Definitions of Popular Music: Recycled

Abstract

Is it surprising that there is no generally accepted definition of popular music when one considers the range of subject matter which the term embraces, and the diversity of approaches which scholars in various fields have taken to study it? Types of popular music studied today range from Renaissance songs, broadsides, parlor music, and more recent dance tunes to Muzak, film scores, and pop in the industrialized countries in addition to high-life, calypso, and revolutionary opera in the Third World. The people who study it may be folklorists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, literary scholars, historical musicologists, or ethnomusicologists. Wiser scholars have prefaced their attempts at defining popular music with reflections on the difficulties of the task and on the small return such definitions yield. For example, in the 1950s Howard Brown wrote: 'Popular' is admittedly a difficult word. Everyone knows what it means and yet no one can define it quite precisely.' In the Sixties, Robert B. Cantrick in a discussion of popular music that includes non-Western music and the historical past similarly observes that talks about popular music but no one knows what it is.2 Most recently and most vividly, Serge Denisoff points out that Popular music is like a unicorn; everyone knows what it is supposed to look like, but no one has ever seen it.s Even special genres like rock or pop seem to elude fruitful definition. To Carl Belz, Any listener who wants rock defined specifically is probably unable to recognize it,4 and Tony Jasper asserts: Pop re-