In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance’. Today, exactly fifty years later, the position of popular music studies within the academy is far removed from Browne's experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted solely to popular music, scholars regularly present papers on popular music topics at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of popular music courses. Popular music has even become a viable area of interest within music scholarship.

Inspired by Brittany Howard's solo album Jaime (2019), this contribution creates a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American Literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I argue that Black queer strategies of listening and musicking contributes to a new layer of music, the dream space, which helps us understand the impact of music on everyday life.

This contribution reflects on the historical and present condition of the academic field of popular music studies' relationship to the non-academic public, particularly within the context of increased institutional demands for scholarly ‘public engagement'. I begin by discussing various reasons why a continued, sustained engagement with non-academic voices and communities should remain a central priority of popular music studies. I then move to a discussion of certain vantage points and modes of expertise that popular music scholars can offer to broader musical publics, particularly as relating to the political economy of commercial music media and urgent necessities of historical archiving and preservation. In closing, I argue that a renewed commitment to ‘public engagement' also offers a more robust engagement with our field’s own history, and might serve as a way of honouring its intellectual pioneers, many of whom did foundational work well outside the traditional boundaries of the academy.

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic rise in dissertations, theses, and other academic publications exploring hip-hop music, while college courses on hip-hop history have become commonplace. The growing prominence of hip-hop music in our curricular and research agendas, however, does not necessarily make the study of music at colleges and universities more inclusive. In fact, the increasing attention musicologists and music theorists are paying to rap paradoxically threatens to shore up the value of whiteness in the discipline. This contribution addresses the problem by seeking answers to three interrelated questions: (1) What can the incorporation of hip-hop teach us about the challenges of ‘diversity' in music departments primarily devoted to the study and performance of Western classical music? (2) Does the work of non-Black scholars who write about music made by Black bodies contribute to the freeing of those bodies, or merely represent yet another way that they are consumed by white supremacy? (3) How can popular music studies help to overcome ongoing racial inequality within schools and departments of music? The arrival of hip-hop in music departments represents an opportunity to move in bold new directions. If we want to create a more just future for musicology and music theory, then the study of hip-hop in these fields will need to be accompanied by efforts to introduce forms of ‘significant difference’ that transform our respective disciplines as well as the institutions within which we work.

This Afterward reflects upon the three articles of the symposium by Francesca Royster, Jack Hamilton, and Loren Kajiwaka. The author considers the contemporary ramifications of popular music studies being overlooked by the field of musicology at large in the United States.

The textbook historical account of post-war New Music describes a logical and radical succession from Schoenberg to Webern to the Darmstadt School. Against this narrative of inevitability, I provide a more contingent account of the institutionalization of a particular discourse of New Music in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. What is contingent here is not so much why or how certain figures – chiefly Pierre Boulez and René Leibowitz – were important, but the shape and the logic by which this importance was established and maintained. Accordingly, this article first of all provides a summary of just what it meant for Leibowitz's understanding of New Music to be reproduced in an institutional capacity. From here, I undertake close critical reading of Boulez's break with Leibowitz in order to discover what, exactly, Boulez began to do differently to establish a new practice.

If the ideal artistic collaboration is one of shared vision, open communication, and exquisite professionalism then Martha Graham and Carlos Chávez strayed far from it in the making of Dark Meadow (1946). As this article documents, their relationship was full of antagonism, misunderstanding, disdainful gossip, and regret on both sides. Three sources of conflict are examined: 1) a misunderstanding between the two collaborators on the meaning and utility of Greek allusions in art created conflicting aesthetic expectations for a dance with a plot derived from Greek mythology; 2) both artists defied the modernist community's expectations about how each of them should perform their gender identity as artists; and 3) similarly, the press's consistent Othering of Chávez in racist, nationalist terms was contagious, influencing Graham's beliefs about what Mexican music could or should be. Despite significant obstacles, Chávez and Graham produced a work that continues to represent the mid-century Modernist aesthetic.

This article addresses an emerging phenomenon in which Brazilian popular musicians have begun to depart from popular song (canção popular) in favour of free improvisation in response to rising authoritarianism. As a case study, I examine the creative project Carta Branca, which brings together popular and experimental musicians from styles such as MPB and hip-hop to perform freely improvised concerts. Following a consideration of the history of Brazilian canção popular, the article discusses how contemporary popular musicians engage in free improvisation as an alternative means of musical critique. I contend that their actions constitute evidence of a broader ‘post-canção’ moment, with the potential to facilitate more flexible and collective ways of responding to Brazil's reactionary moment. The article further discusses how the musicians’ improvisational turn fosters a renewed engagement with a form of cultural improvisation tied to understandings of national identity and being in the world specific to Brazil.