Mini-symposium at Södertörn University Monday 7 April 2014, 13–17 in MB503 (Moas Båge). Organised by Johan Fornäs and Fredrik Stiernstedt
Preliminary programme
13:00 – 13:15 Introduction
13:15 – 14:30 David Hesmondhalgh: “Music, Collective Experience and Sociability”
14:30 – 15:00 Sofia Johansson: “’Music Is Like Air to Me’: Modes of Engagement with Music on the Internet”
15:00 – 15:30 Coffee
15:30 – 16:00 Ann Werner: “Embodiment and Musical Mobiliy”
16:00 – 16:45 Linus Andersson: “I’m a 21stCentury Digital Boy: Themes of Slackerism and Infantile Masculinity in Skatepunk”
16:30 – 17:00 Axel Englund: “Opera and the Sexualization of Power Relations”
David Hesmondhalgh: “Music, Collective Experience and Sociability”
The connections of music (and its sibling form dance) to sociality and community mean that any consideration of its value as a social practice needs to address a question fundamental to any understanding and evaluation of people’s lives: how might we flourish together? Yet the sociology of popular music has been surprisingly reluctant to conceptualise, in any sustained and normative way, the relations between music and collective experience. Arguably, this question becomes more complex and difficult in modernity, when people are constantly surrounded by strangers, and when distant events, institutions and people can have a major impact on our lives. In such circumstances, commonality, community and solidarity are vital but controversial concepts. This paper examines some major contributions to understanding the question of how musical participation and performance might enhance people’s lives: Small, Keil, Turino and Schutz. Through a sympathetic critique of their approaches and assumptions, and with reference to karaoke and clubbing, I seek to build a realistic appraisal of music’s ability to provide good collective experiences of ordinary sociability in modernity.
David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media and Music Industries at the University of Leeds, where he is currently Head of the Institute of Communications Studies. He is the author of Why Music Matters (Blackwell, 2013), Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (Routledge, 2011, co-written with Sarah Baker), and The Cultural Industries, now in its third edition (Sage, 2012). He is also editor or co-editor of five other books, including The Media and Social Theory (with Jason Toynbee, 2008), Media Production (2006) and Western Music and its Others: Difference, Appropriation and Representation in Music (with Georgina Born, 2000). He recently co-edited (with AnamikSaha) a special issue of the journal Popular Communication on “Race, Ethnicity and Cultural Production”, to which they contributed an article on that topic.
DavidHesmondhalghwill also hold a lecture for the MKV higher seminar Tuesday 8 April 13-15 on creative work in the cultural industries: “Sex, Gender and Cultural Work”.
Sofia Johansson: ”‘Music Is Like Air to Me’: Modes of Engagement with Music on the Internet”
This presentation considers how music streaming on the Internet facilitates specific forms of engagement with music. Based on nine focus groups with young adult Spotify users in Stockholm, I discuss how music is experienced in relation to Spotify, and how streaming is understood to shape meanings of music artists and fan practices. Drawing on theories concerning digital cultures, as well as music and everyday life, I highlight how music is valued as omnipresent and essential for framing emotions, within mobile and connected music use, but also how playlist listening and the ease of access to music on the Internet are perceived to lead to “lazy” engagement with music, and to a distanced approach to artists.
Sofia Johansson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. She has published on popular journalism, celebrity, and social media, with an empirical research focus on popular culture, media audiences and everyday life. She is currently heading the research project“Music Use in the Online Media Age”, funded by the research foundation RiksbankensJubileumsfond.
Ann Werner: “Embodiment and Musical Mobiliy”
The question about music and emotion (or affect), frequently raised in musical therapy research as well as popular music studies, is here investigated through mobile streaming of music. With the increased – but not new – mobility of music through applications like Spotify, emotional and embodied experiences of music take place in public space. Seeing embodiment as movement, affect (Massumi 2002) and figurations of difference (Braidotti 2002), this paper will explore the relation between embodiment and musical mobility. What feelings does mobile music bring and how does mobility shape embodiments?
Ann Werner is Lecturer in Gender Studies at Södertörn University. She published her PhD thesis on teenage girls’ uses of music and constructions of gender in 2009. Her research is within the field of feminist cultural studies and has investigated music, emotion and bodies as well as power in cultural consumption and production. She is currently conducting research with three other scholars in the project “Music Use in the Online Media Age”, funded by Riksbankensjubileumsfond.
Linus Andersson: “I’m a 21stCentury Digital Boy: Themes of Slackerism and Infantile Masculinity in Skatepunk”
This presentation will discuss themes of masculinity in the punk music style “skatepunk” with the objective to understand how this specific style could be interpreted as an answer to “masculinity crisis” debates of the 1990s, while it continues to be a strong theme in the present day. Theoretically it draws on notions of masculinity and sexuality, and analyses song lyrics, music videos and album art from the period commonly referred to as the “3rd wave of punk”. It suggests that skatepunk promotes an “infantile” masculinity, in its rejection of “traditional” masculinity (responsibility and sexual relations), and idealizing of adolescent male bonding.
Linus Andersson is Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University. In 2012 he published a PhD thesis called Alternative Television: Forms of Critique in Alternative Television, and has worked as a researcher for the Swedish Media Council on a report on anti-democratic content on the Internet, published in 2013. Andersson is working on a chronicle of the Swedish skate- and hardcoresceneof the 1990s.
Axel Englund: “Opera and the Sexualization of Power Relations”
Recent years have seen a host of opera productions that evoke sexualized violence and make use of BDSM paraphernalia such as leather gear, riding crops, blindfolds, etc. Unsurprisingly, these productions have often given rise to controversy on grounds both ethical and aesthetical. In addition, however, they can be understood as a self-reflexive commentary on the art of opera: they foreground questions of excess, theatricality, and agency that can be found at the intersection of operatic performance and sadomasochistic role-play. In this presentation, I reflect on such questions by way of various stagings of a scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Axel Englund is Lecturer in Aesthetics at Södertörn University, Sweden. He is the author of Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (2012) and co-editor of the volume Languages of Exile: Migration and Multilingualism in Twentieth-Century Literature (2013). His research centres on twentieth-century poetry and the interplay of music and literature. In 2011, he was an Anna Lindh fellow at Stanford University, and he has held visiting scholarships at Columbia University and FreieUniversität Berlin.