Dr. Norman Stanfield

One of my musical interests at Christmas time is the performance of Christmas music played and sung by musicians in the great urban outdoors. My role model is the Salvation Army’s brass band culture. I have more than a passing academic curiosity because I have been a cornet player in a British-style Brass Band for the last 10 years.

Back in the day, Christmas time was (and is) a major time for fund-raising. (This is true of some non-Salvation Army community brass bands in England today.) We all are aware of the Salvation Army’s excellent kettle drive, where volunteers shake jingle bells to draw attention to the hanging globe beside them.  What is far less known is that some 50 years ago, those kettles were the centrepiece of a small music ensemble of 8 or so brass band players from the Salvation Army.

The ensembles, comprised of the members of the full band divided into groups, would appear on the evening streets of cities and towns around the world. In England, they are still a common sight.

In Vancouver, they travelled through the streets of the wealthy neighbourhoods (Kerrisdale, Shaughnessy, etc.) under street lamps (to throw light on the music clipped to their lyres)  and occasionally umbrellas, playing for 15 minutes to half an hour before moving on to the next lamp-post. During their performance, faces would be pressed against windows, then children assigned the duty of rushing out to the players with money in hand, thanks to the cooperation of parents. It was hard work for the Salvation Army players, working in difficult weather conditions with embouchures that had to be made of steel, but their reward was the knowledge that their crucial, life-saving and life-affirming social programs would continue unabated.

Christmas Street Music

Mikhail Bakhtin’s principles of Misrule– once a year, those below rule those above, street music- theatre, and busking – once operated during high days like Christmas .  Misrule theory, aka transgression, is also one of the features of my World Music course when I introduce students to English morris dance, wassail songs, and May Day carols. It no longer functions in modern-day Christmas but it once was the central engine in “the old days”. Misrule events were not necessarily rowdy affairs, and they were certainly not anarchic, thanks to the administration of the Lord of Misrule.  The Salvation Army Christmas ensembles fit the description fairly accurately, if somewhat demurely.

When I occasionally see a volunteer choir or brass ensemble on the streets or in a mall, I see most of the elements of Misrule at play, except for one crucial detail that even threatens to negate the rest. They do not busk.

The ensembles make an appearance in an outdoor market or a commercial street busy with shoppers, playing or singing music as if they were live muzak. The general public is delighted yet mystified. “Why are they here?” Speculation then muddies the experience. Hirelings of the market or mall? An odd sense of self-worth? An embarrassing public display? Christmas or Kitschmas?

If the same group is busking, the reason for their music and their presence becomes obvious, regardless of ability or repertoire.  The listeners enter into a social contract that is transparent and mutually satisfying. In addition, they receive instant feedback of their worth in the form of a “payment” that resembles a reward and expression of gratitude.

Last year, I had one odd experience with a roving Christmas choir. A rag-tag ensemble of amateur singers accompanied by a single guitarist appeared at our doorstep, sang one song in broken English, then asked for a donation and inquired if we wanted to hear the Christian message. Although I admit to being somewhat annoyed at the interruption (note that the Salvation Army Christmas ensembles call out to patrons with their music, not personally bang on doors, and they do not proselytize) I have to grudgingly admit that the event complied with my Misrule imaginings. I asked myself if this how some householders felt when the mummers arrived to crash around in their house with their play and kettle.

Readings

The following two books are perfect for culture-vultures. They encapsulate the many aspirations, contradictions and tensions of Christmas time, including Misrule. Professional musicians who find themselves caught up in the whirlwind of the season will find answers to many of the questions that linger in the back of their mind as they dutifully crank out the music so craved by the public.

Unwrapping Christmas, edited by Daniel Miller (OUP, 1993)

(Amazon) In an age of secularization and the decline of ritual, Christmas has emerged as the most promising candidate for the first global festival, celebrated not only in the Christian West, but in many countries with either a minority or no Christian population. How is it that Christmas is not merely surviving, but actually gaining in importance? This book provides the first comparative study of the Christmas phenomenon, based on direct observation of how the festival is actually celebrated in diverse social contexts. It begins with some general theories of Christmas, including the first full English translation of “Father Christmas Executed” by Claude Levi-Strauss, and then focuses on two controversial issues. First, the relationship between Christmas and materialism is examined and interpreted in the United States, Japan, and Trinidad. The second theme is the debate over the place of the family in Christmas celebrations; this section ranges from discussion of quarrels and tensions sparked off by the festival to a study of a deliberately anti- (or non-) nuclear family Christmas, and examines evidence from Sweden, Britain, and the Inupiat of Alaska. Christmas is rapidly becoming the focus for a constellation of activities such as gift-giving, the marking of the seasons, and the celebration of extended family networks which otherwise would have seemed to be in sharp decline. This collection represents a fascinating and significant contribution to understanding how and why Christmas has developed into the global festival celebrated today.

Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture, edited by Sheila Whiteley (Edinburgh UP, 2008)

(Amazon) How do we understand Christmas? What does it mean? This book is a lively introduction to the study of popular culture through one central case study. It explores the cultural, social and historical contexts of Christmas in the UK, USA and Australia, covering such topics as fiction, film, television, art, newspapers and magazines, war, popular music and carols. Chapters explore the ways in which the production of meaning is mediated by the social and cultural activities surrounding Christmas (watching Christmas films, television, listening or engaging with popular music and carols), its relationship to a set of basic values (the idealised construct of the family), social relationships (community), and the ways in which ideological discourses are used and mobilised, not least in times of conflict, terrorism and war. Packed with examples ranging from Charles Dickens’ seminal text, A Christmas Carol, Coca-colonisation and Santa Claus, Victorian cartoons and Christmas cards, to Dr Who, The Office, ‘A Fairy Tale of New York’, ‘Happy Christmas (War is Over)’, and such dystopian films as Jingle All the Way and All I Want For Christmas, the case studies offer an incisive account of the ways in which Christmas relates to social change, and how such recent events as 9/11 and the continuing conflict in Iraq focus attention on traditional themes of community and family. Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture offers students and scholars alike an opportunity to explore the hidden agendas of the world’s most popular festival and what it means to the outsider looking in.

 Why study ethnomusicology and popular music?

As music students approach their third year of undergraduate studies, they glance at the subject offerings and spot two courses devoted to music of the world and popular culture. In the massive universities in the States, even non-music students are tempted by the same courses and enrol in the hundreds. The introductory courses are similar to Music Appreciation programs where music notation is not a pre-requisite to understanding the course material. The textbooks, as expensive and ubiquitous as the classic Mus App books and CDs, are Cook’s tours of factual information and scholarly observations.

But what of the needs of students in a school of music? They are rapidly getting up to speed on the technical requirements of their music instruments or voice. Some will even be in the zone for a full-time career as musicians in the near future. At the same time, they are becoming increasingly more aware of the historical and a theoretical foundation of the music they perform. Their core music history and theory programs have already established the primacy and complexity of their adopted high art, Western Classical Music. So why embark on such a tangent as ethnomusicology or popular music?

One of the many answers is simple.  Triangulation.

Triangulation

This word may be familiar to those of you who, like me, have enjoyed the out-of-doors. Many’s the time my friends and I located ourselves on a hiking trail or slope of a mountain in Banff and Yoho National Parks by locating and identifying the surrounding peaks. The more peak spotting, the more confident we were of our maps. Occasionally our exact location was not at all what we imagined.  Back in the real world of day jobs, triangulation can be regularly seen in use by surveyors who measure land for future development.

Sociology has been obsessed with the concept of triangulation for decades, thanks to Norman Denzin. He developed a triangulation methodology which he described in his 1978 book, The Research Act. A quick search of the internet reveals that educational theorists have also used Denzin’s research to measure the effectiveness of their teaching goals and objectives. The goal of these triangulators is to get as close to the “truth” of an initial observation as possible by invoking several research techniques to either reinforce or cast doubt on the primary thesis.

Triangulation and the musical experience

Triangulation in the context I am suggesting is a method for locating your musical self by measuring your current understanding and appreciation of Western Art Music with the new points of view offered by ethnomusicology and popular music. In the process, you will likely discover that your musical needs, and those of your potential listeners, are not what you had imagined. You are no longer located in the same place you were as a Western art music practitioner.

Of course, Western art music listeners are aware that a deeper appreciation of, say Beethoven symphonies can be achieved by comparing (“triangulating”) his later masterpieces with his early works. Symphony number 7, for example, takes on new meaning when compared to the early symphonies.

However, the triangulation I am recommending results in more than a deeper appreciation; it is transformative. I am suggesting that you, the listener and/or music performer, can discover a new location of “you” when you triangulate your current music preferences and understanding with diverse genres completely outside your Western art music preferences. In other words, you discover that your understanding of music is not a “fixed point” from which to achieve greater insight. It moves around as you ramble through entirely new vistas of music-making.

This is an entirely different concept of learning, 180 degrees from the classical learning curve of knowledge acquisition. It is in keeping with the future of education as a system of creating artists of knowledge, rather than artisans of facts. The BC Ministry of Education has labelled this new direction in their dramatic, innovative mandate entitled Enabling Innovation: Transforming Curriculum and Assessment (August 2012). The ministry wants to replace the steady and inexorable procurement of facts to the back of the room, in favour of teaching young people how to be creative with knowledge and experiences.

Triangulation and Western art music

My definition of triangulation can be applied in the most wonderful ways to the music world.  In the realm of performativity, the sedentary stage presence of WAM musicians is found desperately wanting when triangulated with the movement and theatre of their popular music counterparts. Objections will be raised by old-school traditionalists who re-affirm the role of Western art music performers as ego-less broadcasters of the sound of the music coded in the music notations in front of them. When I think of this scenario, I am always reminded of Japanese puppeters in Bunraku.

Western art music audiences, equally committed to restraint and immobility, allegedly insist on this quietude so they can meditate more properly on the sounds. But musical statues both on and off the stage are hand-in-hand with the steady decline in the interest in Western art music (except by those nations who have made a fetish of all things Western, especially “high art”). All are agreed that something has to change. And who’s to say that a performance of classical music wouldn’t be enhanced immeasurably by say, the musicians standing while playing (cello excepted, maybe) with music memorized?

Triangulation and hybridity

It is in the territory of musical hybridisation that triangulation really shines. Interestingly, hybridity is most common in popular music. Folk music (aka traditional, roots, ethnic, and/or heritage music) is usually bounded by ethnocentricity. When combining two or more musical cultures into something new, an invigorating new location of music is fomred in the town square we call “the global village”. And if you don’t find yourself uplifted by the new sound, but instead, frustrated by the loss in translation of your “familiar” heritage, then welcome to the 21^st century and its new mode of critical awareness.

The future of music lies in the hybridizing effect of globalisation, reflected back on each member of a culture no matter where they live.  Local musics, including Western art music and folk music in general, will inexorably become static, even if it is perfectly formed and steeped in nostalgia. The future will assign these experiences to the museum. Canada is perhaps the first nation to develop and champion hybridity, first by establishing a society of multiculturalism, then moving inexorably into the domain of transculturalism. Canadian identity will transform from the isolating effects of hyphenation (e.g., Latin-Canadian) to simply “Canadian”, as the mixing of music and other forms of culture finally achieve critical mass.

Readings

Peter Burke (2009) Cultural Hybridity

(From Amazon books) The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, “Bollywood” films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Ien Ang, have engaged with hybridity in their work and sought to untangle these complex events and reactions; or that a variety of disciplines now devote increasing attention to the works of these theorists and to the processes of cultural encounter, contact, interaction, exchange and hybridization. In this concise book, leading historian Peter Burke considers these fascinating and contested phenomena, ranging over theories, practices, processes and events in a manner that is as wide-ranging and vibrant as the topic at hand.

Tyler Cowen (2004) Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures

(From Amazon books) A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist’s eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural “destruction” breeds not artistic demise but diversity.

Through an array of colorful examples from the areas where globalization’s critics have been most vocal, Cowen asks what happens when cultures collide through trade, whether technology destroys native arts, why (and whether) Hollywood movies rule the world, whether “globalized” culture is dumbing down societies everywhere, and if national cultures matter at all. Scrutinizing such manifestations of “indigenous” culture as the steel band ensembles of Trinidad, Indian handweaving, and music from Zaire, Cowen finds that they are more vibrant than ever–thanks largely to cross-cultural trade.

For all the pressures that market forces exert on individual cultures, diversity typically increases within society, even when cultures become more like each other. Trade enhances the range of individual choice, yielding forms of expression within cultures that flower as never before. While some see cultural decline as a half-empty glass, Cowen sees it as a glass half-full with the stirrings of cultural brilliance. Not all readers will agree, but all will want a say in the debate this exceptional book will stir.

Introduction

 The beginning of every semester brings to my mind, yet again, the dilemma of teaching at a university in the 21^st century. Along with all my notes, readings, and online preparations, I find myself revisiting this troubling question like some sort of ghost of Christmas past, present, and future.

The End of Traditional Education

My quandary surfaces in the exams that I am required to administer. “Assessments” as they are now called, exist to ostensibly measure the amount and quality of learning that has occurred in each student’s mind. Students take these evaluations (i.e., final marks) to their undergraduate advisors, scholarship committees and ultimately their future employers, as proof of their competency. But exams can also be trials by fire, dominated by stressful rote learning and crisis management techniques. Granted, some people thrive on competition, but “some” is not “all” and those who loath the race to superiority are sometimes brilliant in their own quiet way.

The most extreme example of the inherent malice of the exam process is found in Japan. The trains always run on time. When one is late during national university entrance exam time, it is almost always because a student has jumped on the tracks in front of one. Far less extreme, but equally troubling is the after-school programs of supplementary education, called Juku (Cram Schools). In the world of music, the after-school band programs are famous for their sky-high standards. A closer look at the programs reveals that the students practice 2 to 3 hours a day after school, and 5-6 hours on each day of the week-ends. Euroamerican educators and sociologists wonder out loud if a deep price is being paid for such obsessive behaviour. In the realm of the national entrance exams, the cost becomes obvious.

The New Examination

“What would an exam look like if it was devoid of fear and loathing?” is the question I ask myself every year.

My path to the answer of this troubling question has been the evolution of my exam procedure, which has moved inexorably from in-class misery to online freedom. I began by playing ambient music, and then the sound of crickets in the night, during the writing of the exams. The music was not to everybody’s liking, but the quiet sound of evening crickets was surprisingly successful. I then went on to allow students to write the exams anywhere in the music building, even outside in the sunshine, on the day of the exam. Finally, I gave everybody permission to access their notes and books, commonly called open book exams.

Now I have arrived at the final stage – online exams. And here I find an amazing intersection of two worlds. I have, almost by accident, created a blend of online instruction and traditional lecture-hall education. One could even say that my classes are a form of distance education, given my use of Connect online course materials and online exams, but without the distance from the teacher. A quick search of the internet reveals that university distance education online is  over-taking traditional instruction, much to the consternation of traditional universities and colleges.

The Future is Now

My introduction to this radical new style of examination was co-incidental. Some years ago I decided to upgrade my computer skills by enrolling in some courses at the Academy of Learning, just up the street from where I lived. Classes were drop-in, not scheduled. When you arrived, you found a free PC and monitor, rather like a study cubicle in a library, and worked from a teaching manual. The educator was referred to as a facilitator who was there to assist students if there was one or another detail in the manual that they couldn’t understand. There was no time limit on enrollment. And the exams could be taken anywhere, any time. And they could be repeated as many times as necessary until you achieved your 100 per cent mark.

Music students who have participated in the exam system of the Royal Conservatory of Music have somewhat the same experience. Each student prepares for an exam for as long as they want. The RCM sends out examiners at certain times of the year to evaluate your efforts. You don’t go to the RCM and enroll for several years, you take the exams in your home town.You can fail the exams, and take them again. You can skip exam levels (but not at the highest levels). You can take as long as you want to acquire your “degree”. You can start and end at any age. I’ve personally examined wind players in the 60s and 70s.

The New Education

The new style of examination stands up well to the early warning signs of the demise of traditional instruction.  For example, the National Training Centre’s hierarchy of average learning retention states that listening to lectures is the poorest form of education. Another pyramid is Benjamin Bloom’s hierarchy of meaningful education, reflecting the same urgency of reformation.

And then there is David Ausubel’s Assimilation Theory of Education, which some label “the flight from rote learning”. The goal today appears to be a blend of rote/memorisation and “meaningful” learning, with far greater emphasis on the latter because it can motivate the learner to willingly do the former, without threat of failure. In-class exams based on rote memorisation do not to fulfill this mandate, at least in the social sciences and humanities.

Perhaps even the hard sciences, if you believe Thomas Kuhn.

In addition to the radical re-assessment of the act of teaching, this current age of digital information and social media results in the alarming fact that everything I say in lectures is available online, sometimes with brilliant illustrations. How can teachers like me compete with the internet? Not by being more erudite – that is impossible. We do our job by organizing the information in a meaningful way, while continually being reflexive, so students can see how experience combines with information.

Conclusion

So I will lecture, but I will try not to pontificate. I hope. Some students may mistake my casual manner for talking down, as if they had travelled back in time to a grade 11 classroom. Others are grateful for my style of passing on knowledge and experience, as if it were peer-to-peer, rather than knowledge from on high.

With all this in mind, I have placed my exams online. You can write them in a coffee shop, a bedroom, a park bench, wherever there is a wifi connection.  The exams require you to apply the information you received in class, and supplement with online resources like Wikipedia, and apply them to unique situations, not found on the internet.

If you look back at my earlier entry with virtually the same title, The World Music Textbook Dilemma, you will read my basic concerns which I will fine-tune here.

Like my M328 class, I have not been able to find a textbook that reflects the content of my lectures. Stating it another way, I don’t teach course material that is dictated by the contents of a textbook, as if I were merely an extension of the book, no matter how well structured and written a given text may be. I see bits and pieces of my hand-picked subject matter in the many textbooks which I will describe, below. But I believe students deserve the benefit of unique insights and discoveries that come from direct experience and personal research, rather than the formulaic structure of a rote education.

Textbooks have been a fixture of education since time immemorial, or at least since World War2. They were usually the principal source of information for any given course, acting both as a guide through the subject area and a reference. Now the reference component is completely overtaken by the Web, leaving only the direction of the course which ultimately is the responsibility of the instructor long before the advent of textbooks.

When I envisioned all the potential themes for my Popular Music Studies course, I quickly realized that I had enough material for dozens of lectures. This is certainly true of the field of Popular Music studies in general, making the topic almost impossible to coral in one book. So the themes in each of my lectures are designed to excite curiosity for self-guided learning in the future, in keeping with the 21^st century attitude that life is filled with lifelong learning in the workplace, and “serious Leisure” at home.  Old hands will recognize these ambitions in descriptions of Continuing Education.

Ultimately, each student in my class will create their own DIY personal textbook based on the notes they write in class and during their online reading and study projects. Really dedicated students (hopefully everybody in the class) will supplement their notes with information gathered from the Web.

So, with all of this in mind, here is a brief and very select survey of textbooks that are available for students of Popular Music Studies. (A far more comprehensive bibliography is found on the web. Google Society for Music Theory: Popular Music Interest Group; BASIC BIBLIOGRAPHY.) One way to investigate these books is to look at them online, via Google books or similar sites. Or, go to the music library and browse the shelves where they are found. (Most of these titles have been placed in the M403J Reserve Books section of the Music Library.) Note that this survey does not include the amazing encyclopedias of Popular Music (e.g., Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World). Nor does it cover the multitude of excellent “readers” and essay compilations. That’s a subject for another blog entry.

Pop music textbooks roughly come in four varieties.

Popular music textbooks for non-music undergrads

This first category is comprised of books written for the massive, one-semester Popular Music classes found in major universities in the States (and one or two campuses in Canada). Like their fading predecessor, Music Appreciation (i.e., Western Art Music Appreciation), the pop music courses are designed for non-music students who enrol by the hundreds each semester, looking for an extra three units, some welcome relief from the rigour of their technical courses, or to broaden their Bachelor of Arts program of learning. They are essentially music history courses with all the styles of popular music arranged in chronological order, beginning with the ‘50s. They avoid music notation, knowing that their consumers, like their fellow Music Appreciation classmates, usually have no experience in the reading of music (although we all suspect that a great number of frustrated musicians participate in the course, having abandoned the dream of a career in music). The first two books are interesting adaptations of American texts, designed specifically for Canadian students.

Jay Hodgson et al (2009) Rock: A Canadian Perspective (Oxford UP, adapted from American Popular Music: from Minstrelsy to MTV, by Larry Starr and Christopher Alan Waterman: 2009, Oxford University Press USA). Jay Hodgson is one of the architects of the pop music program at University of Western Ontario.

Rob Bowman et al (2008) Rockin’ Out, Canadian Edition (Pearson Education Press, adapted from Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in The U.S.A., by Reebee Garofalo: 2007, Prentice-Hall). Rob Bowman of York University in the Toronto area is a pioneer in the study of Popular Music.

Barkley, Elizabeth Crossroads: The Multicultural Roots of America’s Popular Music (Prentice-Hall)

Campbell, Michael And the Beat Goes On: An Introduction to Popular Music in America, 1840 to Today (Wadsworth)

Campbell, Michael, and James Brody Rock and Roll: An Introduction (Schirmer)

Charlton, Katherine Rock Music Styles: A History (McGraw-Hill)

Covach, John What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History (Norton)

Friedlander, Paul Rock and Roll: A Social History (Westview Press)

Stuessy, Joe and Scott Lipscomb, Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (Prentice-Hall)

Szatmary, David P. Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock and Roll, 5th ed.  (Prentice Hall)

Popular music textbooks for music undergraduate students

These titles are a blend of music and sociology that would be appropriate for a third or fourth year course in a School of Department of Music. They would be most effective if they were a foundation course that would be followed by courses specializing in particular pop music area studies, for example, heavy metal.

Richard Middleton (1990) Studying Popular Music

Allan F. Moore (2001) Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock

Sociology textbooks for popular music studies

The second and much larger category of textbooks is rooted in sociology and cultural studies. Or to put it another way, many students prefer to bypass the litany of names and dates and go straight to the answers that come from asking “why”.  These kinds of music courses perfectly link with sociology and even anthropology departments. They also recognize a well-established truism that popular music is driven largely by sociological concerns and trends, either consciously or unconsciously. A few of these books also dabble in music theory specifically applied to popular music because they have been created for music schools in England that actually grant degrees in the study of popular music.  I have arranged the books in chronological order, beginning with Richard Middleton’s ground-breaking text which was the first to break into the post-secondary music education market. Not surprisingly, most of them originate in England.

Peter Martin (1995) Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music

Simon Frith (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

Keith Negus (1996) Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction

Jason Toynbee (2000) Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions

Peter Martin (2006) Music and the Sociological Gaze

Brian Longhurst (2007) Popular Music and Society

Roy Shuker (2008) Understanding Popular Music Culture

Joe Kotarba and Phillip Vannini (2008) Understanding Society through Popular Music

Music theory textbooks for popular music studies

Then there are the new crop of popular music textbooks that are centred on music theory and analysis. They are closest to the kind of book one would imagine in a course on popular music in a school or department of music that offers an optional upper level music course that would exist alongside music theory courses devoted to twentieth century atonalism or advanced level set tone analysis. The one possible exception is Ken Stephenson’s book which is rather elementary, and would work well at the secondary level of school. The last three books are comprised of essays, a very popular trend in Popular Music literature. It still takes me aback to see a monograph on the use of bitonality in the music of Sarah McLachlan, as opposed to say, Richard Strauss.

Sorce, Richard (1995) Music Theory for the Music Professional: A Comparison of Common-Practice and Popular Genres

John Covach and Graeme Boone, editors (1997) Understanding rock: essays in musical analysis

Ken Stephenson (2002) What to listen for in rock: a stylistic analysis

Walter Everett, editor (2000) Expression in Pop-Rock Music

Allan F. Moore, editor (2003) Analyzing Popular Music

Allan F. Moore (2012) Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song

Popular Music for Secondary and Primary Education

Finally, there is a particularly interesting genre of textbooks relevant to budding music educators. They signal the trend to enlarge and even replace, traditional music-making programs in schools such as class recorder, band, choir and orchestra.

As I compiled this list I was reminded of some startling statements I read a few weeks ago in Making Music with GarageBand and Mixcraft, by Robin Hodson et al. (Course Technology Cengage Learning, 2011). “Teaching creativity in the classroom has always been somewhat of an enigma in the traditional school music program. For whatever reason, many music educators find it difficult to teach their students how to be creative-specifically through music composition…the power of the (software and PC/Mac) tools our students have at their disposal, the creative opportunities that those tools facilitate, the incredible potential in all of the students we teach…that allow non-traditional (and traditional) music students to compose music without having to know how to read music…It is clear that the students in our classroom want to create content in the same medium in which they consume it. (page 2)

Lucy Green (2002) How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education

Lucy Green (2008) Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy

Nicole Biamonte, editor (2011) Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from ‘American Idol’ to YouTube

Carlos X. Rodriquez, editor (2004) Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education (based on a Northwest University seminar sponsored by the MENC, The National Association for Music Education)

But wait! There’s more

Having declared that there will be no textbook in the class, for lack of an appropriate candidate, I am now going to assign a textbook for the class – Ethnography in the Performing Arts: A Student Guide. It is a manual for doing music ethnography rather than a book specifically designed for a popular music course. Written by Dr. Simone Kruger, a distinguished academic and ethnomusicologist residing in England, the book will be the subject of four of the weekly reading assignments. And here’s the best part. It’s online and it’s free.

Kruger, Simone (2008) Ethnography in the Performing Arts (Palatine/Liverpool John Moores University)

The count-down begins in earnest for M403J, Introduction to the Study of Popular Music, the 2012 edition, so you may be asking yourself if there is something you can do before the first class?

Obviously a lot of lounging, considering that you’ve all struggled and fought your way to the end of Spring semester, with its deluge of end-of-term papers and exams. But I think you’ll find your new freedom replaced with, dare I say, boredom, caused by a daily life without the stimulus of learning. So with the prospects of a summer course to get your synapses firing on all cylinders again, I have some suggestions for reading and viewing that you could do ahead of the course date. Note that these suggestions are not “required” course material; you most certainly could succeed in the course without reading or seeing a single one of these items. But I believe you’ll be far richer for the experience, and definitely get more bang for your buck (i.e., M403J tuition fee) when you’re in my classes.

Granted, you will be doing this summer reading on the bus, to and from work, or perhaps the beach on week-ends, but on the plus side, my recommendations are what could be called inspired over-views that time never allows during a regular semester. They are full of rich insights while avoiding meandering academese. And best of all, they’re easy on the wallet.

Pocket-Books

At the top of the list is Music: A Very Short Introduction, by Nicholas Cook (Oxford University Press). Coming in at a modest 137 pages, it is the most erudite and engaging non-fiction book I have read in a very long time. And it’s very inexpensive. As you work your way through the pages, you’ll discover that popular music features prominently in his discussions. Gone are the days when “music” meant Western Art Music.

If you are as deeply impressed with the book as I was, you will want to go the next step and read World Music: A Very Short Introduction, by Philip Bohlman (Oxford University Press, 150 pages). I approach popular music studies partly from the vantage of an ethnomusicologist who has embarked on a probing study of a far-away music culture. Except it is the music of Us (as opposed to Other). Both books are part of an excellent series of pocketbooks (that can actually fit in a pocket!) called “Very Short Introductions”. The series appears to be missing Popular Music: A Very Short Introduction, but Nicholas Cook has the topic perfectly covered in his book.

Then there is Carl Wilson’s brilliant little pocketbook, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the end of Taste (2007). It’s a cheeky look at pop, as opposed to rock, and it explores the topic of popular listening preferences among “the masses”. And it’s a hoot. I guffawed out loud in the airplane when I was reading it, much to the surprise of my movie-watching seat-mates. Best of all, it’s a great Canadian read. His book is from another series of tiny books collectively called 33 and a 1/3. Each one zeros in on a pop music icon to reveal basic truths about music-making and music-listening.

Larger Books

If you have a more time on your hands, or perhaps you are feeling really ambitious, I recommend these larger studies that fill very important gaps.

Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music (1995). Nettl casts his sharp eye on the world of schools of music, and in the process, illuminates Western art music in a whole new light. By placing WAM in a new context, he provides a level playing field that allows the introduction of topics like the study of popular music. The “heartland” in the title is a reference to a typical music school in the American mid-west, but it applies equally well to UBC’s School of Music. My only quibble is the lack of Canadian content, but I acknowledge that he didn’t write it for “us”, but rather for the thousands of American music students who fill their massive schools of music.

Next, dive into Christopher Small. Although my gut tells me to recommend Music.Society.Education (1977, reprinted 2000), my head says, read Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (1998). The latter evolved out of former, a ground-breaking study of Western art music in relation to music outside of the concert hall, including popular music.

If you have a vast ocean of time on your hands, then you might want to perform a reality check on your paper writing skills by reading Music: A Short Guide To Writing  About Music (second edition), by Jonathan Bellman. It’s a bit stuffy, but he does make a few good points which could be useful for upgrading your writing style.

None of these books are available as e-books. As inconvenient as that may be, it tells us something about the marketplace for ideas.

Movies

“But wait. There’s more” (K-tel)

I recommend seeing the following movies as well. Brief excerpts of some of them are presented in my classes, so it would be quite an advantage to see them in their entirety before you attend the classes. Of course, like assigned readings in a typical university class, you’ll wonder what part of the myriad details will be the subject of discussion, but seeing the movies ahead of time will set you up for at least a glimmer of recognition.

Also, if you look at the syllabus for M403J in my UBC Blog website, you’ll see recommended (not required) movie titles that have been added to each lecture description. The following brief list of titles is a mix of my syllabus recommendations and other films that I introduce in class. They are movies with music content, unlike some of my syllabus recommendations that veer into non-music topics dealing with popular culture. Also, some of the movies below are “golden oldies” but they still stand out because of their timeless themes.

I acknowledge that “seeing movies” has taken on an entirely different meaning in these modern times. With the death of DVDs and movie rental chains, viewing movies is now restricted to those with access to the internet and Netflix or a similar site (which raises uncomfortable questions of equality of access), or buying the hard copy, which is what I do.

Five Easy Pieces (1970).

Jack Nicholson is at the top of his game, but that isn’t why I think the movie is great. Patiently wait for the scene in the movie when Nicholson’s character plays a classical piano composition, then admits to his dilemma of sounding authentic, while feeling inauthentic. For me, that moment is the climax of the movie, and its central theme. And yes, the title is a riff on Stravinsky’s music for piano of the same name, which I love.

School of Rock (2003)

Jack Black is hilarious as he challenges the norm of grade school music education with, what else, rock and roll.

Crossroads (1986)

A classic study of the hybridity that comes from combining classical music technique with rock music know-how, starring the same young guy (Ralph Maccio) who inspired us in Karate Kid.

The Visitor (2007)

One of the themes in this movie is the fascinating progression of interest in music performance from Western Art Music in the form of piano lessons, to the popular idiom of drum circles.

Bamboozled (2000)

Despite the fact that this movie does not have a music theme, it does address some issues in the entertainment industry, and it will give you a very important context for discussing rap, in or out of the class.

Students in my 2012 summer music class, Introduction to the Study of Popular Music, will soon be gathering in the School of Music building right about the time the rhododendrons are in bloom, or should I say, exploding from the over-sized bushes they stem from, all over the campus. At this time of the year the university resembles a national park. The evening time slot of my classes is a rare opportunity to take in the atmosphere of the wide expanses of the commons interrupted by towering trees bathed in the soft light of the summer dusk.

Our busy agenda will partly be taken up with shared pop music pleasures in a class project where volunteers present their current musical favourites in a relaxed 20-minute format, using guidelines found in my online course website. It’s worth marks, but I’ll explain those details in the class.

In the spirit of full disclosure, it’s only fair that I should reveal what I’m listening to these days.

Remember that most of my musical life has been taken up with the life of a classical musician, ethnomusicology and teaching, but that’s not to say I have been oblivious or even antagonistic towards pop music. On the contrary, it has provided the sound track of my life, and continues to do so, today. Our western world is totally immersed 24/7 in popular culture, including popular music, so it’s impossible to ignore. To turn my back to the flow of daily life expressed in popular culture and music is to be “off the bus” and out of touch with current and potential audiences. In fact, classical music is beginning to meet pop music at the half-way point, much to the annoyance of its old school listeners.  Given the crisis engendered by classical music’s shrinking audiences, as documented by Greg Sandow and others, it may be too late.

Be that as it may, my interest in the latest top ten has never been far from my mind or my ear, regardless of the distractions of contractual occupations and fatherhood.  Thank God for the car radio.

The background

When I was younger, we all socialized to the sounds of popular music, including those of us training for careers in classical music. Like all adolescents, my first experiences with pop music were deep and life-altering, akin to ducklings imprinting on their mother. No matter the time in history or the genre of the songs, our first pop music love can set us on fire and burn bright when we give in to nostalgia. For those of us in the classical music business, what is unknown is the manner in which these early flames influenced our love of classical music. Now there’s a great dissertation.

Since absorbing myself in popular music studies these last few years, I’ve discovered my listening imprints were formed in The Dark Ages, according to Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll (1986). Those dark times have also been called the Culture Wars. After the raw sounds of early pop in the 50s, the main-stream music industry, dominated by my parent’s generation, fought to re-gain control of popular music by co-opting and denuding rock and roll (and the folk music revival) with novelty numbers and easy listening composed by producers and composers like Mitch Miller or Percy Faith (a Canadian!). They went further by manufacturing and distributing what they believed to be appropriate “teen” music by producing crooning love songs and pleasant up-tempo numbers sung by white Teen Idols like Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon of Beach Party fame.

“Dark Ages”? That wasn’t my experience. It’s true that we couldn’t bear to see or hear the music appreciated by the previous generation. Also, our sub-generation scorned the Elvis impersonators in the higher grades, rejecting cuffed jeans (a la Grease) in favour of preppy clothing). But, at school dances there was still a whole lot of rockin’ goin’ on, thanks to the heated, distorted sounds of Louie Louie, as sung by the The Kingsmen, and an avalanche of new dance moves like the twist that displaced old-school  jive, a staple of high school dances for about 40 years. (Jive lives on as Ceroc and the rarified world of ballroom competitive dance.) Mind you, my Canadian prairie world had virtually no exposure to the music of black America and only a slight awareness of the American Folk Revival (Bob Dylan et al). There were many local garage bands that provided music for dances, emulating American surf music. Some of them, like the Stampeders, worked their way onto the charts.

My parent’s listening tastes were exactly opposite. No surprise here; that’s typical of generational change. But, there seemed to be more to the contrast than the usual musical opposition generated by youthful rebellion and raging hormones. They listened to “easy listening” and television crooners like Dean Martin, Perry Como, Debbie Reynolds; the list goes on and on. In rural Canada, there were still vestiges of country and western, but not in the cities. Given that their musical tastes were drenched in benign, always soft, musical sounds it’s hard to believe that generation evolved from the jump-sounds of the big band era. The entire urban parental culture seemed to be locked into a unreal state of altered reality, heightened by their suburban life-style. For an example “the book British Hit Singles & Albums states that (Mantovani) was “Britain’s most successful album act before The Beatles … the first act to sell over one million stereo albums and had six albums simultaneously in the US Top 30 in 1959” as quoted by Wikipedia. If you are familiar with the music of those “cascading strings”, you would be horrified. Worse, the dream behind many a parent’s ambition to provide classical music lessons for their children comes from those kinds of music preference.

When I was in a university school of music, living in a student residence, the Beatles arrived. Of course, they had already been around for several years before that, but as new bottles containing old musical wine (i.e., covers of R & B, and tweenie love songs). But all that changed when the Sergeant Pepper’s  LP became available. Then the deluge. We classical music students began to hear from other music students about Leonard Bernstein’s enthusiasm for the Beatles, comparing Lennon and McCartney’s songs to Schubert. None of this raging discovery penetrated the walls of the music school, but outside, at dances and listening parties, we were all transfixed and mesmerized. Classical music students were living entirely compartmentalized lives, working at classical music while living in the midst of popular music. I haven’t seen that state of mind change until recent times.

Pop music comes and goes, of course. When I first started teaching Popular Music Studies, Curt Cobain had recently died. That had a profound effect on many of my music and non-music students. Now he’s hardly remembered. Thanks to the arrival of many new Canadians into my classroom, I’ve discovered C-pop, M-pop, K-pop, and J-pop.  Another trend I’ve seen in my classes is the general lack of awareness about the Great Canadian Songbook which increases year to year. The GCS not comprised of art music, but rather popular music created by hard rockers like Randy Bachman and soulful prophets like Joni Mitchell. Given its status as the legacy of Canadian music history in the minds of the majority of Canadians (at least, since the 50s), I address that problem in my class.

A confession

I am a CBC addict, and have been for a very long time. I was there during the CBC 2 earthquake when day-time listening converted from wall-to-wall classical music to Canadian folk-rock interrupted by a few hours of Beethoven and Brahms at lunch-time. For me the dramatic shift in programming did not signal the end of the world, but rather a profound witnessing of the displacement of classical music from the centre to the periphery, at least among the CBC listening public. The moment was as dramatic as the time in 1969 when the Canadian fiddler Don Messer was pulled from CBC in order to change its image from local to worldly, as in up-town and sophisticated. Next stop, global. The recent change in their week-day programming has brought me back into the fold of pop music, albeit in only one format, Canadian singer-songwriters. I know that I’ve been missing some key sounds and ideas in the today’s soundtrack, from Lady Gaga and Glee to Drake and Lil Wayne, but with the help of social media and the likes of Pitchfork, I keep up to date.

The envelope, please

So, to return to my opening question, what am I listening to right now? Last summer I couldn’t get enough of Stars (Fixed), Metric (Gimme Sympathy and Sick Muse) and One Republic (Secrets). Lately I’ve been pausing during my busy days to listen to Sarah Sleane (Amen), Kathleen Edwards (Change the Sheets) and Feist (The Bad In Each Other). My son introduced me to a great new singer named Grimes (Claire Boucher).This week’s obsession is Genki Sudo (World Order).

But, regardless of my current favourites and nostalgic flashbacks, I am also in the enviable position of researching rap, drum-and-bass, punk, Canadian rock and roll, and countless other pop and rock sounds. It all goes towards my deepening understanding of the contents of my pop music course. In addition, I find myself reflecting on popular culture in a far more conscious and “critical” manner than I ever did as a youth. For example, I’ve been re-discovering the Beatles, thanks to the insights of YouTube, the Web, books and articles that could never have been imagined when the Beatles were current. And I even wonder if my teen-age tastes were formed by the same entertainment industry that created Beach Blanket Bingo. “Oh the humanity!”

It’s a great time to be studying music.

I recently spent umpteen hours in front of a video screen, viewing three television series devoted to the understanding (and then appreciation) of music. But, rather than regretting the down time, I got off the couch very impressed and perhaps even changed. All of them were hosted and researched by Howard Goodall who has an impressive career as a populist music educator and documentarian for the BBC.  I began with the 2006 series entitled  How Music Works and then moved on to his self-titled Great Dates (2002), followed by the piece de resistance for me, 20^th Century Greats: The Beatles (2004). Summer 2012 students enrolled in my course MUSC 403J – Introduction to the Study of Popular Music – should have a close look at the latter. The three programs (but not his first documentary dating from 2000, the Big Bangs of Music History, commercially available from Kultur) are unofficially available on YouTube. Naturally, I am anxious for all of them to be formally published so that all concerned can benefit from its sales, but for now they are least viewable, albeit in some sort of legal limbo.

How Music Works

For my blog, I have chosen to describe “How Music Works” in some detail, although it is by no means superior to the others. It jumped out at me because my courses are open to non-music students and his explanations of the mechanics and aesthetics of music would certainly give them a major leg up as they prepare for my lectures.  Also, the series resembles a Music Appreciation program but with an important upgrade I will explain momentarily.

How Music Works is sometimes irreverent and always far-ranging, with profuse use of popular music to make its points. The startling use of pop and rock to underline music concepts normally illustrated by Western art music is reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s extremely popular televised children’s programs called “Young Peoples’ Concerts”. In his usual Manhattan button-downed, up-town style, Bernstein introduced the fundamentals of music to a concert hall full of children trucked in from suburban schools. But, in addition to describing musical characteristics with the usual classical music settings, he also employs popular music. When he launches the musicians of his New York Philharmonic into a chorus of a Beatles song to illustrate some sort of construction in melody, the enthusiasm of the tweenies is electric. The camera pans to the audience, showing us the barely contained delight of row upon row of surprised kids.

Goodall also reminds me of another great explainer of all things music – Robert Harris, an occasional presenter on CBC.  His series called Twenty Pieces that Changed the World, featured on the Sunday Edition, is still one of the most popular items in the history of CBC programming. Although radio-bound, like a radio play, his language and tone more than compensate, conveying information with a marvelous mix of common sense and unexpected wonder. And he too places great emphasis on popular music alongside the usual classical music suspects.

How Music Works is divided into 4 sections in sequence – Melody, Rhythm, Harmony, and finally Bass – each one presented on Youtube in five parts. Although the joints of each part are rather awkward, I didn’t find them disruptive.

The quirks

Right off the bat, you have to accustom yourself to the fact that the program originates from England, complete with accent and jokes that are a bit mystifying. For example, during several discussions, he uses the expression “meat and veg” (i.e., vegetables) as a metaphor for middle-of-the-road musical taste. If you’re a Corrie fan or BBC World Service is your site for international news, you’ll be fine. When he illustrates aspects of music notation, English music terminology prevails, such as minim instead of half note. In general, I personally find it refreshing to hear thoughts from England as opposed to the omnipresent (yet necessary) voice of the States. Another more likely criticism will come from people on both sides of the pond who will accuse Goodall of skimming the surface of Western art music, given the vast ocean of information that has been uncovered by Western Art Music musicologists. However, I find it very intriguing to see what strikes the writer as particularly relevant among so many choices, given the time limitations of a TV production.

There are a few questionable bits. In typical Western fashion, he privileges harmony, as evidenced by the third section, but I will give him that indulgence, considering his audience. His pop music examples are a bit dated, favouring early Cold Play, simply because the series came out in 2006 (with research and production taking place for several years before).

In part 1 of “Melody” he suggests (but does not say outright) that the heart of universal melody is the pentatonic scale and then proceeds to illustrate his point with songs from different cultures. However, when he has a South Asian singer present a song in pentatonic mode, he stretches the facts close to the breaking point. South Asia has a profuse number of scales consisting of multiple numbers of notes and as far as I know, none of them source back to an ur pentatonic root.  This inconsistency should not detract for the uncanny fact that pentatonic set tones do seem to pop up everywhere, occasionally independent of each other. Rather than get in a huff, I found myself enjoying his musings and wanting to engage with them by shooting the breeze around a table full of good cheer with like-minded musicians or ethnoids (i.e., ethnomusicologists).

The good

When I first saw this video presentation I was composing my own syllabus for a future Music Appreciation Course (which can be seen in my blog’s list of syllabi). I wanted to address the listening needs of 21st century listeners, attuned as they are to popular and world music perhaps more than Western art music. In fact, I state in my syllabus introduction that it is no longer acceptable to assume “Music Appreciation” means Western art music, even if the book or instructor occasional wanders into the music of Other (including pop and folk). You might imagine, then, how vindicated I felt as I watched the series. Rather than tangents, popular and world music are on equal footing.

What I find compelling in all the series are the visuals. Instead of just listening as if in a traditional classroom or lecture hall, my brain was equally engaged both visually and aurally in a wonderful parallel experience. And there’s no way a viewer can’t help but notice that all the performers are young people.

After this kind of program, how could anybody think of mounting a Music Appreciation program in pure lecture format? That would be so last century. To put it another way, Howard Goodall’s presentation has raised the bar so high that teachers such as me should either rise to the challenge or make room for the next generation of instructors who can.

As I prepare for my Popular Music course this coming spring, I see in my lecture notes that I occasionally triangulate pop music and Early Music. By “Early” I don’t mean the dawn of rock and roll in the ‘50s; I’m referring to the popular music of decades like, for example the renaissance 1550s, the baroque 1660s or the classical  era of the 1870s. Early Popular Music is derived from “commoners” and is usually gentrified or imagined by court composers, often with instructions to play a la pesante (in the style of a peasant). From the 19th century onwards, music from the same demographic was called folk, a term that has endured up to the present.

Before exploring this topic, perhaps one point needs to be clarified. Popular Music of the last 100 years or so has been heavily commodified, that is, created to sell for profit, even if the songs began life as creative inspiration. Early pop music songs, particularly ballads, were also created for profit (like sheet music today) but the singers who bought the sheet music never imagined that they could make a living singing the songs (unlike the entertainment industry today). The creators of the songs were barely acknowledged, and never accrued fame by performing them, and the performances of the songs seemed to have been motivated only for the sheer pleasure of sharing them with near friends and relatives. The unknown, vast genres of aural folk music (such as children’s games, and high day songs like Christmas Eve wassails) and instrumental dance music, seems to have only existed in the minds of the performers, past and present, with no thought of creative attribution. In both cases, singing or playing from memory ruled the day, even when some music began life in printed form. The repeated performances inevitably led to socially sanctioned  and unattributed variation, unencumbered by copyright. Some would call this the heart of music authenticity. But that’s another story.

Sources of Inspiration

My appreciation of Early Pop Music is not really surprising given my years as a musician in many Early Music ensembles, mostly playing flutes from the repertoire of the French baroque (Cameron Hotteterre, A=392), the Italian baroque (Cameron Rottenburgh , A-415) and the renaissance (Puglisi Verona, A=450). The repertoire in all these groups consisted of High Art from court and church, and Low Art from the villages and city market-places. The High Art could be sublime, but the Low Art was always rollicking good fun.

At one particular twist in the road, I settled on a solo career. The impetus for this adventure began with a challenge presented by my friend and manager in the entertainment division of Expo 86. The organisation had commissioned me to be an Artist-in-Residence for the entire 6 months of the fair. “Could you play your music in a kind of virtual village context (i.e., the streets and by-ways of the fair), using theatrical conventions like costume and patter appropriate to the music-maker I was portraying?” I had already experienced the rich depth of audience reaction when we Early Music musicians successfully used the concert performance model of re-enactment.

I was eager to try out the same mode of performance using the material I had gathered in my first venture into ethnomusicology – the sacred music of the Japanese shakuhachi flute. The music was originally performed by the Komuso – peripatetic warrior-monks and occasional spies who used a flute(!) to realize their many roles and aspirations. Rather than play the music in the sterile atmosphere of a recital-hall stage, as I had done many times, or inflate the sound with reverberation and electronic pitch correction commonly heard on recordings, I would play the music live while I wandered the streets of the site as an actual komuso, complete with bee-hive hat disguise. If you left your reality check at the gate, you could almost imagine a similar moment in the crowded byways of the Yoshiwara District of old Tokyo.

I was delighted at the success of the project. Not only did it attract the attention and wonderment of thousands of fair-goers, it teased the curiosity of the media. Much to my amazement, I even received alms, the original intent of the music, from Japanese visitors who seemed quite un-fazed by my presence. Best of all, everything I did as a komuso, and the music I performed, was authentic in every detail.

“And thereby hangs many a tale,” perhaps for a future blog.

For the second half of the fair, I continued to wander the streets of the Expo, but instead of a sombre Japanese monk, I was a boisterous renaissance pipe and tabor player. My role model was Will Kemp, Shakespeare’s comic  actor and his associate, Thomas Slye, seen on the left. As you can see in the illustration, the player blows a three-hole recorder called a pipe (two Sweetheart reproductions in G and D) with one hand while the other hand plays a drum called a tabor (Paul Williamson, small and large). And, in keeping with the tradition, I immersed myself in the songs and dances of the commoners of long ago, this time from the streets, theatres and public houses of the English renaissance, all drawn from sources and literature regularly used by those in Early Music.  Each day, I recreated the music accompaniment for Kemp’s Nine Day Wonder, as he jigged his way from London to Norwich in 1600 AD. My costume, banter and music was essentially a concert of Early Music in the round and on the run. Anybody who had more than a fleeting interest in my music had to follow me around for 45 minutes to hear my entire concert.

Fast forward to my years as a passionate morris dancer immediately following Expo 86. After an apprenticeship as a novice journeyman morris dancer and unusual pipe-and-tabor musician (a common sound among historical Morris teams, but now rather rare), I followed the team’s tentative venture into group singing after practice sessions, a time-honoured custom among morris dancers in modern (and pre-modern) England.  The idea was introduced and promoted by the English ex-pats in our membership, one of the wonderful and unique features of the team. Again, rollicking songs about seasonal pleasures and adventurous lads filled my musical life, in addition to a host of jigs, hornpipes and reels, all drawn from “the people’s music”.

Now that I am a practicing ethnomusicologist, I find myself again visiting the musical literature of commoners, now called the folk. I discovered that an army of academics have devoted vast amounts of energy and creative thought to the music of western and non-western folk, especially narrative songs generally called ballads in the West. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, some maverick academics had given the repertoire of folk music the same kind of respect normally accorded to courtly songs and bourgeois lieder. The reverence for the musical art of the people was carried forward by songcatchers of the second revival who were motivated by left-wing politics and the call to grant power to the people. Now, when we look at the history of Western art and folk music, we see a divide that began merely as a narrow gap in earlier centuries, only to steadily widen into the gulf that exists today.

The “Top Ten” of Long Ago

Since I began teaching and researching modern-day pop music, I have come to realize that the early songs and dances of urban and rural folk that I so carefully learned in my Early Music and Morris Dance days can also be identified as the popular music or more specifically, the pop music, of those distant times. Not “pop” as in the binary opposition to rock, but pop in opposition to art music.

Imagine renaissance and baroque folk songs and dances driven by the enthusiastic needs of a historical youth culture in the courts and the villages, always on the look-out for new and exciting departures from the norm of a previous generation set in their ways. I am reminded of a wonderful bit of speculation I heard during an Early Music rehearsal. Apparently the pace of certain historical dances (e.g., the minuet) slowed down over the course of their history. Why? As the people who picked up the dance in their youth began to age, their ability and enthusiasm to dance with vigour also waned. I acknowledge that the youth in historical demographics would not be nearly as omnipresent as they are today, given the modern consumer market’s obsession with attracting the disposable incomes of young people. And the life expectancy in pre-modern Europe hovered around the 30 to 40 year mark, blurring the very meaning of the term “youth”. But these are provisos, not rebuttals.

If we apply some of the same critical theories and cultural studies towards Early Pop that have been developed by contemporary pop music scholars, we can bypass some of the hoary debates about orality versus print, rural versus urban, non-literate versus literate, vulgar versus genteel. I dare say we might even be able to apply the insights of pop music’s arch curmudgeon, Theodor Adorno.

Keeping Company

Of course, I am not the only one to re-cast “folk” as “pop”. A hint of the accidental conflation of the two terms can be seen in the title of the first canonic set of ballads entitled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898, my italics), compiled by Sir Francis Childs,. Also, William Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859, ibid italics). Many modern Early Music ensembles have explored the idea of modernity in early popular music. One example that immediately springs to mind is the CD produced by the Baltimore Consort (with Chris Norman) entitled La Rocque ‘n’ Roll – Popular Music of Renaissance France (Dorian Recordings, 1993). Then there is the entire output of the City Waites, founded in the early 1970s by Lucie and Roddy Skeaping. Jeremy Barlow’s Broadside Band in the ’80s. There are many others.

Early Commoner Music is explored in a marvelous, new book called Music and Society in Early Modern England, by Christopher Marsh (Cambridge, 2010).  Following in the wake of social historians like Peter Burke (Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe: Ashgate, 1978; see Marsh, 2010: 15), Professor Marsh has presented the pre-modern English music of the people through the lens of the everyday, the everyman and everywoman. Pop Culture scholars will nod their head in recognition because they know only too well the work of Henri Lefebvre, the eminent sociologist of the everyday. (See his Critique Of Everyday Life, University of California Press; 3 edition 2011, a translation of the original Critique de la Vie Quotidienne, 1947/58). Tia DeNora (Music in Everyday Life: Cambridge, 2000), Harris Berger and Giovanna Del Negro (Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music and Popular Culture: Wesleyan, 2004) and Susan Crafts et al. (My Music: Music in Daily Life Project: Wesleyan, 1993) have looked at the same question in the realm of today’s amateur and pop music-makers.

Now the door is open to view Early Pop with the same eyes.

More reading for the avidly curious

Newman, Steve (2007), Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Mullan, John and Christopher Reid, editors (2000), Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection (Oxford University Press; annotated edition)

Reay, Barry (1998), Popular cultures in England, 1550-1750  (Longman)

Harris, Tim, editor (1995), Popular Culture in England 1500-1850 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Barry, Jonathan (1994), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England (Palgrave Macmillan)

Hibbert, Christopher (1987), The English: A Social History 1066-1945 (Grafton Books)

Reay, Barry, editor (1988), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-century England (Croom Helm, 1985, reprinted Routledge)

Underdown, David (1985), Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford University Press)

Briggs, Asa (1983), A Social History of England (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Malcolmson, Robert W. (1973), Popular Recreations in English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge University Press)

A few weeks ago, during the final classes of my ethnomusicology course (M328C) I once again taught my unit on the Japanese vertical flute called the shakuhachi, and the influence of Zen Buddhism on its sacred solo music.  “Zen Shakuhachi” was the focus of my first excursion into music research, using my newly acquired knowledge of ethnomusicology and buddhology, following my initial fascination with Alan Watts. My field study in Kyoto and Kobe consisted of participating in group lessons and private instruction supplemented with extended explanations of the influence of Zen Buddhism. Essentially, I was learning how to play the Japanese flute, building on my training as a professional flutist. Some of that research was encapsulated in a Master of Music Thesis, The San Koten Honkyoku of the Kinko Ryū (The Three Sacred Traditional Melodies of the Kinko School) but unfortunately there wasn’t space or time to include the detailed lessons I received in the Taizan ryū (対山流) school of Zen Shakuhachi, associated with Meian-ji (明暗寺), the home temple of the lay komusō (虚無僧). I wish I could claim to be alone and unique in the study of Zen Buddhism and the shakuhachi, but many others have investigated the same ground, even more so in the last few years with the advent of the internet and its DIY blogs. Still, I may have one particular and unique point of view; I find it interesting to triangulate Zen Buddhist shakuhachi music with Western Art Music (WAM) and its educational music institutions.

Deep Practice and Deep Listening

Of course, advanced music students in universities and conservatories already expand their traditional knowledge with brief, Zen-inspired encounters. Coyle’s “deep practice” is often cited by private music instructors, and Barry Green’s populist tradebooks, The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry (2005) and The Inner Game of Music (1986) sit on many a teacher’s shelf of core reference books. In musicology classes, music students are introduced to John Cage et al. His music of silence (4’33”) was partially inspired by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966), Japan’s great Zen Buddhist philosopher, during Suzuki-sensei’s residency at Columbia University from 1952 to 1957. Cage sat in on his lectures. The above Western names are only a small sample of the many authors who have explored the intersection of Zen Buddhism and music, and written a range of materials from self-help manuals to philosophical reflections. But these readings are understandably ephemeral to main-stream music studies.

Enlightenment

As I prepared my lecture notes this Fall, I found myself marvelling at the quandary of the word “enlightenment” as described and understood in the West and the East. Music students are somewhat aware of the former, given that their musical heroes such as Bach and Mozart sought to emulate Voltaire’s spirit of enlightenment, if not his atheism. The musical discourse of Western Art Music is, at its heart, “enlightened” with its blend of rational expectations and calculated surprises. Western Art music compositions have even inspired non-musicians to be equally thoughtful and intellectually engaged, be they politicians or philosophers. The academic study of music also aspires to be rational, even ultra-rational, raising musicology from its pedestrian place in the Humanities to a starring role in the Social Sciences.

Still, in the West’s headlong rush to create the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century, WAM encountered a wall that could only be breached by the spontaneous misadventures of the Romantics. Now, that early spirit of triumphant rationalism is parodied by Data, Tuvok and Seven of Nine. But regardless of our modern-day scepticism about the salvation of logic, science in general, and music theory in particular, is still deeply immersed in its mastery.

“Enlightenment”

So what is the nature of Zen “enlightenment”? First, it helps to understand two points of view. There is the vast wave of religious Buddhismt where the powers of heavenly others ( tariki 他力)  are invoked by faith and prayer.  Then there is the thin stream of those who carve their own paths (i.e. jiriki 自力) with the temporary assistance of a master (guru, roshi, etc.).

Second, we must let go of the word “spiritual”, at least in the sense of redemption and peace of mind. As one famous Zen monk said, “now that I’m enlightened, I’m as miserable as ever”.

Third, we are assured that the epiphany of Zen enlightenment cannot be arrived at by logic. Bodhidharma, the South Asian monk who founded Zen Buddhism in China, declared in no uncertain terms that the tools to achieve Buddhist enlightenment were “教外別傳  (kyōge betsuden) A special transmission outside the scriptures; 不立文字  (furyū monji) Not dependent on words and letters; 直指人心  (jikishi ninshin) Directly pointing to the human mind; 見性成佛 (kenshō jōbutsu) Seeing into one’s own nature, attaining Buddhahood”.

Buddhologists are well aware of the irony in the vow to let go of words and letters, given the vast literature that has been generated by Buddhism over the last 2500 years. The core sacred texts, called the Tripiṭaka (大蔵経 Daizōkyō), alone occupy several metres of library shelf space, and a visit to any New Age bookstore will reveal hundreds more books devoted to Buddhism. On the other hand, the profuse literature clearly shows that Zen Buddhism is most certainly not anti-intellectual. In some schools of Buddhism, logic is used to an extreme degree to illustrate the futility of logic. This radical introspection has prompted academics to see parallels in the writings of philosophers like Immanuel Kant, (1724-1804) (Critique of Pure Reason). Recent writings by critical theorists such as Steven Heine and Dale Wright have turned the postmodern gaze towards the classic writings of Zen Buddhism in an effort to purge Western affectations from Eastern reality.

Enlightenment, called kenshō  (見性), by Bodhidharma and everybody else in the history of Zen Buddhism, is arrived at by a judicious confluence of traditional meditation techniques, mindfulness, and random-based epiphany. This third condition is particularly curious, and aggravating to some, because it disallows the steady progress of logic through time to a final flash of acumen that resembles Archimedes’ “eureka!”

The literature in Buddhism is filled with circuitous descriptions of “enlightenment”, the consequences of that awareness, or the factors that must come to play before that awareness can be achieved. In all these places, Buddhism resembles post-modernism.  For example, postmodernists are quick to point out that truth is relative. Buddhists have known this from time immemorial because they have plumbed the depths of truth, only to find that it consists of “nothingness”, or rather “no thingness”.  Along with all aspects of reality, truth is in a constant state of “dependent origination”, pratītyasamutpāda (緣 起, engi), another name for cultural and even physical relativity.

In short, Western Enlightenment is rooted in essentialism and Eastern enlightenment in existentialism (but without the dead hand of fatalism). The binary is reminiscent of modernism and postmodernism.

Enlightened Musicking

So what does enlightenment hold for musicians? In WAM, Western enlightenment is manifested in the patient construction of a composition, the unraveling and quiet discovery of the inner mechanism of a piece of music, or the victory of a great performance after intense preparation, followed by adulation and perhaps a career. In Zendō ( 禅道), the way of concentration (“attention!”), enlightenment has consequences not tied to reason or personal gain. Certainly it is not the disastrous conclusion suggested by Herman Hesse in his magisterial book Magister Ludi, where the glass bead-game master realizes the futility of his ultimate game of universal logic, and drowns himself in a lake. In The Ten Oxherding Pictures and accompanying poems, we are given hints of the stages of progress toward enlightenment, culminating in the tenth edict, a return to society in order to spread enlightenment. This notion has been embraced in popular culture by the Naruto series, one of the best selling manga of all time. The protagonist has a technique named “Kakuan Entering Society with Bliss-Bringing Hands,” a kind of Buddhist “pay-it-forward”.

Perhaps today’s postmodern musician can synthesize both “enlightenments”, despite their seeming diametrical opposition. The result would not be essentially spiritual, rational, or logical, but it would provide a focused and useful lens for the serious student of music and life. Buddhists call it madhyamaka (Japanese: 中觀派Chūgan ha) – The Middle Way.

Last summer, during the course of my class, Introduction to the Study of Popular Music (M403J,) I wrote a blog entry about Rebecca Black and her song entitled”Friday”. It was just peaking at one million hits on Youtube, and promised to go much higher. I liked it. “Friday” is catchy, devoid of inner meaning, and polished to a brilliant production shine. It had also been mercilously pounded by professional and amateur critics way out of proportion to its tweenie dreamworld. The crime? Trite lyrics, sung by an unremarkable (if surprisingly accomplished) voice, compounded by an entirely inauthentic context. The reception to the song was a wildly diverse, ranging from fan-based admiration to death threats. Essentially, it appealed to the wrath of those who see it as yet another force in the dumbing down of culture.

Now it seems that Rebecca Black has got the last laugh by receiving an affirmation from an entirely unexpected quarter, mega-pop star Katy Perry. Of course, I am using the names “Rebecca” and “Katy” with the full understanding that their names are code for vast production teams and financial interests, although I grant that Rebecca started from a much more modest place.

Katy has starred in a song and related video called, Last Friday Night, which is a responce to Rebecca’s musical and video production.

The song’s lyrics are as shallow as Rebecca’s piece, and incidental to the video. They are nothing more than a litany of cliches describing “the day after”. The music, on the other hand, has a great groove with its romansca-like harmonic movement channeled through  a sequencer emulating a 70s guitar amp.

The video, hands down, is excellent, with impossibly high production values to its credit. It is cast as a movie, cut from the same cloth as any teen flick from the 70s to now. The landscapes are the same “burbs” as Arcade Fire’s Suburbs , but without any pretentions towards social commentary. In fact, it is a paragon of all that is dubious in the land of North American 10 per centers.

Everything in Perry’s video is a superlative echo of Rebecca’s shallow ode to Friday. As we get into the narrative we see Katy Perry, portraying a hapless tweenie with an alarming dental appliance, ill-fitting clothes, and whiny voice, demanding entry into a crowded neighbour’s house to complain about the party noise. Who should come to the door but Rebecca Black herself. Katy is instantly welcomed by the delirious, dancing crowd and with the help and insistence of Rebecca, she transforms into one of the Gap party animals, albeit as a cheesy femme fatale. The explosion of music, dance and mayhem moves out to the back yard of the upscale suburban home,  to be greeted by one of the most reviled of soft-adult, kitsch musicians in pop music history, Kenny G (called “Uncle Kenny” in the narrative interlude). He appears on the deck high above the party-goers but instead of cranking out his usual syrup on a soprano sax, he wails a ripping great alto sax riff leading to impossible high notes. The next day, Katy Perry wakes up  in her own bed surrounded by party detritus, including the jock adonis who was the focus of her intense female gaze the night before. Naturally her parents walk in on her unexpectantly after returning too soon from a holiday, but being Valley Parents, no consequence follows. The credits roll, furthering reinforcing the ambiance of a 70s (or 90s?) teen movie.

Throughout the entire visual feast, Katy Perry never steps out of her nerdy character, despite the gamble that such a physical anomaly could present to an adoring public expecting the usual look of the “Katy Perry” brand of sexualized princess. Even when she transforms into a cartoon femme fatale, she still manages to look unattractive. Nevertheless, her singing voice maintains its signature attractiveness which is normally mirrored in her physical persona.

In short, her character, Kenny G’s appearance, Rebecca Black’s starring role, all subvert the criticisms cruelly directed to Rebecca Black by embracing them in a superlative musical and visual production.

The video is the best pop music can offer. It simultaneously offers food for thought to tweeny girls wrestling with the demands of negotiating personal identity while accommodating the role-models of a prom queen and runway models. It is also an invigorating dance track in a blaze of colour, and a vision of fun in the company of like-minded friends. Of course, a case can be made for the damage done by such a profligate representation, but I hardly doubt that Katy and Rebecca’s tweeny fans are so shallow as to mindlessly follow the lead offered by the video’s portrayal of sex, drugs, alcohol. Tweenie females are not lemmings headed en masse to the ocean cliff, partly confirmed in Gerry Bloustein’s ethnographic essay entitled ” ‘Ceci N’est Pas une Jeune Fille’: Videocams, Representation and ‘Othering’ in the Worlds of Teen-age Girls,” in Hop On Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins et al. (2002).

Not to be outdone, the punk band Woe Is Me, jumped on the wagon with an emo cover version that pushes the boundaries of subversion even further.

Last Friday Night cover by the Woe, Is Me

I give the Katy Perry music video and its follow-up mashup by Woe Is Me, two thumbs up.