Editorial Introduction Music Journalism
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Marc Brennan Thesis
Writing to Reach You: The Consumer Music Press and Music Journalism in the UK and Australia Marc Brennan, BA (Hons) Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre (CIRAC) Thesis Submitted for the Completion of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Industries), 2005 Writing to Reach You Keywords Journalism, Performance, Readerships, Music, Consumers, Frameworks, Publishing, Dialogue, Genre, Branding Consumption, Production, Internet, Customisation, Personalisation, Fragmentation Writing to Reach You: The Consumer Music Press and Music Journalism in the UK and Australia The music press and music journalism are rarely subjected to substantial academic investigation. Analysis of journalism often focuses on the production of news across various platforms to understand the nature of politics and public debate in the contemporary era. But it is not possible, nor is it necessary, to analyse all emerging forms of journalism in the same way for they usually serve quite different purposes. Music journalism, for example, offers consumer guidance based on the creation and maintenance of a relationship between reader and writer. By focusing on the changing aspects of this relationship, an analysis of music journalism gives us an understanding of the changing nature of media production, media texts and media readerships. Music journalism is dialogue. It is a dialogue produced within particular critical frameworks that speak to different readers of the music press in different ways. These frameworks are continually evolving and reflect the broader social trajectory in which music journalism operates. Importantly, the evolving nature of music journalism reveals much about the changing consumption of popular music. Different types of consumers respond to different types of guidance that employ a variety of critical approaches. -
Art to Commerce: the Trajectory of Popular Music Criticism
Art to Commerce: The Trajectory of Popular Music Criticism Thomas Conner and Steve Jones University of Illinois at Chicago [email protected] / [email protected] Abstract This article reports the results of a content and textual analysis of popular music criticism from the 1960s to the 2000s to discern the extent to which criticism has shifted focus from matters of music to matters of business. In part, we believe such a shift to be due likely to increased awareness among journalists and fans of the industrial nature of popular music production, distribution and consumption, and to the disruption of the music industry that began in the late 1990s with the widespread use of the Internet for file sharing. Searching and sorting the Rock’s Backpages database of over 22,000 pieces of music journalism for keywords associated with the business, economics and commercial aspects of popular music, we found several periods during which popular music criticism’s focus on business-related concerns seemed to have increased. The article discusses possible reasons for the increases as well as methods for analyzing a large corpus of popular music criticism texts. Keywords: music journalism, popular music criticism, rock criticism, Rock’s Backpages Though scant scholarship directly addresses this subject, music journalists and bloggers have identified a trend in recent years toward commerce-specific framing when writing about artists, recording and performance. Most music journalists, according to Willoughby (2011), “are writing quasi shareholder reports that chart the movements of artists’ commercial careers” instead of artistic criticism. While there may be many reasons for such a trend, such as the Internet’s rise to prominence not only as a medium for distribution of music but also as a medium for distribution of information about music, might it be possible to discern such a trend? Our goal with the research reported here was an attempt to empirically determine whether such a trend exists and, if so, the extent to which it does. -
Logy and the Study of Western Music*
New Musicologies, Old Musicologies: Ethnomusico logy and the Study of Western Music* By Jonathan P. J Stock Introduction Ethnomusicology currently engages with the study of Western music in two principal ways. On the one hand, there are specific ethnomusicological studies that focus on aspects of Western musical traditions. Examples in clude Paul Berliner's analysis of improvisation in jazz (1994), Philip Bohlman's study of chamber music as ethnic music in contemporary Israel (1991), and the examinations of music schools and conservatories by Bruno Nettl (1995) and Henry Kingsbury (1988). These works, in and of them selves, offer explicit and direct indication of what an ethnomusicological approach to Western music involves and what manner of insights can be produced thereby. Second, and more diffusely, ethnomusicological re search plays into the study of Western music through musicologists' adop tion, adaptation, and application of ethnomusicological techniques and concepts: some musicologists have drawn from specific ethnographies of non-Western musical traditions, and others have made recourse to the standard texts of ethnomusicological theory and practice (such as Merriam 1964 and N ettl 1983). Conference presentations, seminars, conversations, and, especially in the case of younger scholars, courses taken as part of their academic training also provide channels of contact between the rep ertory of scholarly ideas and procedures developed primarily for the ex planation of non-Western musics and the field of Western musical studies. The titles of such publications as Nicholas Cook's Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990) and Peter jeffery's Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (1992) are clear in their referencing to this particular field of academic endeavor. -
The Authority of Music Criticism Author(S): Edward T
The Authority of Music Criticism Author(s): Edward T. Cone Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society , Spring, 1981, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 1-18 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/831032 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Musicological Society and University of California Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society This content downloaded from 174.92.95.22 on Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:44:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Authority of Music Criticism* BY EDWARD T. CONE W HAT AUTHORITY can the music critic claim for his opinions? That is a question often posed, or implied, by composers and per- formers, and sometimes by critics themselves. Its relevance is not nul- lified by the fact that it is usually asked by one who feels, rightly or wrongly, that he has been misunderstood by the critic and traduced by the expression of his opinion. Rightly or wrongly-for some philosophers, of course, those words are red herrings. -
6. the Evolving Role of Music Journalism Zachary Woolfe and Alex Ross
Classical Music Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges Classical Music This kaleidoscopic collection reflects on the multifaceted world of classical music as it advances through the twenty-first century. With insights drawn from Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges leading composers, performers, academics, journalists, and arts administrators, special focus is placed on classical music’s defining traditions, challenges and contemporary scope. Innovative in structure and approach, the volume comprises two parts. The first provides detailed analyses of issues central to classical music in the present day, including diversity, governance, the identity and perception of classical music, and the challenges facing the achievement of financial stability in non-profit arts organizations. The second part offers case studies, from Miami to Seoul, of the innovative ways in which some arts organizations have responded to the challenges analyzed in the first part. Introductory material, as well as several of the essays, provide some preliminary thoughts about the impact of the crisis year 2020 on the world of classical music. Classical Music Classical Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges will be a valuable and engaging resource for all readers interested in the development of the arts and classical music, especially academics, arts administrators and organizers, and classical music practitioners and audiences. Edited by Paul Boghossian Michael Beckerman Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor and Chair; Director, Global Institute for of Music and Chair; Collegiate Advanced Study, New York University Professor, New York University This is the author-approved edition of this Open Access title. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. -
Exploring Customer Reviews for Music Genre Classification and Evolutionary Studies
EXPLORING CUSTOMER REVIEWS FOR MUSIC GENRE CLASSIFICATION AND EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES Sergio Oramas1, Luis Espinosa-Anke2, Aonghus Lawlor3, Xavier Serra1, Horacio Saggion2 1Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra 2TALN Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra 3Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College of Dublin sergio.oramas, luis.espinosa, xavier.serra, horacio.saggion @upf.edu, [email protected] { } ABSTRACT dataset of Amazon customer reviews [18,19], with seman- tic and acoustic metadata obtained from MusicBrainz 1 In this paper, we explore a large multimodal dataset of and AcousticBrainz 2 , respectively. MusicBrainz (MB) is about 65k albums constructed from a combination of Ama- a large open music encyclopedia of music metadata, whist zon customer reviews, MusicBrainz metadata and Acous- AcousticBrainz (AB) is a database of music and audio de- ticBrainz audio descriptors. Review texts are further en- scriptors, computed from audio recordings via state-of-the- riched with named entity disambiguation along with po- art Music Information Retrieval algorithms [26]. In addi- larity information derived from an aspect-based sentiment tion, we further extend the semantics of the textual content analysis framework. This dataset constitutes the corner- from two standpoints. First, we apply an aspect-based sen- stone of two main contributions: First, we perform ex- timent analysis framework [7] which provides specific sen- periments on music genre classification, exploring a va- timent scores for different aspects present in the text, e.g. riety of feature types, including semantic, sentimental and album cover, guitar, voice or lyrics. Second, we perform acoustic features. These experiments show that modeling Entity Linking (EL), so that mentions to named entities semantic information contributes to outperforming strong such as Artist Names or Record Labels are linked to their bag-of-words baselines. -
Pitchfork Media's Textual and Cultural Impact
CREATING A CULTURE: PITCHFORK MEDIA‘S TEXTUAL AND CULTURAL IMPACT ON ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri- Columbia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by EMILY BRASHER Dr. Stephanie Craft, Thesis Supervisor DECEMBER 2013 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled CREATING A CULTURE: PITCHFORK MEDIA‘S TEXTUAL AND CULTURAL IMPACT ON ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE Presented by Emily Brasher A candidate for the degree of Master of Arts And hereby certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Stephanie Craft Professor Mary Kay Blakely Professor Andrew Hoberek Professor Lynda Kraxberger To my family, for always believing in me. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Stephanie Craft for all of her support and patience though this process. The road was long—there were a few address changes and even a name change along the way—but Dr. Craft spurred me on until the journey reached a happy end. My deepest thanks also to Dr. Mary Kay Blakely, Dr. Andrew Hoberek, and Dr. Lynda Kraxberger, for bearing with me through it all. Thanks to Dr. Betty Winfield for getting me started, and to Ginny Cowell and Martha Pickens for their invaluable advice and help. ii CREATING A CULTURE: PITCHFORK MEDIA‘S TEXTUAL AND CULTURAL IMPACT ON ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE Emily Brasher Dr. Stephanie Craft, Thesis Supervisor ABSTRACT The main purpose of this research is to demonstrate how cultures and subcultures can be created and disseminated through media, and how newer forms of media such as websites can have a tangible effect on the content of older forms of media such as print magazines. -
The Myth of Classical Music Superiority (Part One) (Not The
Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music Greg Sandow Chapter 5 – The Myth of Classical Music Superiority (part one) (not the final text, but a riff on what this chapter will say) Once, at least in the west, pretty much everybody thought that classical music (by which of course I mean western classical music) was the best kind of music. Routinely it was called “good music,” “art music,” or “serious music,” reflecting a belief that other kinds of music weren’t artistic, or serious, or even good (or at least not good on any high level). But now times have changed, our culture has shifted, and people who think classical music is superior are now a small minority. Or at least they are in the culture at large. But in the classical music world, they still have some influence, and that causes trouble. If classical music is going to survive, it will have to take its place among all the other kinds of music we’ve got right now, coexisting with them, learning from them, being influenced by them (just as happened in centuries past, when classical music was shaped by all the music around it)—and above all not claiming to be better than they are. (Other musical styles, of course, will continue to be influenced—as they’ve been for decades—by classical music.) People who insist that classical music is superior make it harder for this to happen. So we need to understand why they’re wrong. [2] The first problem with their belief is very simple. It’s easy to argue that any kind of music might be superior, virtually any kind at all. -
Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: a Response to Lawrence Kramer
Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer By Gary Tomlinson Early last summer, not long after I was invited by the editors of Current Musicology to contribute to this special issue, the inaugural issue of an other music journal landed in my mail box. This was repercussions, pro duced by graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. It opened with a position piece by Lawrence Kramer entitled 'The Musicol ogy of the Future"-a fitting beginning, given that the journal is devoted to fostering "critical & alternative viewpoints on music and scholarship" and that Kramer has ·emerged over the past decade as one of the shrewd est and most theoretically savvy of a younger generation of musical schol ars. But Kramer's essay, on closer inspection, was disconcerting. 'The Mu sicology of the Future" seems to me to linger over old viewpoints more than suggest new ones. It reveals patterns of thought that not only already threaten to harden into new orthodoxies of postmodern musicology but that have, at the deepest level, moved little from the putative truths they aim to leave behind. What follows is a brief rejoinder to Kramer's vision of the new musicology. I should say at the beginning that I do not think Kramer is alone in his difficulty in escaping the old orthodoxies; if he were, my differences with his approach would have no broader resonance than that of a personal disagreement. I sense, instead, that all of us who work in the methodologi cal realms he calls postmodern have experienced this difficulty, that we have all felt twinges of an unease that originates in our sense of the persistent proximity of our methods to those we thought we had moved away from. -
The Current Syllabus for MUSIC
MUS 121 • Writing about Music Spring 2014 Class meeting times: TBA Class location: ACSM, room TBA Prof. Emily Wilbourne [email protected] ACSM 248 718.997.3813 office hours: W 10:00—11:00, or by appointment Elvis Costello famously said that writing about music is like dancing to architecture. These are compelling words, though their force relies in part on the irony of the formulation—in effect, the quote does exactly that which it (convincingly) claims is impossible to do, explicating in words the difficulties of transposing musical experience into text. In this class students will engage with a variety of written accounts of music: novels, poems, descriptive texts, blogs, music journalism, music history, and musicology. Furthermore, students will work to craft written accounts of musical sound and musical meanings, answering questions such as, “How does music mean what it means?” and “How can we put those meanings into words?” In the process, students will learn how to parse and critique the sounding world and to think constructively about the historical materiality of sound and music. Music 121: Writing about Music is a College Writing 2 course. Instruction about writing is included throughout the semester; students should come to each class, prepared to write, to revise their own work, and to think constructively about the work of their peers. 1 Required texts: Readings and listening exercises for each class will be available on the class blackboard site. Please ensure that you access the site regularly and that you keep abreast of any announcements. Recommended texts: • Richard Bullock, and Francine Weinberg, The Little Seagull Handbook (New York: W. -
Social & Behavioural Sciences III PMMIS 2019 Post Mass Media In
The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences EpSBS ISSN: 2357-1330 https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2019.08.02.54 III PMMIS 2019 Post mass media in the modern informational society "Journalistic text in a new technological environment: achievements and problems" ACTUALIZATION OF MUSICAL JOURNALISM ON THE INTERNET Svetlana Paniukova (а)*, Alexey Maslennikov (b) *Corresponding author (a) Chelyabinsk State University, 454084, Pobedy ave., 162B, Chelyabinsk, Russia, [email protected] (b) Chelyabinsk State University, 454084, Pobedy ave., 162B, Chelyabinsk, Russia, [email protected] Abstract In this study, we decided to draw attention to the music author's blog as a successor of traditional music journalism. This work reviews the structure and features of music blogging on the YouTube platform and formulates its fundamental features as a new media-communication and musical-cultural phenomenon of modernity, gradually acquiring an increasing influence on the mass audience. After all, adopting and modifying the content and formal characteristics of traditional music journalism, music blogging becomes its worthy alternative with the use of techniques and forms that are adapted for the modern generation. The study analyzed the pages (channels) of popular Russian-speaking bloggers on the YouTube video hosting. The main conclusions of the study: 1) a large number of works in this area can be called substandard, since many of the videos need careful refinement on the script and camera parts; 2) content analysis of video blog channels allows to distinguish the following genres of music blogging: review, clip, remake, remix, cover version, parody, broadcast and video interview; 3) if we consider music blogging as a new format of modern network media, we can identify a number of its substantive and formal features, which are reflected in more detail in the work itself. -
Popular Music Journalism As Public Sphere
UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING PEDRO NUNES Department of Film and Media POPULAR MUSIC AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE CASE OF PORTUGUESE MUSIC JOURNALISM Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January, 2004 i Abstract Music journalism has been acknowledged as an important space of mediation between artists and consumers. Journalists and critics have played an historical role in the creation of discourse on popular music and are acknowledged by the music industry as an important referent in promotion strategies. Research on the subject has been mostly focused either on the relationship between music journalism and the wider music industry in which it operates or on its status as a field of cultural production. Little consideration has been given to the role played by music journalists in articulating popular music with wider political, social and cultural concerns. This thesis will examine the case-study of Portuguese popular music journalism. It will address its historical evolution and current status by taking into consideration some dimensions, namely, the wider institutional contexts that frame the status of music journalism and how they work upon it, the ideologies and values realised in journalistic discourse, the journalists’ relationship to the music industry (as represented by record labels/companies and concert promotion companies) and issues of interactivity with readers. The thesis will draw on theories of the public sphere and, to a lesser extent, on Bourdieu’s notions of field, capital and habitus to assess the possibilities for music journalism to create reasoned discourse on ii popular music and, therefore, contribute to wider debates on the public sphere of culture.