Transcript What is Popular Music

Are these items Popular Music?
• Which of these Examples are popular music
• Why?
• Why not?
Possible Definitions
• Popular= widely liked or supported
• Popular=“of the people”
• Popular Music as one genre of a trio: folk,
art, popular
Widely liked?
• What about “unpopular” popular musical
genres
• What about “popular” art music styles?
• How do we measure this
– Different kinds of use and engagement
– Market is too diverse, so impact and use may
differ with different genres
– What about “Non-commodity” forms of music
Commercially oriented music?
• Music produced for mass market
• This compares PM with “folk” forms
associated with face-to-face communities
• What about Amateur performers?
• What about Pre-modern societies?
Folk music?
• Idea emerged in 19th century
• “das Volk” (“the folk”) first used by
German writer Johann Herder late 1700s
• Idea of “the folk” as carriers of “national
spirit”
• Folk as a “purified people” (a romantic
fantasy)
Popular vs folk
“the folk are not the mob of the streets, who never sing or
compose, but shriek and mutilate” (Herder 1778)
Quotes from Hubert Parry (English composer) form English
Folk Song Society(1899)
(popular is cheap, low, corrupting)
Music hall is “an enemy at the door of folk music which is
driving it out”
product of “overgrown town”, like “sham jewellery,
shoddy clothes”, “commonest rowdyism”
History of term “popular music”
• First use in English in 19th C
• Eg William Chappell’s “Popular Music of
the Olden Time”
• Not widely used in current sense before
1930s
• equivalent terms not always in other
languages
Possible characteristics of
Popular Music
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Distribution: usually mass cf sectional
Storage: usually recordings
Music theory and aesthetics: ?
Composer/author often collective?
Music that has some relationship to an
industry:
– Commercial/creativity contrast
Definition offered by Simon Frith in Symposium “Can we get rid of the
Popular in “Popular Music” (Popular Music 2005)
*Music
made commercially in a particular kind of
legal (copyright) and economic (market) system;
*Music made using an even-changing technology of
sound storage;
*Music significantly experienced as mass mediated;
*Music primarily made for social and bodily
pleasure;
*Music which is formally hybrid
History of “Commercial” popular
music
• First mass music industry: Sheet music
industry
• Nineteenth century: large English music
publishers
• Spread of the Upright Piano:
• Emergence of the “drawing room ballad”
Entertainment and Popular Music
• Nineteenth century popular theatre
• Minstrel show: based on negro
impersonators
• Novelty acts, grotesques, comedies,
spectaculars
Recording
• Edison invents phonograph in 1877
• 1877 Berliner invents disc medium
• 1890s a commercial domestic playing
machine developed
• Commercial recordings start around 1900
• Early recordings soloists and singers: eg Caruso,
Nellie Melba,
• Most Popular performers: theatrical performers
• Duration of 1 side=3 minutes
• Electric recordings: developed from 1919, but
become standard from 1925
• 1934: magnetic tape developed by BASF
Germany
• 1948: PVC “vinyl” developed: advantages
over shellac: microgroove recording
• 12” LP recording: initially for classical
recordings. First “concept” LPs mid 1950s
• Development of overdubbing techniques
and tape based studio recording
• 1965 : cassette developed, patented by
Phillips
• 1979: The Walkman revolution begins
• 1981: MTV video support of pop music
• 1982: CD technology
• 1988: CD passes vinyl
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1989: DAT tape invented
1992: Minidisc technology
1996 the DVD standard set
1998 MP3 developed
2001- iPod developed >> iTunes and mass
internet marketing of music
Aesthetics of Popular Music
Does Popular Music have its own
“aesthetic system”
Frequently cited characteristics:
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1. Entertainment music
2. Secular (non-sacred music)
3. Intuitive appreciation?
4. Bodily or hedonistic appreciation?
Anti-aesthetics of Popular Music
• Eg Theodor Adorno:
• German political philosopher and composer
• Popular music is
– Debased
– Standardised
– Serves to stupefy, subdue or dominate the
masses
Standardisation?
• Popular music and standardisation:
• Song forms:
– 32 ballad form
– verse/chorus/bridge/chorus
• Repetitive structures
– Eg “Riff” structures in rock
– Repetitive dance beat patterns
• Improvisatory forms tend to use patterns and
structures