Introduction: music, the city and the modern experience (original) (raw)
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Modern forms of popular culture emerged at the intersection of accelerated urban development and increasing transnational interactions in the decades around 1900. The urban entertainment sector was a hotspot of globalisation, characterized by intense cross-border transfer and exchange, making cosmopolitan culture accessible for the majority of leisure-seeking urban dwellers. Only just recently however, has research in this field begun to catch up with developments and debates in transnational and global history, and vice versa. These two edited volumes give an overview of current trends, new conceptual debates, as well as of remaining open questions in research on popular culture in the modern metropolis.
The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musically-inflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, inter-personal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?
Introduction (Musical Performance and the Changing City 2013)
When the Wall came down, the size of the city doubled overnight. There was a lot more space, and much of it was unregulated. There was a joy and excitement in the population that energized the music, and the music became so central to Berlin. It coalesced with the advent of an explicitly electronic music, a new music, a new culture of the present and future.
Popular Music Studies Today
Popular Music Studies has often concentrated on music since 1945, and a wide range of tools and concepts have been developed to aid in the analysis of text, music, production, reception, performance, scene or star. How far can these approaches also be applied to the commercial musical practice of earlier times? This paper will look at my own specialized field: music hall from 1880 to 1918, mostly in Britain but also elsewhere, and particularly at the First World War period. It will examine the work which has been done on musical repertoires, industrial processes and ideological constraints, and compare and contrast this work with various Popular Music Studies approaches. The limits of our sources, and differences in the nature of the musical material will be examined. In addition, the similarities and differences between the study of songs and of other objects of cultural history from the same period will be examined.
Workshop: 'It sounds Greek to me'. Greek Art Music since the Nineteenth Century | King's College London, 2019
This paper aims to present the early stages and the socio-cultural parameters of the establishment of musical and theatrical institutions in nineteenth century Greece and in the wider ex-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Concerts, opera, ballet and theatre productions, balls, light musical theatre, were all instantiations of an urban civilization, linked to city public life, and bourgeois needs and habits. Above all, opera corresponded to the urban custom of evening entertainment, involving social interaction, amusement and spectacle. We shall therefore attempt to trace the trajectory of these musical genres within the more general trend for urbanization and westernization running through the huge area between the Adriatic Sea, the Black Sea, the Aegean archipelago and the Eastern Mediterranean.