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Papers by Matthew Ord

Ethnomusicology Forum, 2024

This article identifies ‘place’ as a core theme in contemporary folk, one that affords a means of... more This article identifies ‘place’ as a core theme in contemporary folk,
one that affords a means of exploring new forms of post-national
identity in Britain. While folk has engaged with questions of
national identity, articulating multiculturalist positions, much
recent work focuses on individual attachments to landscapes
understood as both repositories of highly personal meaning and
sites of universal experience. Through a discourse analysis of the
popular podcast Folk on Foot (a key space for the development of
this emerging discursive strand), I argue that the diminished
emphasis on questions of Englishness or Britishness does not
indicate a retreat from questions of cultural identity as such.
Rather, the programme seeks to sketch out a post-national
understanding of belonging in the landscape, one that de-emphasises cultural and ethnic differences within contemporary
Britain, and focusses instead on common experiences of
attachment to place and landscape that are thought to transcend
notions of collective identity as bounded by national borders.

Tourist Studies, 2023

Since becoming a UNESCO 'City of Music' in 2008, Glasgow has sought to develop the tourism potent... more Since becoming a UNESCO 'City of Music' in 2008, Glasgow has sought to develop the tourism potential of its music scene. As potential beneficiaries, accommodation providers have facilitated the development of music tourism initiatives within the city, strategically positioning themselves as ambassadors for the city's music. This article considers how three Glasgow hotels 'curate' the musical life of the city, presenting themselves as facilitators of cultural experiences rather than mere service providers. We draw on interviews alongside an analysis of marketing discourse to show how this approach is reflected in the physical space of hotels, recruitment practices, and the language of promotional materials. Arguing that the packaging of musical experience often implies an instrumentalist understanding of music's cultural value, we consider what it means for music to be re-imagined as an 'experience', and how music's value as a resource for self-construction is articulated within the discourse of contemporary tourism.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Class, 2020

Facilitating Music Tourism for Scotland's Creative Economy AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship Report, 2019

Journal of Language and Politics, 2019

This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings. Recent s... more This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings. Recent shifts in the political context have stimulated renewed interest in English identity within folk music culture. Symbolic struggles over folk's political significance highlight both the contested nature of English identity and music's semantic ambiguity, with texts being interpolated into discourses of both ethnic purity and multiculturalism. Following research in popular music, sound studies and multimodal communication this article explores the use of field recording to explore questions of place and Englishness in the work of contemporary folk artists. A multimodal analysis of Stick in the Wheel's From Here: English Folk Field Recordings (2017) suggests that a multimodal approach to musical texts that attends to the semantic affordances of sound recording can provide insight into folk music's role in debates over the nature of English identity.

Songs of Social Protest International Perspectives, 2018

Ord. M. (2017), ‘Song, Sonic Metaphor and Countercultural Discourse in British Folk-Rock Recordings,’ in Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest, edited by Simon McKerrell and Lyndon C. S. Way. London: Bloomsbury, 201–222., 2017

Doctoral Thesis by Matthew Ord

PhD Thesis, Newcastle University, 2017

Although recent work in record production studies has advanced scholarly understandings of the co... more Although recent work in record production studies has advanced scholarly understandings of the contribution of sound recording to musical and social meaning, folk revival scholarship in Britain has yet to benefit from these insights. The revival’s recording practice took in a range of approaches and contexts including radio documentary, commercial studio productions and amateur field recordings. This thesis considers how these practices were mediated by revivalist beliefs and values, how recording was represented in revivalist discourse, and how its semiotic resources were incorporated into multimodal discourses about music, technology and traditional culture.Chapters 1 and 2 consider the role of recording in revivalist constructions of traditional culture and working class communities, contrasting the documentary realism of Topic’s single-mic field recordings with the consciously avant-garde style of the BBC’s Radio Ballads. The remaining three chapters explore how the sound of recorded folk was shaped by a mutually constitutive dialogue with commercial popular music, with recordings constructing traditional performance as an authentic social practice in opposition to an Americanised studio sound equated with commercial/technological mediation. As the discourse of progressive rock elevated recording to an art practice associated with the global counterculture, however, opportunities arose for the incorporation of rock studio techniques in the interpretation of traditional song in the hybrid genre offolk-rock. Changes in studio practice and technical experiments with the semiotics of recorded sound experiments form the subject of the final two chapters. Ethnographic, historical and semiotic approaches are combined with techniques from critical discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory to explore sound recording as a means of defining, expressing, and elaborating the revival as a socio-cultural movement. Recording offered a semiotic resource for interpreting traditional texts andrepertoires, and for reimagining social space and the relationship of performance. As such, it constituted a highly significant dimension of the revival’s cultural-political practice.

Ethnomusicology Forum, 2024

This article identifies ‘place’ as a core theme in contemporary folk, one that affords a means of... more This article identifies ‘place’ as a core theme in contemporary folk,
one that affords a means of exploring new forms of post-national
identity in Britain. While folk has engaged with questions of
national identity, articulating multiculturalist positions, much
recent work focuses on individual attachments to landscapes
understood as both repositories of highly personal meaning and
sites of universal experience. Through a discourse analysis of the
popular podcast Folk on Foot (a key space for the development of
this emerging discursive strand), I argue that the diminished
emphasis on questions of Englishness or Britishness does not
indicate a retreat from questions of cultural identity as such.
Rather, the programme seeks to sketch out a post-national
understanding of belonging in the landscape, one that de-emphasises cultural and ethnic differences within contemporary
Britain, and focusses instead on common experiences of
attachment to place and landscape that are thought to transcend
notions of collective identity as bounded by national borders.

Tourist Studies, 2023

Since becoming a UNESCO 'City of Music' in 2008, Glasgow has sought to develop the tourism potent... more Since becoming a UNESCO 'City of Music' in 2008, Glasgow has sought to develop the tourism potential of its music scene. As potential beneficiaries, accommodation providers have facilitated the development of music tourism initiatives within the city, strategically positioning themselves as ambassadors for the city's music. This article considers how three Glasgow hotels 'curate' the musical life of the city, presenting themselves as facilitators of cultural experiences rather than mere service providers. We draw on interviews alongside an analysis of marketing discourse to show how this approach is reflected in the physical space of hotels, recruitment practices, and the language of promotional materials. Arguing that the packaging of musical experience often implies an instrumentalist understanding of music's cultural value, we consider what it means for music to be re-imagined as an 'experience', and how music's value as a resource for self-construction is articulated within the discourse of contemporary tourism.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Class, 2020

Facilitating Music Tourism for Scotland's Creative Economy AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship Report, 2019

Journal of Language and Politics, 2019

This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings. Recent s... more This article considers the sonic construction of place in English folk music recordings. Recent shifts in the political context have stimulated renewed interest in English identity within folk music culture. Symbolic struggles over folk's political significance highlight both the contested nature of English identity and music's semantic ambiguity, with texts being interpolated into discourses of both ethnic purity and multiculturalism. Following research in popular music, sound studies and multimodal communication this article explores the use of field recording to explore questions of place and Englishness in the work of contemporary folk artists. A multimodal analysis of Stick in the Wheel's From Here: English Folk Field Recordings (2017) suggests that a multimodal approach to musical texts that attends to the semantic affordances of sound recording can provide insight into folk music's role in debates over the nature of English identity.

Songs of Social Protest International Perspectives, 2018

Ord. M. (2017), ‘Song, Sonic Metaphor and Countercultural Discourse in British Folk-Rock Recordings,’ in Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest, edited by Simon McKerrell and Lyndon C. S. Way. London: Bloomsbury, 201–222., 2017

PhD Thesis, Newcastle University, 2017

Although recent work in record production studies has advanced scholarly understandings of the co... more Although recent work in record production studies has advanced scholarly understandings of the contribution of sound recording to musical and social meaning, folk revival scholarship in Britain has yet to benefit from these insights. The revival’s recording practice took in a range of approaches and contexts including radio documentary, commercial studio productions and amateur field recordings. This thesis considers how these practices were mediated by revivalist beliefs and values, how recording was represented in revivalist discourse, and how its semiotic resources were incorporated into multimodal discourses about music, technology and traditional culture.Chapters 1 and 2 consider the role of recording in revivalist constructions of traditional culture and working class communities, contrasting the documentary realism of Topic’s single-mic field recordings with the consciously avant-garde style of the BBC’s Radio Ballads. The remaining three chapters explore how the sound of recorded folk was shaped by a mutually constitutive dialogue with commercial popular music, with recordings constructing traditional performance as an authentic social practice in opposition to an Americanised studio sound equated with commercial/technological mediation. As the discourse of progressive rock elevated recording to an art practice associated with the global counterculture, however, opportunities arose for the incorporation of rock studio techniques in the interpretation of traditional song in the hybrid genre offolk-rock. Changes in studio practice and technical experiments with the semiotics of recorded sound experiments form the subject of the final two chapters. Ethnographic, historical and semiotic approaches are combined with techniques from critical discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory to explore sound recording as a means of defining, expressing, and elaborating the revival as a socio-cultural movement. Recording offered a semiotic resource for interpreting traditional texts andrepertoires, and for reimagining social space and the relationship of performance. As such, it constituted a highly significant dimension of the revival’s cultural-political practice.