Popular Music as (Social) Field and (Political) Voice: Critical Media Studies Approaches

Matt Stahl, The University of Western Ontario

Presented at the Symposium on Progressive Methods in Music Education hosted by the Don Wright Faculty of Music, University of Western Ontario.

Abstracts available at http://www.music.uwo.ca/outreach/images-pdf/PM-Abstracts-Fri.pdf

Abstract

In this presentation I will outline a pedagogy for “popular music and society” courses that uses the ideas of “field” and “voice” in order to help students contextualize cases and examples of popular music making by and for members of stigmatized, marginalized, or otherwise subordinated social groups. This pedagogy enables students to question and manage their own musical prejudices (and social-cultural prejudices more generally), and to see popular music as social and political, not just aesthetic. First, I will discuss Attali’s insight that, in music, aesthetic judgments frequently articulate, mask, and justify social fears (as when authorities declare a form of music “noise”). Then I will discuss the ideas of “field” and “voice” and give examples of their use. How do members of marginalized social groups fare in their musical practices or professions? How can musical practice enable them to become “politically relevant” people? “Field” prompts students to identify rules, norms, values, institutions, and other social phenomena in order to understand the trajectories, pressures, and obstacles that confront music makers and audiences as members of differently empowered social groups. “Voice” enables students to identify music makers and music listeners as making demands for cultural and political recognition, autonomy, participation, and value. Finally, at UWO, women make up the majority of media studies undergrads; the pedagogy presented here makes extensive use of contemporary feminist analyses of women’s and girls’ experiences and struggles in male-dominated worlds of Western popular music.