kent williams wrote:
Of course, once you start doing any academic work on popular music you have to overcome resistance from the established community who don't think popular music is worth considering as art. The people in the composition department at our local University get mad if anything contains a steady rhythm -- I guess once Stockhausen said regular beats are fascist, they figured that was the end of the story.
I've got to correct this a little, because it's a legend that keeps getting perpetuated and it needs to be pretty heavily qualified.
The attitude Kent's talking about certainly does exist in the academy, but at this point it's pretty much just among the ancient, tenured grey hairs, primarily at scary Midwestern state universities.
The musicology departments at conservatories, however, are filled with popular music specialists. The students in these programs are crawling all over each other to get topics outside of the classical canon. The work is of mixed quality - but some of it is actually really good. These topics certainly aren't making up the bulk of conference papers, but it's happening. In fact, there's a whole session of papers at the upcoming American Musicological Society conference called "Samples, Grooves, Mixes", with the following papers being presented:
Jocelyn R. Neal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), “Musical Style vs. Musical Structure: Shania Twain’s Songwriting Strategies”
Matthew Butterfield (Franklin & Marshall College), “he Power of Anacrusis: Engendered Feeling in Groove-Based Musics”
Joanna Demers (University of Southern California), “Second-Order Simulation in Sample-Based Pop”
Brent Auerbach (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “Pedagogical Applications of the Video Game Dance Dance Revolution to the Aural Skills Classroom”
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