The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century
American Musicological Society Pre-Conference Symposium
AMS, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, October 30-31, 2019.
I worked together in an organizing and program committee with Brian F. Wright and Amy Coddington to plan an AMS pre-conference symposium focusing on popular music studies. The symposium was co-sponsored by the AMS Popular Music Study Group, Amherst College, Northeastern University College of Art, Media and Design, and Northeastern University Department of Music.
Material from this symposium was published in Conference Report: “The Future of Pop” and Looking Towards the Future: Popular Music Studies and Music Scholarship.
Symposium description
In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor stated that “popular songs really had no academic significance.” In 2019, the state of popular music within the academy is far removed from Browne’s experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted to the study of this repertoire, papers on popular music topics are regularly presented at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of courses—often focusing on and including popular forms—which recognize both student interest in and the intellectual validity of the subject.
Despite the normalization of popular music studies over the last 50 years, complex questions linger about the state of the field and the directions it will take. In the spirit of asking these questions, held the symposium “The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century” prior to the annual American Musicological Society meeting in 2019. “The Future of Pop” fostered interdisciplinary collaborations between scholars of different ranks and diverse backgrounds by encouraging conversations about the future of popular music studies.
Inspired by our four keynote speakers, Francesca Royster, Jack Hamilton, Loren Kajikawa, and Shana Redmond, the symposium structured panels around four themes:
How can we tell new stories by looking at the past through more deliberately eccentric and queer perspectives?
How might we more productively engage with audiences and voices from outside of academia?
How can we make popular music studies more inclusive and accessible?
How can we better account for the political stakes of listening?
In addition to our invited speakers, “The Future of Pop” featured presentations from Christa Bentley, Corrigan Blanchfield, Daphne Carr, Philip Ewell, K. E. Goldschmitt, Anthony Kwame Harrison, Eric Hung, and Victor Szabo.