1. Department for
Continuing Education
Music and Art
Marilou Polymeropoulou
marilou.polymeropoulou@music.ox.ac.uk
Week 6 21/2/12
Popular Culture
http://musicandartoxford.wordpress.com/
Saturday, 25 February 2012
2. Previously
• Definitions of art and music
• Aesthetic theories
• Impressionism, symbolism
• Avant-garde, expressionism, futurism
Saturday, 25 February 2012
3. Today
• Popular Culture
• Dancing
• Jazz
• Bad music
Saturday, 25 February 2012
4. • Popular Culture
• Culture
Saturday, 25 February 2012
5. 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
Saturday, 25 February 2012
6. 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
Saturday, 25 February 2012
8. Pop art: representing
popular culture
A. Warhol’s Marilyn’s
prints
- experimentation
- irony
Saturday, 25 February 2012
9. 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)
Saturday, 25 February 2012
10. • Ragtime example: Scott Joplin’s “the
entertainer”
Saturday, 25 February 2012
11. “Foxtrot” used in rock
n’ roll releases (‘50s)
Saturday, 25 February 2012
13. 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
Saturday, 25 February 2012
15. 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
Saturday, 25 February 2012
16. Appropriate social Repetitive and codified
dancing
Improvisational and sensual
Traditional ballroom
dances (upper Popularised
torso, waist, hips)
Rag, tough, animal Jazz dancing in history
dances (use of whole
body)
Avant-Garde dancing
Cabarets, brothels,
clubs
Saturday, 25 February 2012
18. Example #2
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
Sacrificial dance (the chosen one)
“Difficult to understand”, “displeasure”, “lacked melodic and
sonic qualities the audience expected”, “primitive”
Saturday, 25 February 2012
22. “I think ‘popular’, you may not”
Richard Middleton, musicologist
Saturday, 25 February 2012
23. “Jazz is too brisk for the average listener to understand”
Scott DeVeaux, Musicologist
Saturday, 25 February 2012
24. Adorno
“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 industry
Commodification
High/Low art
Good/Bad music
Popular culture Subculture
Avant-Garde
(mainstream) (marginalised)
Saturday, 25 February 2012
25. 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.”
Saturday, 25 February 2012
26. • 1) Tracks which are clearly
incompetent musically
Saturday, 25 February 2012
27. • 2) Tracks organised around misplaces sentiments or
emotions invested heavily in a banal or ridiculous
object or tune. (Jess Conrad’s My pullover)
Saturday, 25 February 2012
28. “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)
Saturday, 25 February 2012
29. • “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