IASPM Journal

“Bring Your A-game and Leave your Ego at the Door!”

2022-09-27T03:22:56-07:00

The established industry practices of collaborative songwriting sessions and camps are vital sites for the acquisition and transferal of songwriting skills and knowledge. While there is a limited body of research into collaborative songwriting and writing camps as such, there is even less academic work done on their role as (informal) settings for training and education of songwriters. Based on fieldwork in an international songwriting camp, the article maps out and explores how aspiring songwriters are socialized into the creative practices of songwriting. Understanding collaborative songwriting as a form of social interaction, and thus inherently characterized by unequal distributions of and negotiations over (creative) power, it analyzes its frameworks of knowledge as an assemblage that is continuously (re-)produced through its ongoing interactional practices.

Self Production

2022-10-24T09:41:44-07:00

Instinctively I have always kept my own music making and producing separate from my research. However, in three recent presentations I have tentatively drawn on my own self-production practice to consider firstly, how it has intersected with what has been a more conventional ethnographic research approach and secondly, to shine a spotlight on the creative process itself examining, in particular, on those ‘triggers’ in the production process that serve to evoke a fresh emotional response necessary for an acceptable recorded performance, particularly when the material is very familiar.

Drawing on current practice, this article builds on this work to examine this notion of ‘surprising oneself’ and to argue, that not only is it a key facet of the art form but is wholly necessary for the artist-producer to maintain a fresh approach in the compositional, performative and subsequent editing and mixing process.

"Guitar Thinking" and "Genre Thinking" among an Online Community of Guitarists

2022-10-12T18:54:33-07:00

Researchers and performers have long intuited that popular music’s organizational features are linked to the physical-tonal properties of the electric guitar. Yet current evidence is either too broad or too specific to support reliable generalizations. Ongoing corpus studies offer remarkable explanatory power in clarifying stylistic trends from a listener’s perspective but are not currently equipped to address the kinesthetic aspects of instrument performance.

In this study I employ statistical methods of corpus analysis to explore how popular-music guitarists navigate the fretboard. I do so via a digital collection of guitar tablature: 257 rhythm-guitar parts sampled from seven decades of songs (1954–2019). An analysis of fretboard transitions reveals a highly idiomatic fretboard profile that aligns best with the minor pentatonic scale. This empirically supports standing intuitions about the relationship between pentatonicism and guitar performance, while underscoring the methodological and potential ethical shortcomings of a strictly harmonic perspective on popular music’s organization.

“Be the Signal”

2023-01-12T08:02:00-08:00

Popular music pedagogy has for decades educated students in the foundational skills of music production. Yet the agency of professional practitioners illuminates that music producers also utilise tacit skills in communication and psychology to garnish musical works that target aesthetic intentions. These soft skills take time to develop in young people and so pedagogy in this field must target this at the beginning of a student’s higher education journey. Pedagogy in this field is complex and previous research efforts have highlighted the usefulness of integrated formal and practice-led collaborative educational approaches. This study develops this discourse further by investigating the utility of pedagogical video resources used in a flipped educational framework. The subsequent case study of the course MPP 1 found that students valued this approach and highlighted video length, accessibility and the educator’s embodiment of practitioner traits as integral to their learning more holistic approaches to popular music production.

Learning Music for Fun, Not Credit

2023-03-27T09:30:26-07:00

This article is a critical reflection of a small, practice-based project involving a university big band. Music was written specially for the project by the author, who is the band director, and this big band is an extra-curricular ensemble made up of both students and musicians from the local community. The project uses an Artistic Research approach, in which insights are gained through the practice and for which the artistic artefacts (in this case two pieces of music) form a significant part of the research. After the performances some of the band members were interviewed about their experience of the project and other aspects of playing in the band. Artistic Research is an increasingly used practice-based method in jazz research and there is scope for it to be utilized more widely in popular music.

British Rock Roadies

2023-01-26T04:53:59-08:00

Important changes in British live sound occurred in the early 1970s: Companies such as Feldon Audio began importing US components like JBL and transformed the industry, venues started to install costume-built systems that were capable of successfully amplifying rock acts, sound companies made millionaire investments to improve sound technology, England became a leader in mixing consoles manufacturing, US speaker cabinet designs influenced a new era in sound. Despite these key economic and material changes, in this article I argue that an equally important shift in live sound occurred in the late 1960s. Instead of drastic technological improvement, concert sound developed thanks to a new actor in the music industry: roadies. Drawing from archival research and semi structured interviews to British roadies active in the late 1960s, this article focuses on their practices and puts them at the center of live sound development.

Valuing in Songwriting

2022-12-02T09:21:13-08:00

Valuing is a sub task of the creative process where the agent of creativity evaluates the possibles afforded to them by the domain and field. To make such evaluations the agent must apply their domain knowledge and an internalised system of the field . This paper explores how the songwriter, as agent, constructs a criterion of appropriateness based on such knowledge through which to assess their creative possibilities.

These criteria conceived by the songwriter operates as a competent yet fallible audience. The valuing process is progressive, moving from the imagined audience of the songwriting agent to be refined by developmental interactions with songwriting, production and record label teams. We may also transfer such a criterion to the audience, as a criterion of effectiveness, in which the chosen ideas are evaluated.

Creativity and Education

2023-04-05T09:28:21-07:00

Formal popular music education (PME) faces a number of challenges; not least how to sufficiently engage learners in creative tasks that help to develop their skills and knowledge, whilst at the same time preparing them for employment in the: ‘ever-changing dynamic of the industries they hope to work in’ (McIntyre et al, 2016, p. 2).

The following study draws upon data gathered during a Practice Based Enquiry (PBE) and the specific context of teaching pop music songwriting and production is explored through the application of the ‘Service Model’ for Pop Music, Creativity and Commerce by an experienced pop music producer undertaking the role of researcher and ‘ETL’ (ETL). Importantly, it it illustrates how to engage learners within an industry-style creative task and shows how the team leader’s role can help to give students important access to the social interactions of the field throughout the process.

Woodshedding

2022-11-02T19:15:34-07:00

In the jazz imaginary, taking one’s “axe” to the fictive “woodshed” has long described a solitary and disciplined process of cultivating virtuosic skill in preparation for the competitive arenas of public performance. Despite an abundance of jazz research, the woodshed and its complex social, aesthetic, and political entailments have gone almost entirely unaddressed in the literature. This paper traces the emergence of this peculiar object through a diverse archive of journalistic, critical, and historical sources—in and beyond jazz—to delineate the contours of virtuosity’s everyday reproduction. I argue that the woodshed and woodshedding mark a constitutive ideological moment in the dynamic between private practice and public performance, a moment that uniquely expresses the gendered logic of social reproduction under capitalism. Attention to the woodshed illuminates largely unexplored relations between musical practice, reproductive labor, and aesthetic exemplarity that together constitute a dominant ideology of music-making in the United States.

Scoring Loss in a Contemporary New Zealand Musical

2023-02-15T11:09:52-08:00

This paper functions as an exegesis of a recent New Zealand musical, Mum’s Kitchen. The show was a creative practice research project and involved a collaborative writing/composition process with a team of four creatives. The article explores explore the confluence of musical voices within the work with a focus on the distinct musical choices made in relation to particular narrative themes. Taking a cue from Murphy (2014), we analyse the songs in Mum’s Kitchen that directly express loss and nostalgia. We suggest that the two composers have their own strategies for “scoring” this theme: use of “anachronistic” styles (such as a country ballad) to evoke a past era, and a collection of contemporary harmonic devices (open chord voicings, harmonic ambiguity) that evoke emptiness and uncertainty. We then argue that [author] as orchestrator both unified these voices through a consistent sound palette, while also emphasising these themes through his sonic choices.

Artistic Research in Popular Music: A Critical Evaluation of Potentials and Challenges

2023-02-03T05:40:00-08:00

The article discusses artistic research as a new paradigm. For this purpose, a contextualizing analysis on practice research is first conducted. Thereby, the essential points of criticism and potentials of artistic research are elaborated from the point of view of epistemic injustice and decolonizing approaches. Following on from this, artistic research is discussed as a promising approach to research and teaching in popular music. Topics and perspectives are suggested, and ultimately a call is made for collaborative research to develop a ‘mosaic epistemology’ and ‘epistemological pluralism’.

Disqueras intermedias, categorías de mercado y cultura institucional de las disqueras en Colombia: el caso de Discos Ondina

2021-12-09T15:09:01-08:00

Through the analysis of the institutional culture of a local record company, the article explores the role of medium-size record companies in the consolidation of market categories around musical genres and styles in mid-20th century Colombia. Starting from the questioning of the pertinence of using the concept of independent label in the Latin American context, specific aspects of Ondina Fonográfica's business are explored, such as technological independence, commercial strategies, the search for local artists, the opening of markets and the establishment of niches, and the organization of the catalog and the target audiences. The exercise highlights important differences with the majors/indies model extensively used to study the record industries in the Anglo-American context, such as unimportant role of talent scouts and a conservative tendency towards the creation of new market niches in small record labels. At the end, new routes are proposed to explore more complex systems than the classic binary model, using less deterministic concepts to study the richness of sound exchanges fostered by the recording industries in Latin America throughout the 20th century.

Practice Research Special Issue Editorial

2023-06-29T06:32:08-07:00