Danpop seminar: Pop Now, Pop Then, Pop Everywhere (online, 04. June 2021)
Pop Now, Pop Then, Pop Everywhere
Inaugural Danpop seminar
Friday 4 June 2021, 1:00 – 4:00 PM (CEST time)
1:00 – 1:15: Bertel Nygaard, Morten Michelsen, Aarhus University: Welcome and Presentation of the Centre
Popular music – music appealing to the many – provides a unique range of crucial perspectives on the history of society and culture. This is what we intend to explore further at the new Danpop: Danish Centre for Popular Music Culture at Aarhus University. In this inaugural seminar, we want to raise some big and fundamental questions in this regard: How may we approach the local and global historical significance of popular music? And how may we present this historiographically?
Such basic concerns involve further methodological inquiries: relating the local to the global and vice versa; approaches to comparison and cultural transfer; social and cultural power; crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries. To help us respond to these questions, we have invited three international scholars to present their perspectives on approaching popular music culture historically.
1:15 – 1:45: Simone Krüger Bridge, Liverpool John Moore University:
Globalisation, Capitalism, Identity: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Popular Music Studies
This presentation seeks to present critical contemporary perspectives on contemporary popular music studies, while considering the notion of popular music as a cultural product, the historical analysis of how music genres develop in relation to people' sociocultural conditions, the role played by technological innovation in underpinning the multiple globalising trends and processes, and the ways in which not only entire social groups, but also individual identities-gendered, racialised, health, and so forth-are shaped and expressed in conditions of global capitalism. In my talk, I will draw specifically on my recent monograph Trajectories and Themes in World Popular Music (2018) and The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music (2021) to point towards current trends and new directions in (global) popular music studies.
Simone Krüger Bridge is a reader in music working at the intersection between cultural sociology, cultural studies, ethnomusicology/music anthropology and popular music studies, and teaching at Liverpool John Moores University since 2007. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of World Popular Music and was founding editor of the book series Transcultural Music Studies (Equinox). Simone is also member (treasurer) of the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).
Break
2:00 – 2:30: Klaus Nathaus, Oslo University:
Sitting Comfortably between the Chairs: How to Study Music as a Historian
In this presentation, I am going to look at the interest historians have in music as an object of study. I want to reflect on the interdisciplinary dialogue, but also the intradisciplinary translation work that historians who research music have to engage in. Finally, I want to point to fields for future historical music research, namely creative labour, the globalisation of culture, and music and the self.
Klaus Nathaus is professor and a social historian working on popular culture in Britain, (West) Germany and the US from the late 19th to the end of the 20th century. He is I am particularly interested in the history of the voluntary organisation of leisure, the development of public entertainment spaces and the production of popular music from the rise of Tin Pan Alley to the advent of the internet. He edited the recent Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe: A Handbook (2021) with Martin Rempe.
2:30 – 3:00: Antti-Ville Kärjä, University of the Arts, Helsinki:
On the Popularity of Music Histories
One of the most lucrative forms of musical non-fiction is a particular type of historical narration, the biography. In the libraries, one can encounter massive multivolume series about the history of music, implying a paradoxical popularity of histories of "unpopular" music. Popular music histories in turn may often border on fan fiction. On the basis of such observations, I aim at interrogating the role of historiography in constructing, and challenging, popular music.
Antti-Ville Kärjä is professor of cultural music research. His current research interests include conceptualisations of popular culture, the cultural politics of music historiography, and multimodal epistemologies, especially concerning olfaction. In 2017–19 he served in the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and from 2008 to 2013 chaired the association's Nordic branch.
Break
3:15 – 4:00: General debate