Call for Propositions: More than words. The voices and sounds of popular music (Deadline: 16.01.2023)

Congrès de l’AFEA 2023 
23-26 May, Université de Bourgogne
Panel « More than words: The voices and sounds of popular music »
Papers can be in French or English
Deadline: 16.01.2023

Organized by Paul Schor (Université de Paris, LARCA), Manuel Bocquier (EHESS, Mondes Américains, CENA / Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne), Elsa Grassy (Université de Strasbourg)

The rise of the commercialization of the phonograph and the mass production and mass dissemination of music at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gradually associated recording with the formation of a soundscape irreducible to the musical object (Maisonneuve 2009). By examining the relationship between sound and culture, sound studies and popular music studies have analyzed the development of sound environments specific to American popular music. These fields of study have shown how aesthetic and musicological characteristics, but also sonic and visual representations, social values and ideologies that are associated with popular music connect sounds to specific social groups (Hebdige 1979). Recent research highlights the development of soundscapes that are shaped by the social and political relations that music helps to construct. From this perspective, the identification of country music with a white, male culture, the association of African Americans with a series of racially defined musical genres (blues, soul, rap, ...), or of rock and punk with white, urban youth are the result of historical and political processes (Nunn 2015; Kajikawa 2015; Stoever 2016)

However, popular music studies and the discourses surrounding them, formal or informal, have tended to prioritize the study of texts over that of sound material. At the same time, the study of social meanings has also relied primarily on lyrics. Musicology was very late in taking an interest in popular music (McClary & Walser 1990) and the codes of musical analysis had to be adapted and expanded so that recorded music could finally be understood in its sonic dimension (see the work of Philip Tagg on "musemes" and that of Serge Lacasse, among others). Conversely, the rock criticism that developed at the end of the 1960s, with the creation of Creem in 1966 and Rolling Stone in 1967, encouraged a legitimization of commercial music by the quality of its texts. That the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan may raise questions: should the recognition of popular music as art be based solely on the quality of its lyrics?