Hah, well the University of Iowa is about as scary as Midwestern Universities get...
And to clarify where I got my impression of the academic attitudes towards pop music, it was from the Electro Acoustic composers gang, a fair number of whom I got to meet at SEAMUS a few years ago. If you want to write _about_ popular music, there's a lot of academic angles, because you don't have to pass judgement on the artistic merits -- you can come up with a context that makes it relevant in any number of disciplines. If you google 'Kembrew Mcleod' -- or just go to Kembrew.com -- he's at the University of Iowa, and has done a ton of work on pop music, sampling etc. The people in a lot of music departments -- maybe not all, but most -- are a much harder sell. They're either looking backwards at the great canon of western classical music, or they're flying up their arses trying to make music even less attractive to non-academic listeners than the serial and aleatoric music that was all the rage 40 years ago. I wish I had a dime for every time I've heard a music professor go on a rant about the minimalists -- Reich, Glass, etc. If you really want to send them screaming, strum a major chord on a guitar ;-) This has eff all to do with techno though. Someone talk about records ;-) On 9/23/06, Dennis DeSantis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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" -- Dennis DeSantis www.dennisdesantis.com Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
