Anno 2016/1-2

L’obiettivo di questo numero monografico è esaminare l’area di significati evocata dall’espressione “popular music”, mostrandone i risvolti e i sottintesi negli studi musicali attuali. 

In the United States, the recent twenty years have seen the emergence of what might be defined as a “flat world” (Thomas L. Friedman) of musical styles – a reshaped cultural environment in which many listeners and scholars no longer view classical music as more sophisticated than other styles.

The study of the relationhips between verbal language and musical expression, if applied to the most various historical and cultural contexts, facilitates a critical- analytical and interdisciplinary-transversal approach, capable of seriously challen- ging the traditional dichotomy “art” / “popular” cultures (colto / popolare), as well as the most recent tendency – especially in Italy – to give different meanings to analogous terms such as popolare and popular.

Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, was an enormously influential work that offered a way of attempting to understand cultural production in the era of “late capitalism”.

From the USA (Frank Zappa, The Velvet Underground, The Grateful Dead) to the UK (AMM, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Soft Machine), experimentation seemed to be one of the preoccupations of the pop “avant-garde” that arose in Anglo-American popular music at the end of the 1960s, under labels as diverse as progressive, art or psychedelic rock.

The question in the title of this special issue is hard to answer from a global perspective. Local scholarly and institutional traditions but also local definitions of the term “popular music” have a strong influence on our way of thought. This article discusses the conceptual history that is associated with the German “populäre Musik” in following it back to its origins in the 18th century

This article aims firstly to test the musicological resilience, and possibly probe the limits, of the epistemological field identified by the notion of “popular music” as an object of study.

Defining what is understood by the term “popular music” has always been problematic, and the term has tended to be used in a vague and indistinct way that can encompass a wide range of fundamentally different musics.