society, Popular Music, and Poetics. He is author of Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place (2000, Macmillan), Cultures of Popular Music (2001, Open University Press), Culture and Everyday Life (2005, Sage), editor of Remembering Woodstock (2004, Ashgate) and co-editor of Guitar Cultures (2001, Berg), After Subculture (Palgrave, 2004), Music Scenes (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) and Music, Space and Place (Ashgate, 2004).
Andy is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and a former Chair of the UK and Ireland IASPM branch. He is also a member of the British Sociological Association (BSA) and a co-founder of the BSA Youth Study Group. He is a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, an Associate of PopuLUs, the Centre for the Study of the World???s Popular Musics at Leeds University, a member of the Board for the European Sociological Association Network for the Sociology of the Arts.
Andy is also a member of the Editorial Boards for the journals Cultural Sociology, Perfect Beat, Leisure Studies and Music and Arts in Action.
Nicholas Cook
Towards a musicology of performance: Chopin's mazurkas on record
When theatre studies split off from literary criticism, it largely left behind the practices of close reading that had become too closely associated with the written text. Similar issues arise as the study of performance becomes increasingly prevalent in musicology: do empirical methods for the analysis of recordings merely reinstate the scriptist tendencies of the 'old' musicology only in a new form, or can they contribute to a musicology that fully recognizes the performative nature of its subject matter? I explore these questions in relation to a project under way at the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), based on a large corpus of recordings of Chopin's mazurkas; I hope to show that it is possible to bring together empirical data, analytical interpretation, and cultural critique into a productive musicological synthesis.
Nicholas Cook is Professorial Research Fellow in Music at Royal Holloway, where he directs the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM); he previously taught at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop. His books, mostly published by Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in ten different languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking Music (1999), coedited with Mark Everist, and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004); he also coedited the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music with Anthony Pople (2004).
Nicolas' latest book, now in production at Oxford, is The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-si??cle Vienna. He is currently working on the analysis of performance, including a computational project undertaken under the auspices of CHARM and based on recordings of Chopin's Mazurkas.
A former Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Nicholas Cook was Chair of the Music Panel in the Higher Education Funding Councils' 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year.
Deborah Wong
An ethnomusicology of hope in a time of trauma
This presentation addresses shared sensibilities between politically progressive activists and researchers who do ethnographic research. I juxtapose a recent position statement issued by the Society for Ethnomusicology addressing music and torture with my own research on Japanese American drumming (taiko), employing the lens of critical pedagogy and engaged ethnomusicology.
I suggest that ethnomusicologists are often politically progressive for reasons built into the discipline: ethnomusicologists work closely with people at the level of lives lived, focused on the messy politics of quotidian experience, and are willing to engage deeply and repeatedly with subjectivities not their own. On the other hand, SEM has not been able to acknowledge its majority American identity, and I argue that SEM should face up to its Americanness by transforming it into an anti-imperial gesture. I show how the crafting of the SEM position statement against the use of music as torture moved us toward an understanding of how our most intimate methodologies make us ideal actors in a critical pedagogy of reflexive anti-nationalism. I argue for the importance of moving "engaged ethnomusicology" to the center of our work and to try to blur the distinctions between research, advocacy, and cultural work.
Deborah Wong is an ethnomusicologist, specializing in the musics of Thailand and Asian America. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. (1991) from the University of Michigan, where she worked with ethnomusicologist Judith Becker.
Deborah's first book, Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual (Chicago University Press, 2001), addresses ritual performance about performance and its implications for the cultural politics of Thai court music and dance in late twentieth-century Bangkok. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (Routledge, 2004), focuses on music and identity work in a series of case studies. She has taught at UCR since fall 1996 and is Professor of Music. Deborah has taught as Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College (1991-93) and at the University of Pennsylvania (1993-96); she was a visiting professor at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. Deborah is currently the President of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Asian American issues and activities are a priority for Deborah. She has served on numerous committees addressing issues in Asian American studies curriculum as well as Asian American student needs. She has studied Japanese American drumming (taiko) since 1997 and is a member of Satori Daiko, the performing group of th Taiko Center of Los Angeles. Her book in progress will address taiko in California. Born on the East Coast, Deborah is now an enthusiastic Californian. She self-identifies as Chinese American (third generation), as multiethnic, and as Asian American.