In thinking about how to locate popular music within music history, I start from two propositions. Firstly, that attempts to isolate and define musical types, functions and effects by purely empirical means are likely to be unhelpful. Understanding ‘popular music’ – for example – in terms of a quantitively measured ‘popularity’ (sales figures) is not only methodologically difficult to do coherently but, more important, it hypostatises what is in reality a result of living, historically changing relationships. Secondly: if, then, musical categories should be grasped as part of social processes, it does not however follow that in this relationship (between musical type, concept or practice on the one hand, social group, factor or formation on the other) the relata are in a one-to-one correspondence. Thus – quoting again examples from commonly assumed positions – the idea that ‘popular music’ is ‘really’ confined to authentic proletarian self-expression is no less misleading than the Adornian notion that it is part of an undifferentiated blanket of leisure-goods imposed on the unresisting masses by a monopoly-capitalist ‘culture industry’.

In late 1932, after a run of hard luck on tour – jobs that evaporated, buses that broke down, and money that ran out – the Kansas City orchestra of Bennie Moten headed for Camden, New Jersey to record for Victor. The session produced ten sides, among them a piece bearing the leader's name: ‘Moten Swing’. Guitarist and trombonist Eddie Durham had come up with the arrangement in Philadelphia not long before, constructing a series of brass and reed riffs over the chord changes of Walter Donaldson's hit song of 1930, ‘You're Driving Me Crazy’. The opening of ‘Moten Swing’ featured the band's pianist, William ‘Bill’ Basie.

In recent years, a surprising void has opened in discussions of the evolution of twentieth-century British popular music. Directly and indirectly, much attention has been given to the influence of the United States. Little, however, has been written on the development of Britain's own popular vocal and dance forms, especially in the key years between the two World Wars; neither have other cultural inter-relationships, such as British acceptance of ‘Latin American’ rhythms received the attention they deserve.

Discussions of rock or contemporary popular music are very often suffused with suggestions of massive and remarkable ‘change’ (in musical style, in surrounding fashions, etc.). Just as often, however, they are filled with virtually opposite visions of endless repetition, or continual ‘sameness’ (the music all merely sounding alike). Diverging in this way, views of change in popular music tend towards extreme polarisation – so much evidently depending upon the scale and scope of comparison, and indeed much of the problem centring on the domain or level in music isolated as the one most likely to offer explanation of the underlying processes.

Since the beginning of summer 1984 a new wave of panic and despair has taken hold of Soviet pop musicians. They have become aware that the Ministry of Culture, under whose supervision pop groups in Russia work and on whose policies their very existence depends, has decided to destroy them.

This article deals with one of the darkest chapters in the history of popular music: the way in which it was pressed into the service of the cynical and ultra-reactionary goals of German fascism between the years 1933 and 1945. The aim, however, is not simply to fill a gap in historical accounts, which hitherto have always ignored this period. The subject is far from being merely of historical interest: it concerns the mechanisms whereby popular music can be socially and politically misused – mechanisms to which it can more easily fall victim, the more professionally it is produced. It is a fatal error to assume, for example, that popular music serving reactionary interests unmasks itself self-evidently as such. Rather, at no time has the lack of political responsibility on the part of performing musicians and composers been so clear, and had such disastrous eventual consequences, as was the case in Germany between 1933 and 1945. And this is what makes the subject as topical today, forty years after the ending of fascist tyranny in Germany, as it was then. ‘Continuity and change’ requires that the bitter experience of the past be combined with the urgent call to learn lessons from it now, after so long. The next time could be the last time!

An investigation of the reception and perception of early rock 'n' roll in various parts of the world may tell us little new about the music itself, but it can inform us on contemporary issues and attitudes in these places, and remind us of the ways in which popular music has been utilised by commercial and political forces controlling the mass media.

The show (spectacle), in its urbanised, commercial version, is usually cast in the role of soundboard or crucible, where the meeting of an already finished product and its audience is effected. This conception tends to localise creative musical achievements in a prior moment, and can only envisage the relations between manager, producers and performers as unilateral.

There have been, since Becker's pioneering work in the field of jazz (Becker 1951), a small handful of empirical studies that have focused on the popular musician in society – most specifically with respect to the conflicts such musicians can feel between what they want to play and what is demanded of them by their audience and the larger commercial market. Becker pointed out the vast differences between the expectations of the audience, those of the employers and those of the performer. In general, the audience expects the musician to play commercially popular tunes in an orthodox manner. The employer, concerned about money, applies financial sanctions to coerce the musician to fulfil audience expectations. The musicians, on the other hand, prefer to play the more individually expressive and esoteric forms of their music – in this case, jazz.

In this article we report some findings of our research into the inter-relationship of social and musical change among Jewish Oriental ethnic groups in Israel. This research is based on a broad approach to the ethnomusicological study of change which can be conceived as follows: the ethnomusicological study of musical change endeavours to analyse musicologically significant processes of change in terms of anthropologically or sociologically significant variables. This approach resembles that of J. Blacking who argued that ‘… we must “explain music and music-making with reference to the social, but in terms of the musical”’ (quoted in Kaeppler 1983, p. 359).