IASPM UK Conference 1996: Popular Music: Aesthetics versus Sociology?

Abstract

Let's face it: in many respects popular music studies still has a hard time combining sociological and musicological views about music, its meaning(s), its sociological implications, and so on. Dialogue is difficult: scholars working in the social sciences, while dealing primarily with the question of social identification with music, still try to understand how musicological research could help them in any way. On the 'other side', musicologists, while analysing the musical sounds themselves and their signification, try to include sociological inputs in their work. This is of course an oversimplication of what is going on, but we must recognise that much work still needs to be done in order to provide popular music studies with a truly interdisciplinary status. David Hesmondhalgh (Goldsmiths College, London) and Dai Griffiths (Oxford Brookes University) probably had this idea in mind when they decided to organise the conference, which was held at Oxford Brookes University on Saturday October 26th. Quite cleverly, they chose to centre the discussion around aesthetics, leaving room for both approaches to express their opinion. Interestingly enough, the format of the event was conceived, according to the conference programme, 'To allow more opportunity for in-depth debate than [it] is sometimes possible at academic conferences', by alternating a main speaker (40 minutes) with a respondent (20 minutes) from the 'opposite' discipline. In the first of the four papers, 'Popular Music and the Nation State', Martin Cloonan (University of York) considered the Nation State as a body of influence in relation to the production, diffusion and reception of popular music, and proposed three ideal types of 'popular music' / 'nation state' relationship. In his response, the ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes (Queen's University, Belfast) shared many of Cloonan's views, but pointed out a need for a clearer definition of 'state' in relation to the concept of 'national identity'. The next two papers gave rise to much audience response. Lucy Green (Institute of Education, London) raised the question of 'The Reproduction of Gender in Music' by presenting young students' comments (11-14 years old) about gender identification in relation to their musical practices at school. The paper, demonstrating quite clearly how gender identification in music is socially and historically constructed (through what she called music's 'delineated meanings'), was criticised by Jason Toynbee (University of Coventry) who argued, among other things, that the very notion of school as an institution was largely responsible for pupils' gender identity. In the third paper, Jonathan Burston (Goldsmiths College, London) directly approached the question of aesthetics by arguing that 'The Megamusical' (Cats, Les Mistrables, Phantom of the Opera, etc.), a new trend in musicals which has introduced the 'FM sound' (loudness, spatialisation of sound, masking of humanly produced noises, etc.), is threatening the aesthetic value of the genre. His respondent, the composer and musicologist Stephen Banfield (University of Birmingham), did not only share the speaker's opinion, but went further by criticising Lloyd Webber's work as being of bad taste according to the traditional aesthetics of musicals (Banfield's arguments were much criticised by members of the audience). In the last paper, Richard Middleton (Open University North, Newcastle) explored 'The Aesthetics