Music and ArtMarilou Polymeropoulou

marilou.polymeropoulou@music.ox.ac.uk

http://musicandartoxford.wordpress.com/

Department for Continuing Education

Week 6 21/2/12Popular Culture

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Previously

• Definitions of art and music

• Aesthetic theories

• Impressionism, symbolism

• Avant-garde, expressionism, futurism

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Today

• Popular Culture

• Dancing

• Jazz

• Bad music

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•Popular Culture

• Culture

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Culture• Raymond Williams defines culture as:

• 1) “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development” - cultural development of W. Europe: philosophers, artists, poets

• 2) “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” - W. Europe: literacy, holidays, sport, religious festivals

• 3) “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” - W. Europe: signifying practices, poetry, novel, ballet, etc but also: comics, soap opera, pop music

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Popular Culture

• “Popular Culture is the arts, artifacts, entertainment, fads, beliefs and values that are shared by large segments of society.”

• Quantitative

• What is the role that it plays in our lives?

• Examples

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R. Lichtenstein - Drowning Girl (1963)

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Pop art: representing popular culture

A. Warhol’s Marilyn’s prints

- experimentation- irony

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Foxtrot• Named after dancer and comedian Harry

Fox who popularised this type of dance

• Inspired by African American culture

• Music used: ragtime (ragged, syncopated rhythm, popular in late 19th early 20th century)

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• Ragtime example: Scott Joplin’s “the entertainer”

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“Foxtrot” used in rock n’ roll releases (‘50s)

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Strictly come dancing

• US Version “Dancing with the stars”

• BBC One, 15/5/2004

• Most popular talent show, Best talent show, Best variety show awards

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Jazz• Music and dance

• “Popular dancing is an extremely important cultural activity, for bodily movement is a kind of repository for social and individual identity. The dancing body engages the cultural inscripting of self and the pursuit of pleasure, and dancing events are key sites in the working and reworking of racial, class, and gender boundaries.” Robert Crease 2002

• Popular in the ‘20s

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Rag, tough, animal dances (use of whole

body)

Cabarets, brothels, clubs

Traditional ballroom dances (upper

torso, waist, hips)

Appropriate social dancing

Popularised

Repetitive and codified

Improvisational and sensual

Avant-Garde dancing

Jazz dancing in history

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Example #2Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

Sacrificial dance (the chosen one)

“Difficult to understand”, “displeasure”, “lacked melodic and sonic qualities the audience expected”, “primitive”

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“I think ‘popular’, you may not” Richard Middleton, musicologist

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“Jazz is too brisk for the average listener to understand” Scott DeVeaux, Musicologist

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“From the middle of the 19th century on, good music has renounced commercialism altogether. The consequence of its further development has come into conflict with the manipulated self-satisfied needs of the bourgeois public”.

Culture industryCommodification

High/Low artGood/Bad music

Popular culture (mainstream)

Subculture(marginalised)

Avant-Garde

Adorno

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Bad music

• Simon Frith

• “I can’t persuade someone that the music they like is bad unless I know their tastes, the way they make sense of their listening pleasures.”

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• 1) Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically

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• 2) Tracks organised around misplaces sentiments or emotions invested heavily in a banal or ridiculous object or tune. (Jess Conrad’s My pullover)

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“As it stands, the concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contradictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical blind alleys”. Tony Bennett (sociologist)

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• “For black people, Elvis more than any other performer epitomises the theft of their music and dance”. Helen Kolaoke, The Guardian 2002

Saturday, 25 February 2012