Pinching (or taking back) ideas from popular music: Placing the concept album in contemporary classical music

This chapter considers Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé’s operatic- rock album Barcelona (1988) as a logical extension of Mercury’s fascination with operatic musical devices, narrative structures and iconography. With this album, two global superstars from divergent musical genres met and brought their musical perspectives into genuine collaboration. However, Barcelona, like other popular explorations of opera, has remained largely unexamined because it sits somewhat uncomfortably across art and popular music, agitating anxieties and authenticities as they operate in both terrains. This chapter will investigate how such anxieties became established by unpacking the circulation of opera within popular recording cultures as elite reproductions of operatic repertory, as ‘crossover’ music and through its appropriation by popular musicians. This chapter will then conduct an analysis of the Barcelona collaboration that situates its creation in the context of Mercury’s musical trajectory. Special consideration will be paid to the musical style established in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975). Comparing previous performances to the Barcelona album indicates that Mercury and Caballé largely did not attempt to emulate each other’s vocal style, but reproduced their existing vocal technique. Despite Barcelona exploring musical and vocal terrain already cultivated by Mercury in previous releases, critics had considerable difficulty viewing Barcelona as a credible exploration of rock and opera, precisely because Mercury and Caballé occupied the same creative space. Operatic critics aligned Caballé’s performance with crossover singing due to the apparent simplicity of the Barcelona songs. Rock critics heard Caballé’s operatic voice and Barcelona’s orchestral accompaniment and viewed it as ‘weird’ and ‘difficult to handle’ (Gage, 2012). As the first recording bringing together genuine international stars from their respective genres (see Promane, 2009, p. 140), Mercury and Caballé’s collaboration is problematic precisely because it bridged the popular/elite divide from both directions simultaneously.

This paper introduces the IASPM Journal special edition entitled Twenty-First Century Popular Music Studies (PMS), in which a number of papers respond to Philip Tagg’s paper “Caught on the Back Foot: Epistemic Inertia and Visible Music” (2011). Respondents discuss a lack of ethnographic methodology in three prominent journals, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society and Journal of Popular Music Studies; the success of PMS in Australasia and the role of ethnomusicology there; the potential of ecomusicology for PMS; the proliferation of PMS courses in new universities in the UK; gender and sexuality within PMS; differences between the concepts of invisible and of ubiquitous music; and the need for addressing corporeality within PMS. The common threads of these discussions are brought out, and a number of key issues emerge. Interdisciplinarity is emphasized and the interactions of classical and popular music, ethnomusicology as well as recording and production are examined. It is suggested that PMS might consider tactical alignments with other relevant bodies in order to overcome epistemic inertia, including ethnomusicology organisations, the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production, and academics and practitioners involved in teaching and making popular music.

Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories and Places, 2014

Music and heritage-work have long gone hand in hand—whereby past musicians and musical works are celebrated, and music history is (re)cast in terms of their impact. Across more than a century, for instance, individuals and organizations in the US have constructed an infrastructure to extol certain orchestral composers. This infrastructure— which included symphony orchestras, record companies and university curricula—has gone from emphasizing a few exemplars like Beethoven and Mozart to emphasizing an expanding range of composers from the past. Given the extent of this heritage-work, orchestral music in the US has often been described as “classical music,” a term that unfortunately glosses over the supply of orchestral composers and compositions from the present. Of course, heritage-work is not limited to the realm of classical music. This chapter deals specifically with heritage-work at US progressive-rock festivals from 1993 to 2012. It occurred on festival stages in at least two ways. On the one hand, progressive-rock bands offered musical quotations of the genre’s early exemplars, thereby paying tribute to the past. On the other hand, bands from the first and second waves of progressive-rock (pre-1994) shared the stage with contemporary bands, bringing to life the genre’s past. While progressive-rock has spanned only decades (versus the centuries of classical music), the heritage-work at these festivals somewhat resembled that described above for classical music: the celebration of the past has moved beyond a few exemplars as US festivals excavated a host of early progressive-rock bands. Unlike classical music, however, heritage-work at these festivals has not overshadowed the present.

PhD Thesis

An analysis of the author’s composition portfolio is presented with reference to selected compositions by relevant contemporary composers interviewed in this study: Australian composers Judy Bailey, Stuart Greenbaum, Mark Isaacs, Andrea Keller, and South African composer Stefans Grové. The aim is to identify the existence of fusion in the art music composed by the above mentioned composers and to determine the kind of fusion. Enquiries are being conducted into a composer’s body of work, whether or not there is a specialization in a fusion of genres or whether only certain compositions feature this phenomenon. Further reference is made to the influence of American composers Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Maria Schneider, and Australian composers Paul Grabowsky and Carl Vine upon the accompanying composition portfolio. Composers have to employ certain compositional techniques in order to overcome difficulties in practice. Presenting classical or jazz performers with musical genres they do not normally perform can be confronting. This thesis is an evaluation of compositions, as well as innovations by composers used to overcome difficulties in fusion.

Music Education Research International, no. 6, 2013

From an autoethnographic perspective as a performer, educator and scholar, I consider constructions and presentations of success, what it means to be a popular musician in the 21st century, and how these issues are dealt with in the higher popular music performance education institution where I work. This position paper explores success as construed in music education and popular music studies in relation to changing contexts and practices in popular music. While popular music has a growing presence in music education and the literature of the field, institutions, scholarly publications, and mainstream media infrequently and inadequately address trends in popular music practice such as the widespread adoption of portfolio careers. Under- and mis-representation of popular music’s canon and practices, and ideas of success thus threaten to under-value the majority of popular music and popular musicians, a problem that should be addressed in higher popular music performance education and across the music education profession. Drawing also on literature from music business and economics, I call music educators to challenge traditional approaches and assumptions, engaging critically with the present in order to prepare for the future.

Dalhousie Graduate Studies Online Theses, 2016

System of a Down is an Armenian-American heavy metal band who participated in a counterculture around the turn of the millennium, both through its music and through its members’ participation in activism. I situate both the band’s sound and identity portrayal through analysis of the music and the socio-historical context which made them popular. System of a Down was labelled a “Nümetal” band primarily due to the touring circuit participated it in. I investigate the sonic signifiers of this subgenre of heavy metal through examples from the band’s first album. I then compare contemporary Nümetal to songs from the band’s eponymous album and am able to identify what makes the band unique among its peers in terms of musical conventions used. System of a Down’s music participates in a culture opposed to global warfare and injustice. This thesis opens the door to further in-depth study of this band’s important music.

Since the international breakthrough of The Sugarcubes and Björk in the late 1980s, the Anglophone discourse surrounding Icelandic popular music has proven to be the latest instance of a long history of representation in which the North Atlantic island is imagined as an icy periphery on the edge of European civilization. This mode of representation is especially prominent in the discourse surrounding post-rock band Sigur Rós. This article offers a critical reading of the band's reception in the Anglo-American music press during the period of their breakthrough in the UK and USA. Interpretative strategies among listeners and critics are scrutinised using the concept of borealism (Kristinn Schram) in order to examine attitudes towards the Nordic regions evident in the portrayals of Sigur Rós. Reception issues then form the basis for a musical analysis of a seminal track in the band's history, aiming to demonstrate how specific details in Sigur Rós' style relate to its reception and the discourse surrounding it. The article finds that much of the metaphorical language present in the band's reception can be linked to techniques of musical spatiality, the unusual sound of the bowed electric guitar, and non-normative uses of voice and language.

Classical music has resisted incorporating music technologies into its mainstream compositional practices, in part because technology allows greater access to the techniques and timbres associated with virtuosic human acoustic performance. However, classical music composition and production can be enabled by music technologies, and they offer an effective vehicle for women to test and occupy the role of composer, performer and producer. This paper outlines how home-studio music production technologies were used to compose and stage The Pomegranate Cycle (2010, 2013). The Pomegranate Cycle was composed, recorded, performed and produced by a female opera singer using consumer-level recording technologies. This self-directed methodology is unique in opera, providing a model for other singer-composers.