David Hesmondhalgh Research Articles

Beyond door policies: Cultural production as a form of spatial regulation in Amsterdam nightclubs

Understanding regulation is key to identifying and understanding the mechanisms and patterns that (re)produce social inequalities in nightclub production. Roughly speaking, researchers have focused on two forms of regulation: governmental regulation and club-led regulation. First, city councils regulate nightlife through licensing, zoning laws, nightlife districts and urban redevelopment. Second, clubs have their own incentives to regulate spaces of consumption: to ensure safety, to increase middle-class audiences’ spending power and to attract audiences with high subcultural capital. Research in this vein has so far mainly focused on door policies. However, in analysing club-led regulation, a more nuanced, intricate understanding of cultural production is key. Using David Hesmondhalgh’s cultural industries framework, this research argues that existing work on regulation presupposes pre-existing demand, neglecting that nightclubs also actively create demand. First, it highlights that clubs employ other, less visible but nonetheless exclusionary, production practices that are in effect before audiences even reach the door: hiring external organisations, genre-based formatting, locational strategies and guest lists. Second, it decentralises the role of door policies. Understood in relation to other nightclub cultural production practices, door policy research does not account for nightclubs’ assessments of door policies, venues’ financial precarity, social networks and the need to constantly attract new audiences. By doing so, I examine the workings of power in urban cultural economies by understanding cultural production as a form of spatial regulation. The research is based on 29 interviews with 36 Amsterdam-based nightlife promoters and 111 hours of short-term ethnographies in clubs and at industry events.

Sounds of Accompaniment

Sounds of Accompaniment

Literature’s listening spaces

Literary descriptions of music are – of course – pure fi ction. However, such narratives are also windows into the phenomenological and sociological workings of music in modern society. Many novels share detailed descriptions of music in their fi ctional worlds, and this article examines what two contemporary novels reveal about modern-day music listening as both a cultural and private practice. The article will analyse the nature of ‘listening spaces’ represented in A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010) and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2005). Both novels have been published within the fi rst decade of the 21st century and describe Western popular music. Music experienced by fi ctional characters can be valuable empirical data, because novels represent different listening situations varied by geography, epochs and genres, and they depict characters with different demographics, lives and musical/cultural backgrounds. This enables scholars to collect and compare multi-faceted datasets. The aim of this article is to use literary descriptions to ask qualifi ed questions about sociological and phenomenological aspects of contemporary music listening practices. The analysis will focus on the atmosphere of listening (Böhme, 2017) – and especially the fi ctional listeners’ bodily presence in musical spaces – in dialogue with sociological studies of music listening by especially Tia DeNora (2000), David Hesmondhalgh (2013) and Even Ruud (2013). The analysis indicates how fi ction articulates a connection between music, body (in space and place) and mind (emotions, temporality and memory).

James Curran and David Hesmondhalgh (eds), Media and Society

<i>James Curran and David Hesmondhalgh (eds)</i>, Media and Society

Hearing the Contradictions: Aesthetic Experience, Music and Digitization

If, as Susan Buck-Morss (2003) suggests, aesthetic experience is an occasion for “making critical judgments about not only cultural forms but social forms of our being-in-the-world,” or if it is linked, in David Hesmondhalgh’s (2013) account, to the possibilities of collective flourishing, potential changes in the nature of that experience merit critical attention. This article reflects on the ways in which these social or ethical dimensions of the aesthetic experience of music are affected by digitization. It moves from a discussion of aesthetic experience as a form of encounter that refers to a common world, to consideration of recent work in music sociology that engages themes that emerge from that discussion: aesthetic judgment, and the question of difference and commonality. With illustrations from focus group interviews, I suggest that the quantization associated with digital environments is altering the cultural form of aesthetic judgment, just as personalization is changing the meaning of “difference” in this context. The essay is intended as a disclosive critique that takes as its primary object not the world observable through thick description or hermeneutic interpretation of actual cultural practice, but a world evoked through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of meaning.

When a Culture Becomes a Commodity (Book Review: David Hesmondhalgh “The Cultural Industries”)

When a Culture Becomes a Commodity (Book Review: David Hesmondhalgh “The Cultural Industries”)

Book Review: Why Music Matters by David Hesmondhalgh

Hesmondhalgh, David (2013) Why Music Matters, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN: 978-1-4051-9242-2 (hardcover); 978-1-4051-9241-5 (paperback); 978-1-118-53581-3 (e-book), 198 pages.

The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call Out Culture As Venture Community Management

As Ursula Huws has written, digital labour is 'difficult to conceptualise' because the internet creates new styles of labour: it not only traffics far more in the immaterial, it is also arrayed along new axes of production, new forms of compensation, and new forms of gendering and racialisation. (1) It is this kind of labour that interests me. I am specifically interested in the hidden and often-stigmatised and dangerous labour performed by women of colour, queer and trans people, and racial minorities who call out, educate, protest, and design around toxic social environments in digital media. Social media platforms benefit from the crowd-sourced labour of internet users who, with varying degrees of gentleness or force, intervene in racist and sexist discourse online. This labour is uncompensated by wages, paid instead by affective currencies such as 'likes', followers, and occasionally, acknowledgement or praise from the industry. Cheap female labour is the engine that powers the internet. Some of this labour occurs in the fabrication laboratories and electronic assembly plants in East Asia where almost all of the world's chips and digital devices are produced. Women of colour are the majority of this workforce, as has been the case since the industry's early days. Over a thousand indigenous Navajo worked at a state of the art plant on the reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico producing chips from 1965-1975, receiving less than U.S. minimum wage. (2) Labour must be cheap in order for digital culture to exist. Though Moore's Law, which dictates that processor speed doubles every eighteen months, has been credited for the vast gains in computing power and miniaturisation that has enabled the transition to digital mobile sociality, offshore workers who make the devices at a competitive price are a crucial part of the economics of this shift. Digital labourers became newly visible in 2010 when eighteen workers, unable to continue working in untenable conditions, attempted suicide, resulting in fourteen deaths in one year at the massive Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China. (3) The idea of 'digital labour' is often associated with more highly paid, white, and male workers in the global North. As Gina Neff writes, however, these digital jobs are defined by precarity: 'YOYO' (you're on your own) economics, and the need for individuals to accept high levels of risk. (4) The software developers and workers she studied at start-up companies in Silicon Alley were expected to add their cheap or free labour to their paid labour by talking up their companies at key social events and trade shows, thereby blurring the line between paid work and play. She terms this 'venture labour' --workers willingly took up this burden because firstly, it didn't seem like a burden; self-interest was at the core of the motivation for contributing this kind of digital labour. As she writes, 'there is clearly a great degree of work involved in building and maintaining these regional economies, and this work is disproportionately done after hours by people who have the time, ability, and social capital to navigate such events (p160).' Neff shows that the business of software production is not only 'knowledge work,' but affective work as well. Clearly there are sharp differences between overworked female labourers in an electronics plant, precariously employed as software and game developers, and social media users who 'call out' and critique racism and misogyny online. They may all be labouring in the digital economy, but just as they are gendered and racialised differently, they are rewarded differently and under different conditions. David Hesmondhalgh says as much when he asks, 'are we really meant to see creating code or writing about favourite shows online as 'exploited' in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?' (5) Many of the 'venture labourers' that Neff writes about were white, male, and from middle class backgrounds, giving them a leg-up in the fend-for yourself-economy of software development work, while the mostly-female Asian assembly workers at Foxconn labour with no jackpot in sight. …

How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Mainstream?: Charting the Musical Middle

How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Mainstream?Charting the Musical Middle Eric Weisbard (bio) Redefining Mainstream Popular Music. Edited by Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, and Jodie Taylor. New York: Routledge, 2013. 222 pages. $125.00 (cloth). $44.95 (paper). Why Music Matters. By David Hesmondhalgh. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 198 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). $26.99 (e-book). Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. By Motti Regev. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. 208 pages. $69.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). $19.99 (e-book). The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s. By Mitchell Morris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 248 pages. $70.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song. By Edward P. Comentale. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 274 pages. $90.00 (cloth). $28.00 (paper). Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. By Anita Elberse. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013. 307 pages. $30.00 (cloth). $15.99 (paper). Let’s Talk about Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. New and Expanded Edition. By Carl Wilson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 303 pages. $19.95 (paper). $16.99 (e-book). Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World. By Daniel Horowitz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 491 pages. $34.95 (cloth). [End Page 253] The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. By Matthew Delmont. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 294 pages. $68.95 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). Love, Peace, and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America’s Favorite Dance Show Soul Train: Classic Moments. By Ericka Blount Danois. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013. 243 pages. $24.99 (paper). The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture and Style. By Nelson George. New York: William Morrow, 2014. 256 pages. $27.99 (cloth). Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation. By Questlove. New York: Harper Design, 2013. 288 pages. $45.00 (cloth). Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. By Nadine Hubbs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 225 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). Mainstream is a word we use without much questioning, and notions of mainstream music can be particularly fraught. Mainstream music is too safe, too apolitical, too pop sounding, too middle class or too working class, too white. The problem, as the field-defining scholar Simon Frith points out (echoing Marcel Proust), is that the songs we are most ready to dismiss intellectually connect us emotionally—they are the ones we sing together.1 American music has long been rich in mainstreams. The show business variant, evolved from vaudeville and Broadway, gave us pop, a quickening of popular. But there were black and southern white mainstreams too by the 1920s, as first noted by Philip Ennis. Ennis, hired young onto an early 1950s BMI Music Publishing study of radio DJs meant to refute charges of commercial manipulation, was already an emeritus sociology professor when he published his one solo work of music scholarship, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (1992). The book placed the three streams of commercial pop against three smaller streams connected to authenticity and musical genre: gospel, jazz, and folk. Its opening half remains the best attempt to capture the multiple formulations of sound, identity, and capitalism that rock and roll drew on. This may be because Ennis, who disparaged rock and roll in its heyday, felt no investment in his streams or in debates between pop and less overtly commercial styles. Flows were flows. [End Page 254] Perhaps this era’s distance from the late 1960s to early 1970s peak of countercultural insurgence gives us a renewed fondness for the work started by Ennis, for seeing the worth of those who are included in pop mainstreams as much as those who lampoon them. Climbing charts and social mobility are kissing cousins. When Bruno Mars—of complicated ethnicity, interwoven genre affiliations, and a background as a child Elvis impersonator—performs his “Billionaire,” one should draw conclusions carefully, especially as the...

Book review: David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries

Book review: David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, <i>Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries</i>

David Hesmondhalgh, Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries

David Hesmondhalgh, Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries

Book Review: Sarah Baker and David Hesmondhalgh, Creative Labour: Media work in three cultural industries

Book Review: Sarah Baker and David Hesmondhalgh, <i>Creative Labour: Media work in three cultural industries</i>

Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music by Richard Middleton

Journal of Popular Music StudiesVolume 21, Issue 3 p. 316-320 Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music by Richard Middleton David Hesmondhalgh, David Hesmondhalgh University of LeedsSearch for more papers by this author David Hesmondhalgh, David Hesmondhalgh University of LeedsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 September 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2009.01199_1.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume21, Issue3September 2009Pages 316-320 RelatedInformation

Music and collective identities

This paper presents some introductory observations on the ways in which the opposition between the modern and post-modern understanding of social identities can be overcome in the context of musicology. It is based on the consideration of identities as dynamic and changeable categories, as well as on the importance of the relation between individual and collective positionings, on the complexities of the multiple identifications and on the understanding of music as a social construction of identity. Due attention is paid to basic theoretical and methodological aspects in the interdisciplinary analysis of ?self? and ?other?. In music, the problems of self-presentation appropriation, difference, power, control, authenticity, hybridity, as well as other issues that blur the boundaries between musicology, ethnomusicology and the studies of popular music, are made relevant by these interdisciplinary terms. Both the modern and post-modern understanding of identity can first be placed in the context of the binary questions: ?How to construct the identity and maintain it?? and ?How to avoid the construction of the fixed identity and thus leave the door open for the possibility of change??. It seems that the deconstruction of these opposite approaches has now grown in importance. This paper focuses especially on that kind of theorizing about music and socio-cultural identities. The views of Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, that older and recent models of music representation are not ?either/or? categories but rather complement each other, are especially singled out. These authors show by numerous examples that music can invariably both reflect existing identities and construct new ones. They conclude that possible shortcomings, such as the danger of essentialism in the earlier approach, and of later reductionism, could be avoided by carefully using the homology and process models of music representation. Their typology of music articulation of a socio-cultural identity, however, leaves the opposition between ?real? and ?imagined? intact. The theoretic analysis of other disciplines leads us to conclusion that these categories were the result of different images, whose opposite poles existed in the contrary approaches of ?realism? and ?radical constructivism?. In this context, the analysis of Milan Subotic in the field of social theory is singled out as a ?middle-way? position between these opposite sides. This approach in musicology could be most helpful in keeping an equal distance from both ?imagination? and ?reality?. Where society is concerned, reality is, after all, imagined. However, this invention is certainly not an arbitrary one, but rather an effort to label social processes as a social reality, from the perspective of the ?longue dur?e?. Therefore, it is especially important to maintain an historical approach in the study of music, something that is often lacking in post-modern narratives. Since the relation between collective identities and music is a complex and diverse subject, theoretical and methodological approaches must be further developed in the context of separate and specific topics of research. Finally, musicology itself is a construct of musical representation in the performative processes and praxis of music. In that respect, the reconciliation between the antagonisms highlighted in this paper could be achieved in the concurrence of historical narrative and contemporary critique.

The Tortoise and the Hare

The Tortoise and the Hare

From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (review)

Reviewed by: From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology Nasser Al-Taee From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. By Derek B. Scott , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [ 258 p. ISBN 0-19-515195-X. $65 (hbk.); 0-19-515196-8. $35 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, index. It does not seem all that long ago that Susan McClary said "when cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology fifteen years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings" (Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], back cover). In her forward to the volumes in the Routledge series Critical and Cultural Musicology, Martha Feldman claimed that "Musicology has undergone a sea change in recent years." Indeed, Derek Scott's book can be seen as a continuation of a growing body of critical musicology dedicated to examining issues that have been marginalized by musicologists such as ideology, identity, gender, and racial representation in Western music. To this end, Scott asserts that musicology is no longer an autonomous field of academic inquiry, but has entered a phase of "postdisciplinarity" (p. 4), and a vibrant intellectual movement in the interdisciplinary field of the arts, sciences, and humanities. Scott embraces the notion that the rise of critical musicology was advanced by the collapse of the binary divide between classical and popular, which broadened the scope of musicological inquiry to topics such as gender, race, identity, sexuality, and narrative. In doing so, Scott is committed to social semiotics advanced by Richard Leppert, Susan McClary, and Lawrence Kramer and puts forth a series of exemplary essays articulated in a rich, engaging, and provocative interdisciplinary style. The book is divided into four parts, each with two chapters. Part 1 concerns gender, sexuality, and musical style rooted in social practices. The first chapter deals with erotic representation from Monteverdi to Mae West. Building on McClary's work on seventeenth-century narrative, Scott analyzes "Pur ti miro" from Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) as a representation of the mutual arousal thought necessary for sexual reproduction in the seventeenth century, to the stereotypes dominating American erotic songs of the 1920s and 1930s in what he refers to as the "predator," Mae West, the "innocent," Helen Kane, and the "prim and proper" Ann Suter (pp. 27-29). The second chapter examines eroticism in the Victorian era. Scott argues for disjunctions in representation rather than universals or constants that can be traced through "evolution" or "progress." The author contends that music can be negotiated, building on conventions rooted in style codes and social practices. Part 2 concerns the working of ideology in relation to popular music. Scott examines representation of the American Indian in popular styles of Western music from the eighteenth century to the present. He thus moves from sexuality to ethnicity in order to show how cultural difference is represented and how shifting perceptions of the Native American can be related to changes [End Page 140] in attitude to the "civilized" and the natural world. Scott traces the appropriation of the Native American from Rameau's harpsichord piece Les sauvages (1725) to J. P. Richardson's pop song "Running Bear" (1960). Here we are confronted with a host of signifiers delineating the "enemy" as alien and whisky drinking or courageous and wise, reflecting shifting political and cultural changes. Scott claims that even films that attempt to depict Native Americans in a more positive image, such as Dances with Wolves (1990), are no less dehumanizing and have a tendency to imply that Native Americans are unable to cope with the grim practicalities of modern life. Throughout the chapter, Scott emphasizes the fact that the construction of the Native American in Western history informs the way white Americans and Europeans build their own sense of identity and reveals little or nothing about the people who are supposedly the subject of those...

Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House (review)

Reviewed by: Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House Mary Simonson (bio) Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House. By Maria Pini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 192 pp. Bibliography, index. Cloth, $69.95. In the past decade, scholarly explorations of club and rave cultures have abounded: Will Straw and David Hesmondhalgh have launched inquiries into dance music production; Ben Malbon and Sarah Thornton have discussed clubbing and raving in relation to ideas of youth resistance and subcultures; and Kai Fikentscher and Fiona Buckland have undertaken ethnographic studies of the New York club scene.1 In a number of cases, gender issues have played an important role in these inquiries. Scholars including Thornton, Angela McRobbie, and Barbara Bradby have critiqued the tendency of clubbing scholarship to focus on aspects of production (a level of participation that tends to be male dominated), and the frequency with which such scholarship privileges Birminghamesque narratives of subcultural capital and resistance that treat clubbers as unsexed, unraced, unmarked participants whose experiences are not affected by their identities.2 [End Page 86] Maria Pini's Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House emerges as a response to such feminist critiques of clubbing scholarship. Instead of lamenting the invisibility of women and their experiences in accounts of raving and clubbing, Pini rewrites the club narrative from a female point of view, weaving together women's accounts of experiences within and outside of clubs. Combining self-reflexive feminist ethnography, interviews, various feminist philosophical writings on female subjectivity and post-feminist identities, and nuanced critiques of the ways in which the voices of female clubbers and ravers have been written over in most literature on club cultures, Pini redefines the clubbing experience as a space in which women actively construct and perform female identities and subjectivities, play with notions of femininity, and explore new feminisms. Separated from the "everyday," clubbing and raving allow for the negotiation and rewriting of "woman" at this moment in history. Unlike much writing on clubbing, however, Pini's study is not about raving as a phenomenon, issues of music and event production, or the politics behind the popularity of clubbing. Rather, Pini employs clubs and raves as spaces in which to think about women's experiences and constructions of self at a historical moment in which conceptions of feminism and femininity are in flux. Club Cultures is about how women generate and use clubbing and raving, not about the production or phenomenon of these cultures. Indeed, Pini goes so far as to acknowledge that her decision to use clubbing and raving as a venue in which to explore changing modes of femininity is somewhat arbitrary; there are a plethora of other locations in which women experiment with identity. Yet social dance spaces such as clubs and raves work especially well for thinking about alternative constructions of "woman," she argues, because they are liminal spaces in which a set of unwritten rules and procedures provide a level of safety and freedom for women interested in using drugs, escaping from pressures to attend to heterosexual relationships, dressing up, and so on. "With rave," Pini writes, "different conditions are in place—conditions which allow for the fabrication, embodiment, and exploration of very different fictions of femininity. These are fictions where an insistence upon the 'right' to adventure, a valorization of 'madness,' and a celebration of 'autoeroticism' are central."3 Just as Pini's female clubbers use the dance floor as a space to play with various definitions and constructions of self, Pini herself takes to the dance floor to choreograph a narrative of postmodern transformations in femininities and feminism, and the difficulties and contradictions inherent in negotiating these shifts. Women's voices are at the center of Club Cultures. The book's main section features interviews of eighteen white female London ravers between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five, which were gathered as part of Pini's MA and PhD work at Goldsmiths College at the University of London.4 In turn, these women speak to us either individually or in dialogue with their friends, sharing their views on the role of clubbing in...

Global noise - Rap and Hip-Hop outside the USA

The thirteen essays that comprise Global Noise explore the hip hop scenes of Europe, Anglophone and Francophone Canada, Japan and Australia within their social, cultural and ethnic contexts. Countering the prevailing colonialist view that global hip hop is an exotic and derivative outgrowth of an African-American-owned idiom subject to assessment in terms of American norms and standards, Global Noise shows how international hip hop scenes, like those in France and Australia, developed by first adopting then adapting US models and establishing an increasing hybridity of local linguistic and musical features. The essays reveal diasporic manifestations of international hip hop that are rarely acknowledged in the growing commentary on the genre in the US. In the voices of rappers from around the globe with divergent backgrounds of race, nationality, class and gender, the authors find a consistent rhetoric of opposition and resistance to institutional forms of repression and the construction of a cohesive, historically-based subculture capable of accommodating regional and national diversities. CONTRIBUTORS: Roger Chamberland, Ian Condry, David Hesmondhalgh, Claire Levy, Ian Maxwell, Caspar Melville, Sarah Morelli, Mark Pennay, Andre J.M. PrEvos, Ted Swedenburg, Jacqueline Urla and Mir Wermuth.

Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi, 360 pp. ISBN 0-520-22083-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-520-22084-6 (paperback) Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, eds. Music and Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ix, 376 pp. ISBN 0-252-02544-X (hardcover), ISBN 0-252-06865-3 (paperback)

Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi, 360 pp. ISBN 0-520-22083-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-520-22084-6 (paperback). Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, eds. Music and Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ix, 376 pp. ISBN 0-252-02544-X (hardcover), ISBN 0-252-06865-3 (paperback). Over the last decade of the 20th century, music scholarship inched its way towards the kind of engagement with critical theory long embraced by the other arts.1 With the two books under review here, Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music and Music and Gender, music scholarship has achieved a sophisticated marriage of music and critical theory. Gone is the sometimes tiresome confessional tone of early musicology, largely absent is the glossing of musical materials too often found in sociological books on popular music. The hallmark of both volumes is their conscientious effort to map out explicit methodological and theoretical territory. Both books are rigorous, adventurous, and carefully considered collections of essays that serve as important models for the training of young scholars. My motivation for writing this review comes from my use of essays from these books in two different courses on music and identity in recent years. Interestingly, the first course was a cultural studies seminar, while the second was taught to upper-year music students.2 I was much struck by the fact that the material could be useful in such different contexts. My cultural studies students had uneven competence in music theory and history, while my music students were largely unfamiliar with critical theory. Both groups engaged in ongoing, lively debate generated by the ideas raised in these books. This review will not attempt a comprehensive description of each essay contained in both volumes. Rather, I will address particular pieces for their relevance as pedagogical material, giving greater attention to Western Music and Its Others, as a full review of Music and Gender will appear in a forthcoming issue of CUMR.3 I want to argue that if a critical and interdisciplinary approach to musical scholarship is to be useful in the academy, we must integrate it into the training of undergraduates, rather than waiting to deprogram our graduate students. MAPPING A CRITICAL THEORY OF MUSIC Of particular value in both books are the detailed introductory essays, which go beyond describing their distinct projects by advancing exciting theoretical possibilities for musical scholarship. In Western Music and Its Others, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh map a complex terrain marked by working across musical sub-disciplines (musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies and film music studies), in order to think through a range of cultural issues. These are expressed as a number of relationships (between Orientalism/Postcolonialism, Modernism/Postmodernism, and Fusion/Hybridity) through which issues of identity, representation, and appropriation may be examined. The authors skillfully negotiate this potentially unwieldy combination of attitudes and lenses, identifying a number of core conceptual problems present in any critical approach to the study of music. At the centre is the need for a multi-layered theory that is both processual and homological, understanding that music can both construct new identities and reflect existing ones (p. 31). I found this weighty (fifty-eight page) essay most useful near the end of my courses on music and identity. Once familiar with the specific essays in the book, students were better able to track its dense argument and range of theoretical terms. In their introduction to Music and Gender, Beverley Diamond and Pirkko Moisala reveal a more closely defined project: that of articulating a feminist ethnomusicology, expressed within a postcolonial frame that recognizes the fluid and relational nature of culture (p. …

Musically Imagined Communities Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. Western Music and Its Others. Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press

Musically Imagined Communities Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. <i>Western Music and Its Others. Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music.</i> Berkeley: University of California Press