Good afternoon.  I'd like to begin today by thanking Paul Wells for having had many of us to a pleasant dinner at the MTSU Foundation House and, as a result of that dinner, organizing this series of brown-bag lunches on popular music.  Then I'd like to thank him again for asking me to speak.  Thank you, Paul, for both these things.

As the speaker at the first of these lunches, I feel some responsibility to touch on general, fundamental issues of popular music studies, although I certainly wasn't asked to assume that responsibility.  Still, I'm going to try to raise some issues that I hope you will find interesting and worthy of discussion. I'd like you to know, too, that this is the first time I've really tried to organize these ideas and present them in public.  I'll be making three major points, the first of which deals with issues fundamental to the study of all music and the second and third of which deal with my take on popular music studies, specifically.

The title of this presentation is "Popular Music Studies: A Musicologist's Perspective."  Yes, I am what is called a musicologist: I received my training in a musicology program, and I teach music history in a university school of music.  And I think I know that for some of you, perhaps, that label, musicologist, conjures up images of insufferable "stuffed shirts" who for years not only have ignored anything that wasn't Western classical music, but who've looked down their noses at it.  "It" of course includes popular music-or to use a German term, Trivial Musik, Trivial Music.  Not only that, musicologists and those like them have, even to the present day in most cases, completely dominated our college-level departments and schools of music, especially those at our most prestigious institutions.  One major negative result of that domination has been to make it extremely difficult for any student to learn about music outside the boundaries of Western classical and remain associated with a department of music.  So I understand if you find yourself wondering, "What exactly will a musicologist have to say about popular music studies?"  So, first, I want to talk briefly to you about what musicology is.

The modern field of musicology originated in central and western Europe in the eighteenth century (arguably) and flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  As you perhaps understand it, musicology historically has taken as its subject anything dealing with the Western classical or art-music tradition.  That becomes obvious when you consider that music from any other culture or social class around this planet is left to other fields, especially those of ethnomusicology and folklore.  In other words, if it ain't Western high art, it's either ethnic or folk or both, but apparently it's not "ours."

Musicology, like many of the other humanities disciplines, has served the society that spawned it, and by that I mean, it has served the cultures of the dominant socioeconomic classes of European society and those who supported them.  That last group, "those who supported them," has included many if not most Western intellectuals.  Being on the faculty of the University of Vienna or Oxford University or Harvard University, for example, typically has meant that you were part of a fairly elite group.  In that case, your colleagues and the society you served were not likely to be awfully impressed if you studied string bands from the American and Southern heartlands.  And if you taught in a music conservatory-those nineteenth-century institutions that trained the musicians who served the dominant classes-neither your students nor your colleagues, most of whom sought to be accepted by the elite, would have been interested in the subject either.  So the culture of musicology traditionally has placed great emphasis on the study of Western classical music and its historical antecedents right back to the ancient Greeks, though rarely beyond.  And often this meant excluding other musics, whether musics of the uneducated European classes or of other supposedly inferior societies.

But not all musicologists are or have been so narrow-minded.  Some of the founders of the field were quite broad-minded about what they considered the field's purview, and as late as 1955 the American Musicological Society adopted this definition of musicology: "a field of knowledge having as its object the investigation of the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic and cultural phenomenon."  Today, especially, we seem to be witnessing a steady breakdown of the cultural, social and intellectual walls that exist between those who study Western classical, Western pop, Western folk, and the musics of non-western cultures.  And that is the background from which I speak to you today.  Although I've been trained in Western classical music, my interests embrace all human music-making-no, make that "all music-making."  One of my guiding principles-a quote that I have on my office wall-comes from Henry Cowell, who wrote, "I want to live in the whole world of music."  In keeping with that sentiment, I embrace the simplest, most basic definition of musicology.  Musicology is the systematic, scholarly study of music-and by music here, I mean music, period: no qualifiers.

That means that if you are involved in the scholarly study of music-and I expect that many of you here today are-then you are a musicologist.  Yet those of us here today and our other colleagues who study popular music come at music from quite different backgrounds.  Perhaps more important, we come at music from different cultures-different scholarly cultures.  For example, we may have here today persons who study, talk about and teach aspects of popular music from the point of view of those labeled musicologists, ethnomusicologists, folklorists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists and philosophers, as well as those involved in so-called "cultural studies" and those who come from a background in journalism or mass communications.

These different labels reflect not only different educational backgrounds, but different scholarly goals and methodologies as well.  As a result of these differences, the music scholarship produced by these different disciplines has unique strengths and weaknesses.  But more important for my argument today is the point that these different disciplines represent different cultures.  Music scholars (we and our colleagues) often grew up in, or were drawn to or adopted different music traditions, each of which was attached to a different culture or sub-culture that appealed to us.  Being either comfortable with or drawn to a particular music sub-culture, we then entered fields of study that allowed us to deal with the music we liked.  Yes, certainly that, but it also allowed us-allows us-to be around the kinds of people we want to be around; it provides us an entrée into those societies that appeal to us.  Our association with whatever musical tradition we've chosen also attaches to us the characteristics of the societies to which we seek to become attached ourselves.  So, a farm girl from rural North Carolina can become an opera singer and live and work in Europe; a Jewish city boy from Brooklyn can embrace Appalachian "folk music" and become a radical apologist for a culture to which he is not native; a guy who loves rock music can hang out with rock stars and become a member of rock's inner circle; or a young man from the Ozarks can, by studying English-language literature, find a way to become a champion of his own marginalized culture . . . and, oh by the way, gain access to the Grand Ole Opry backstage.

In short, we use the music we study to help us achieve our own social and economic goals.  Now, that's okay; we shouldn't be overly concerned about it.  But we should make sure that we're aware of it.  More important, we should make sure that we're aware of how it affects our fundamental assumptions about music and ultimately our scholarship.

The picture I've described here is that of a balkanized discipline, a kind of Tower of Babel around which people speak different theoretical languages, appear to belong to different cultures, use different nomenclatures and methodologies, and study different, narrowly circumscribed musics.  All of which brings me to my first major point: the scholarly study of music-musicology, if you will-is an immature discipline based upon weak theoretical foundations.

If one seeks, for example, to become a mathematician or a physicist, a chemist or a biologist-no matter what the ultimate specialization-one begins by learning the basic laws governing the materials addressed by that discipline.  One also receives early on a broad overview of the entire field.  In the study of biology, to take a specific example, one begins by studying the entire range of life on the planet, as well as the chemical bases of life.  (And it's worth stating here too that when biologists become certain of life on any other planet, you can be sure that it will be covered as well.)  But we music scholars, balkanized as we are, do not share a common scholarly foundation.  Why?  I'll try to answer that question as I proceed.

What should an introductory course of study on music-not Western classical music, not popular music, not world music, just music-include?  What basic information about music should every beginning music scholar learn?  Here is part of the answer I'm coming to.

1) Context
The student should understand that he or she is studying a single cultural product of one (though perhaps several) species, out of a huge number of species on one single planet, out of what may be millions of planets in our universe.  In other words, it's a very narrow field.

2) Physical bases
The student should have a fundamental understanding of the physical properties of sound.  This information is well-known and long has been included in studies of the nature of music, dating from at least the time of Pythagorus.

3) Biological bases
The student should have a fundamental understanding of how the bodies of humans (or any other potentially music-making species) respond to sound and music.  This is where we begin to encounter difficulty, for comparatively little is known about this most basic reality of music-making.  Why is this seemingly non-musical subject so important?  Because music would not exist without the bodies of these biological organisms and their abilities to create, manipulate and respond to sound.  In our case, humans are the most important subjects: they either value a music or they don't; it either affects them-that is to say, their bodies-in ways they like or it doesn't.  And it is these basic matters-complex though they be-that must provide, it seems to me, the future foundations of music scholarship.  Fortunately, with recent advances in our knowledge of neurology, genetics, evolution and, more narrowly, music cognition, we are gaining new and significant information increasingly rapidly, and the importance of this new knowledge is reflected in the emerging discipline of biomusicology, which deals with these very issues.  (By the way, the biggest problem I've had teaching this material is not lack of information, though that certainly is a difficulty, but dealing with students and sometimes faculty who refuse to accept, as Stephen Jay Gould has written, "the established fact of evolution.")

4) Deep music history
The student should understand how and why the music-making and music-perceiving ability evolved and, during the recent past, how music evolved as an art.  Here lies one of our greatest challenges: to write the history of music from the moment one of our evolutionary ancestors realized some advantage from manipulating sound.  This likely will require us to look back millions of years.  In the more recent past, say, the past one-million years, and especially in the last 40,000-to-50,000 years-that is, the period during which complex human societies began to emerge-we must attempt to chart the movements of groups of humans around the world and to understand what music cultures they took with them and how the musics of different groups may have become acculturated, thereby producing the major musical traditions that we find around the world today.

5) Comparative music
The student should be exposed to the major music traditions from around the world, including the musics of the West, with special emphasis on the music aesthetics of each tradition.  Studying the music aesthetics of a tradition-ideally with respect and sympathy-will allow the student to understand and appreciate that music as do those native to the culture.  In other words, we need to embrace cultural relativism as it applies to music.

To conclude this section, training in these five areas, it seems to me, would provide music scholars with that common foundation, solid both scientifically and culturally, upon which any music tradition could be studied effectively, and would move us far down the road to becoming a mature discipline.

Now to the field of popular music studies.  If musicology is an immature discipline, then the study of popular music is somewhere just past its infancy.  Like Europe-centered historical musicology, popular music studies have served the societies that spawned them.  Like traditional musicology, too, it was dominated originally by journalists, collectors and dedicated amateurs.  More recently it has attracted persons from many fields who want to understand-and help others understand-one of recent history's most powerful cultural phenomena.  Most of the scholarly interest in popular music studies, it seems to me, has come from sociologists, those engaged in cultural studies of various sorts and those associated with the mass media.  While traditional musicology, and perhaps even ethnomusicology, disdained music that was considered trivial-either too simple, shallow, or commercial-journalists and scholars of the type I've mentioned began to study this music seriously.  As a result, we now thankfully have a small but steadily increasing body of serious scholarship upon which to build.

From my perspective-that is, from the perspective of a traditional musicologist, but hopefully one with an open mind-the scholarly study of popular music reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of those disciplines that seem to dominate it.  The field seems strongest in the realms of cultural studies and relevance to contemporary society.  But I perceive two significant problems with the current state of popular music studies: 1) a lack of historical awareness; and 2) domination by rock 'n' roll and hip hop cultures and aesthetics that marginalize other styles and traditions and in light of which those other styles and traditions often are poorly understood and inaccurately judged.  In addition, I might have added "lack of knowledge of a wide variety of musics from around the world, especially traditional and art musics."  But that is not so great a problem with popular music studies, and truth be told, every field of music scholarship can be criticized on at least one of these points, most often two.

Consider this example.  One result of the increased scholarly activity in popular music studies is the growing number of documentaries dealing with the subject.  In October, Bravo, "The Film and Arts Network," aired an eight-part documentary entitled Popular Song: Soundtrack of the Century.  Since Bravo usually targets (I think) a more culturally sophisticated audience than that which watches MTV, VH1, BET or CMT, I was intrigued.  Now it may seem a picayune thing to you, but consider what I've already talked about.  When I heard the series title, Popular Song: Soundtrack of the Century, my immediate question (even though I was fairly sure of the answer) was, "which century?"  It says something about the focus of most popular music scholarship that the answer to this question was assumed.  But it gets worse.

The first two hours of this eight-hour documentary dealt with the nineteenth-century background to twentieth-century popular music and the popular music produced through mid-century by, most especially, New York, Los Angeles, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and the movie industry.  But the third hour was entitled something like "The Roots of Rock 'n' Roll," which was the only one of the episodes I saw in which I heard country music discussed.  (Note: I did not see all the later episodes.)  Hank Williams was right in there with all the other blues and early rhythm-and-blues artists as a progenitor of rock 'n' roll.  Now, while there is some truth to this, presenting Hank Williams and country music in this way is a gross distortion of the historical and cultural realities.  Furthermore, I cannot imagine a truly balanced, responsible discussion of twentieth-century American popular music that devotes three-fourths of its time to post-Tin Pan Alley music.

But country is not the only music tradition marginalized by the rock 'n' roll and hip hop juggernauts.  Others include: a) the above-mentioned Tin Pan Alley tradition; b) just about any kind of vernacular sacred music, but especially white vernacular sacred music; c) minstrel songs, primarily because of the racial stereotypes used; and d) nineteenth-century parlor songs.  In other words, any music tradition which has an aesthetic that does not match the blues-based rock or hip hop aesthetics is given short shrift.  For example, if you want to understand Bing Crosby's popularity as a singer, you must begin by understanding and appreciating the musical aesthetic of the tradition of which he was a part.  If on the other hand, you judge him by the rock 'n' roll or hip hop aesthetics, you will quickly come to the conclusion that he was some kind of white musical geek and not worth the trouble.  But in so doing, you miss understanding one of the most popular American singers of the twentieth century.  By extension, the same can be said of the other traditions I've mentioned.  (I should state here, too, that, in my experience, these same criticisms can be leveled at many of the textbooks that have been written for academic courses on popular music.)

So what's the answer?  We should remember our common foundation: it's all human music-making, which in the scheme of things is a fairly limited subject.  Remembering our common foundation, we should recognize and then seek to move beyond the limitations of our own scholarly cultures.  We should seek to acquaint ourselves with other major music traditions at least well enough to begin studying our own traditions comparatively.  This act alone will decrease the likelihood that we will judge other musics ethnocentrically. Finally, consider: although there are many music-cultures on the planet, ultimately we humans have only a few ways of organizing music.  By restricting our study to the music of only one culture or one social class, we miss opportunities to understand the larger context and to recognize the oneness of all the varieties of this art form.

I'd like to give you examples of this, but first I need to provide a definition of popular music.  Having heard Paul Wells attempt to define it for the purposes of The Center for Popular Music (as in, "What exactly are we supposed to collect?"), I know it presents some knotty problems.  In the text I use in my undergraduate, introductory music class, David Willoughby divides the world of human music-making into folk, popular and art musics: a helpful taxonomy to the extent that it reflects the gross categories into which we tend to place music.  Willoughby defines popular music as "a vernacular music that has a broad, mass appeal, is created to be sold, and is distributed via a commercial network."

If this definition suffices for you, consider then the case of opera.  Opera is the grandest of the grand genres in the Western classical music tradition, and few scholars of popular music-especially in America-would attempt to study it.  But if you are interested in the business side of music or in how the stylistic development of music is affected by the desires of its audience, then you should be familiar with this tradition.  Opera was invented in the last years of the sixteenth century, but it didn't take off as an industry until it arrived in Venice in 1637.  From that point, a vital, continent-wide music industry developed within the course of a century.  And in places like Venice and Naples, at least, the response of the audience, which most definitely included commoners, was very important to the development of the genre.  Furthermore, this music was, arguably, vernacular.  The popularity of operas in the local dialects, especially in Naples and Venice, are a clear indication of this.

And I could go on.  What about the popularity of a touring "star" like Franz Liszt, who in the post-French Revolutionary economic world made his money by going from town to town, selling tickets and prints of his own compositions to individual buyers?  What about the world of Kabuki and Bunraku theater, which developed and made its money by selling tickets and catering to members of the urban Japanese mercantile classes?  And what about the jongleurs of late-Medieval Europe, who went from place to place performing a common body of songs, including those written by the often-but-not-always aristocratic troubadours and trouvères?  Or what about Homer?  Surely he performed his epic poems for persons who were not aristocrats . . . and modified them when they did not please!

So we all need to seek the bedrock of our discipline, build a common theoretical foundation upon that bedrock, and then look beyond the musics, social classes and cultures with which we are comfortable.  In doing so, I think we would help music scholarship mature as a discipline, and I think we and future generations of musicians would be the beneficiaries.