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.

One dominant issue in the writing of music histories is the question of how (or indeed whether) a musician's life and work can be interwoven convincingly. In recent years, music biographers have begun to reassess the historical legacies of many significant musicians with this issue in mind, but their critical reflections have for the most part focused on composers. This article seeks to transfer some of this rethinking – particularly on the life/work question – to the twentieth-century classical performer. Doing so reveals a historiography of the performer which sharply divides life and work in a way that is disciplinarily entrenched between biographical approaches on the one hand and empirical approaches to recordings on the other. After illustrating the nature and development of this division, I conclude by calling for greater scholarly convergence and suggest two directions forward, taking leads from artistic research and popular music studies in doing so.

Drawing upon Rancière's argument that aesthetics instigates politics, Latour's rethinking of agency as relational, and Ortiz's work on Afro-Cuban music aesthetics, this article explores how the experience of aesthetic pleasure in Cuban timba grooves makes politics audible and affective in novel ways. Through a combination of ethnographic and musical analyses of Havana D'Primera's performance of ‘Pasaporte’ live at Casa de la Música in 2010, it unpacks the political affordances of call-and-response singing and polyrhythmic timba grooves among participating listeners in Havana. In contrast to the recurrent tendency to exclude musical details from research into the politics of music, this article suggests that engaging grooves and catchy melodies do important political work as musical actants by creating affective communities and new expressions of political critique. The concept of musical actants serves as a lens through which to view these pregnant interactions between rhythmic, melodic, social, and political meanings in time.

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.

After Cage and Tudor visited Japan in 1962, the term ‘Cage Shock’ circulated widely among the Japanese public. My interviews with Japanese composers suggest that the term ‘Cage Shock’ oversimplifies the reception of Cage's debut in Japan. Composer Yūji Takahashi stated that Cage would have met Japanese audiences well prepared for his visit by musical trends present in Japan as early as the late 1940s. Building on the statement that the Japanese avant-garde was thriving before Cage visited Japan in 1962, this article aims to deconstruct the term ‘Cage Shock’ by restoring the complexity of the reception of Cage in Japan and by analysing the reasons why critics adopted the term ‘Cage Shock’. I argue that ‘Cage Shock’ has functioned more as a media buzzword that sensationalizes the story of Cage's impact on Japan than as an objective description of Japanese reaction to Cage.

This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

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.

This article examines the meaning of Western music performances in interwar Shanghai through the theoretical framework of performativity that originated in John Austin's speech act and Judith Butler's notion of identity as performed. The early concerts of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra (SMO), I suggest, were an assertion of settler sovereignty in a treaty port such as Shanghai. Therefore, Chinese musicians performing Western music – propagated through the establishment of the National Conservatory of Music by Chinese elites in Shanghai's French Settlement in 1927 – was the embodiment of three contradictory ideals: colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Zooming in on four SMO concerts that featured Chinese musicians in 1929, I argue that they were sites of identity and power negotiation, the SMO and the Chinese musicians asserting quite distinct performative utterances. On the one hand, the performing Chinese body enacted the cosmopolitan outlook that the Municipal Council was eager to project, not only for the sake of ideology but also to increase SMO's concert revenue by appealing to the increasing number of Chinese concert attendees. On the other hand, it meant national glory to Chinese residents in Shanghai, marking Chinese musicians participating in a global musical network. Lastly, this study draws attention to the diverse geographies of Western music in the twentieth century and its coeval development beyond the West, testifying to the timely need for a global music history in which the musicking of Western music in so many Asian cities should be interwoven into its narrative.

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 article examines the underexplored history of the 1973 Philadelphia Orchestra China tour and retheorizes twentieth-century musical diplomacy as a process of ritualization. As a case study, I consult bilingual archives and incorporate interviews with participants in this event, which brings together individual narratives and public opinions. By contextualizing this musical diplomacy in the Cold War détente and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I argue for the complex set of relations mobilized by Western art music in 1973. This tour first created a sense of co-dependency between musicians and politicians. It also engaged Chinese audiences by revitalizing pre-Cultural Revolution sonic memories. Second, I argue that the significance of the 1973 Orchestra tour lies in the ritualization of Western art music as diplomatic etiquette, based on further contextualization of this event in the historical trajectory of Sino-US relations and within the entrenched Chinese ideology of liyue (ritual and music).

This article uses Joan Baez's impersonations of Bob Dylan from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century as performances where multiple fields of complementary discourse converge. The article is organized in three parts. The first part addresses the musical details of Baez's acts of mimicry and their uncanny ability to summon Dylan's predecessors. The second considers mimicry in the context of identity, specifically race and asymmetrical power relations in the history of American popular music. The third and final section analyses her imitations in the context of gender and reproductive labour, focusing on the way various media have shaped her persona and her relationship to Dylan. The article engages critical theoretical work informed by psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory, and Marxist feminism.

This article examines the lessons that Pierre Boulez learned about sound from Antonin Artaud, suggesting that Boulez's ideas about musical writing (écriture) took shape as the composer imagined and appropriated forms of non-European expression. Boulez sometimes acknowledged the influence of ‘extra-European’ sounds in his music, but also insisted that music should not be a ‘simple ethnographic reconstruction’. Artaud, who explicitly ‘reconstructed’ the ethnographic other in a 1947 radio broadcast, will become my foil to show how Boulez's philosophy of writing hinged on an East–West dualism. I follow Boulez to South America with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault to suggest that he took cues from Afro-Bahian Candomblé when he wrote Le Marteau sans maître. The conclusion reflects on the lessons that Boulez and Artaud might teach us about sound; namely, that recent musicological claims on behalf of the ontology of sound have modernist origins.

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.

Kim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

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.