Are these items Popular Music?

• Which of these Examples are popular music

• Why?

• Why not?

Possible Definitions

• Popular= widely liked or supported

• Popular=“of the people”

• Popular Music as one genre of a trio: folk, art, popular

Widely liked?

• What about “unpopular” popular musical genres

• What about “popular” art music styles?• How do we measure this

– Different kinds of use and engagement– Market is too diverse, so impact and use may

differ with different genres– What about “Non-commodity” forms of music

Commercially oriented music?

• Music produced for mass market

• This compares PM with “folk” forms associated with face-to-face communities

• What about Amateur performers?

• What about Pre-modern societies?

Folk music?

• Idea emerged in 19th century• “das Volk” (“the folk”) first used by

German writer Johann Herder late 1700s• Idea of “the folk” as carriers of “national

spirit”• Folk as a “purified people” (a romantic

fantasy)

Popular vs folk

“the folk are not the mob of the streets, who never sing or compose, but shriek and mutilate” (Herder 1778)

Quotes from Hubert Parry (English composer) form English Folk Song Society(1899) (popular is cheap, low, corrupting) Music hall is “an enemy at the door of folk music which is driving it out”product of “overgrown town”, like “sham jewellery, shoddy clothes”, “commonest rowdyism”

History of term “popular music”

• First use in English in 19th C

• Eg William Chappell’s “Popular Music of the Olden Time”

• Not widely used in current sense before 1930s

• equivalent terms not always in other languages

Possible characteristics of Popular Music

• Distribution: usually mass cf sectional

• Storage: usually recordings

• Music theory and aesthetics: ?

• Composer/author often collective?

• Music that has some relationship to an industry:– Commercial/creativity contrast

Definition offered by Simon Frith in Symposium “Can we get rid of the Popular in “Popular Music” (Popular Music 2005)

*Music made commercially in a particular kind of legal (copyright) and economic (market) system; *Music made using an even-changing technology of sound storage; *Music significantly experienced as mass mediated;*Music primarily made for social and bodily pleasure;

*Music which is formally hybrid

History of “Commercial” popular music

• First mass music industry: Sheet music industry

• Nineteenth century: large English music publishers

• Spread of the Upright Piano:

• Emergence of the “drawing room ballad”

Entertainment and Popular Music

• Nineteenth century popular theatre

• Minstrel show: based on negro impersonators

• Novelty acts, grotesques, comedies, spectaculars

Recording

• Edison invents phonograph in 1877

• 1877 Berliner invents disc medium

• 1890s a commercial domestic playing machine developed

• Commercial recordings start around 1900

• Early recordings soloists and singers: eg Caruso, Nellie Melba,

• Most Popular performers: theatrical performers• Duration of 1 side=3 minutes• Electric recordings: developed from 1919, but

become standard from 1925• 1934: magnetic tape developed by BASF

Germany

• 1948: PVC “vinyl” developed: advantages over shellac: microgroove recording

• 12” LP recording: initially for classical recordings. First “concept” LPs mid 1950s

• Development of overdubbing techniques and tape based studio recording

• 1965 : cassette developed, patented by Phillips

• 1979: The Walkman revolution begins

• 1981: MTV video support of pop music

• 1982: CD technology

• 1988: CD passes vinyl

• 1989: DAT tape invented

• 1992: Minidisc technology

• 1996 the DVD standard set

• 1998 MP3 developed

• 2001- iPod developed >> iTunes and mass internet marketing of music

Aesthetics of Popular Music

Does Popular Music have its own “aesthetic system”

Frequently cited characteristics: • 1. Entertainment music• 2. Secular (non-sacred music)• 3. Intuitive appreciation?• 4. Bodily or hedonistic appreciation?

Anti-aesthetics of Popular Music

• Eg Theodor Adorno:

• German political philosopher and composer

• Popular music is– Debased– Standardised– Serves to stupefy, subdue or dominate the

masses

Standardisation?

• Popular music and standardisation:• Song forms:

– 32 ballad form– verse/chorus/bridge/chorus

• Repetitive structures– Eg “Riff” structures in rock– Repetitive dance beat patterns

• Improvisatory forms tend to use patterns and structures