The Musical Renaissance of the late Victorian era incurred both rediscovery and reappraisal of the English musical heritage. The isolated endeavours of a handful of pioneering collectors from the oral tradition stimulated the institution of a Folk-Song Society with the aim of gathering what remained of a rapidly disappearing national resource. This article examines competing interpretations of the nature and potential application of folk-song. Cecil Sharp, who quickly assumed leadership of the folk-song movement, adopted and refined the notion that communal origin and transmission imbued folk-song with the national character and spirit. Its strategic use in the education system would, he believed, promote not just musical revival but a general national revival as well. In counterpoint to Sharp's folk-song construct, the hiterto marginalised contribution of musical antiquarian Frank Kidson is reassessed. From an ever-diminishing position of authority, Kidson continued to dismiss Sharp's new orthodoxy by insisting that most of what passed for ‘folk’ was nothing more than the remnants of old popular song. The article concludes by seeking to explain why Sharp's construct endured.

Léo Ferré exemplifies what is now widely regarded in France as the golden era of la chanson française during the 1950s and 1960s. This article examines how one singer-songwriter attempted to deal in his own, highly idiosyncratic way with the contraints of working within the record industry, and focuses on the development of his ambivalent relationship with the record label owner and producer, Eddie Barclay. Although sympathetic to Ferré's cause, Barclay also adopted a pragmatic approach, particularly where questions of censorship were concerned, as he attempted to balance commercial necessity, legal requirements as well as the creative demands of the artist. The discussion also explores how Ferré has contributed to contemporary intellectual debates relating to the significance of popular music within a French context. Ferré showed marked resistance to North American influence and middle-of-the-road pop music, particularly la chanson yéyé, but he was by no means not-influenced by the arrival of rock in France.

Television has been conspicuously neglected in studies of popular music, and music has been notably absent from most accounts of television. The thought that this neglect might be significant was taken as the starting point for this special edition of the journal. Unlike some subjects (such as popular music and gender/sexuality, for example), where it is readily apparent that a number of people are busily pursuing research and where there is a history of sustained engagement in a range of related theories and debates, it was not clear initially who, if anyone, was seriously thinking about or researching the relationship between music and television. Even work on popular music and video, which once grabbed the imagination of popular music and media scholars, has faded from the academic agenda. We hoped that the call for papers might strike a chord and prompt new thoughts about this area.

This paper explores some forms of rock/rap hybridity and a historically related shift toward a greater eclecticism in consumption practices in popular music in the United States in the late 1990s, a period marked by the decline of rock as the dominant mode of popular music. This decline has repercussions not simply for a musical style, but additionally for the privileged subjects who are both the producers and consumers of that music: predominantly white, middle-class males. A number of different strategies have emerged which attempt to develop new positions for these white suburbanites to occupy in the contemporary music-cultural terrain in order to re-assert their hegemony as both producers and consumers. On the producers' side, the most common strategy has been to develop hybrid forms which combine rock with styles of its musical competitors – most notably, of hip hop music and culture. On the consumer side, the response has been the emergence of a ‘neo-eclectic’ form of listening where a number of formerly disparate or even hostile musical forms are consumed by a single (white suburban) individual.

This article addresses a gap in the historical study of music on television by revisiting North American popular music in conjunction with the broadcast medium's early stage of development. Central to its analysis is the fact that music has always been deemed essential to the character and success of television. Emphasising the circulating discourses of ‘opportunity’, the article isolates the ways in which some musicians and others in various sectors of the music industry regarded the new medium as a positive influence at its inception. Among key considerations at the time were issues of musical performance style and aesthetics, repertoire, promotional capabilities, career enhancement, and additional leisure options for audiences.

Popular music studies generally celebrate the power of music to empower the construction of individual and social identities, a site of positive self-realisation. But such an approach risks overlooking a significant element in the musical transaction. How, for example, did the inhabitants of Jericho feel? Or President Noriega when musically besieged by US troops in Panama City? Or street kids in Wollongong, New South Wales, driven out of shopping malls by the strategic broadcasting of Frank Sinatra recordings? Every time we applaud the deployment of music as a way of articulating physical, cognitive and cultural territory, we are also applauding the potential or actual displacement or even destruction of other identities. On occasions that displacement may well be conducted as an act of extreme violence: music as pain. This negative side of the territorialism of music, however, receives little attention in popular music studies, even though it is potentially the dark side of any musical transaction. In attempting to redress the balance, this article is a ‘trailer’ for a joint investigation into the use of popular music as a weapon. It represents our initial attempts to think through some of the issues surrounding popular music and its use as a tool of repression and the deliberate inflicting of pain.

This article explores political, cultural and musical issues surrounding the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis, particularly over Jerusalem, which each party uses to symbolise and promote their own perception of the conflict. Specifically, I examine selected popular musical landmarks that capture the essence of the struggle from the ultra-nationalistic tones of the 1960s and 1970s to the more reconciliatory ones in the 1990s advocating peace. Special attention is given to musical cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian singers who played a strong role in the promotion of peace within a utopian dream of coexistence between Arabs and Jews.

Television is an essential part of the star-making machinery of the music business and music accompanies nearly all television programmes, and yet the relationship between the two is uneasy. Television does not seem to be an essential part of musical culture and adds little to music aesthetically. Music has had little impact on the form or aesthetics of television. And yet television has certainly had an impact on music and particularly on the mediation of rock and the formation of the modern pop/rock aesthetic. Here it is not music in television that is important but television in music. The 1950s was a significant turning point in popular music history not so much because of the musical revolution of rock ‘n’ roll but because of the impact of television.

Joni Mitchell has recently been critically received and marketed as a ‘classic’ songwriter. Yet the existing literature has hardly begun to explore the sophistication of her technical achievement. One of her most distinctive contributions is in the realm of harmonic innovation. Through a comprehensive survey of her work, I have found that Mitchell's songs fall under five categories of harmonic organisation: modal, polymodal, chromatic, polytonal, and pedal point. I examine these categories in detail, choosing a variety of examples from the early years of her career (1966–1972). My analyses are intended to contribute to a more knowledgeable appreciation of Mitchell's intellectual stature as a composer. While many songwriters have been inventive within traditional tonal harmony, Mitchell's work is impressive for its extended exploration of alternatives to single key structures and the major/minor system.

If rock'n'roll represented new, sexualised gender identities for the teenagers of the late 1950s, why (and how) were such identities constructed through the multiple voices of the group? In Buddy Holly's ‘Oh, Boy!’ the chorus plays a prominent supportive role in relation to the lead singer; but its continual echoing of the singer's ‘Oh boy!’ allows also for a literal hearing of cries of mutual desire and admiration between two men. This representation of the ‘buddy group’ has continuities with other group, or dual representations of male identity, where mutual, male selves and desires are constructed around an imagined, comforting woman. The presence of traces of the maternal body (Kristeva's ‘semiotic’ sphere) is audible in ‘Oh, Boy!’ through the chorus's separation of rhythm and melody, and in particular, its use of ‘children's rhythms’, consistent with those analysed by the musicologist Constantin Brailoiu as a cross-cultural phenomenon. In ‘Oh, Boy!’ children's rhythms are reworked in a dialogue between singer and chorus, and between guitar and chorus in the instrumental break, in such a way that after the break the singer is able to resolve the rhythmic tensions introduced in the first half of the song and get ‘everything right’. The new symbolic identity of male adolescent independence is audibly structured by the semiotic, so reversing the surface hearing of the song as involving the subordination of the chorus to lead singer in the consensual hierarchy of ‘buddy’ relations. The relationship of Buddy Holly to Bo Diddley adds a further dimension to this structure, where ostensible equality cannot mask the uncomfortable social hierarchy of the white rock star and black mentor, and where an appeal to the other as ‘boy’ would evoke not the buddy group, but slavery.

Traditional genres, modern popular music, ‘classical’ concert music and other styles of music-making in Japan can be viewed as diverse elements framed within a musical culture. Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and Williams' of dominant, residual and emergent traditions, are helpful in formulating an inclusive approach, in contrast to the prevailing demarcation between traditional and popular music research. Koizumi Fumio first challenged the disciplinary separation of research on historical ‘Japanese music’ and modern hybrid music around 1980, and the influence of his work is reflected in a small number of subsequent writings. In Japanese popular music, evidence for musical habitus and residual traits of past practice can be sought not only in characteristics typical of musicological analysis; modal, harmonic and rhythmic structures; but also in aspects of the music's organisation, presentation, conceptualisation and reception. Among these are vocal tone and production techniques, technical and evaluative discourse, and contextual features such as staging, performer-audience interaction, the agency of individual musicians, the structure of corporate music-production, and the use of songs as vehicles for subjectivity. Such an inclusive approach to new and old musical practices in Japan enables demonstration of ways in which popular music is both part of Japanese musical culture and an authentic vehicle for contemporary Japanese identity.

Television is one of the earliest ways that children gain access to popular music. The child's early experience of both music and television does not necessarily separate out ‘music alone’ from his or her evolving musical appreciation. The co-operation of television and popular music encourage particular modes of attention and expression for the child as both viewer and listener. Movement, gesture, and the response of the body to the visual and aural cues of music-television may be seen to inform this appreciation. The child learns, feels and demonstrates that they have done so. This is guided and inspired by what they hear and see.

The country singer Gram Parsons (1946-73) has in the last decade been increasingly cited as a seminal influence upon the development of contemporary alt.country and the roots/americana revivial. This article critiques Parsons and his music within the realm of contextual theology, using him as a bridge to examine the wider issue of what a theology of country music might entail. Both Parsons and Country Music in general are strongly religious in language, ethos and culture, yet the theology articulated both explicitly and implicitly is not evangelical as those outside the genre and culture might assume. Rather, the theology of country music involves a gospel of liminality, a theology of redemptive transgression that is expressed in ‘white spirituals’ where the song is a locus of grace. The article asks if Parsons was a locus of grace; are his songs those of liminal presence; does country music employ a theology of redemptive transgression?

This article argues for the prematurity of any dismissal of the notion of authenticity as meaningful within popular music discourse. It synthesises a range of views as to how authenticity is constructed, and offers a tri-partite typology dependent on asking who, rather than what, is being authenticated. It focuses on rock and folk genres, but also argues that the generic nature of the typology makes it applicable to any other genre wherein listeners are concerned to ask whether a musical utterance can be construed as sincere.

Boy bands embody contradictory representations of their own individuality and authenticity and the corporate nature of their genesis and presentation. Boy band members, the impresarios and entrepreneurs behind them, and the producers of television shows about them must contend in their work and relationships with the social and symbolic conventions of their historical moment. In this article I analyse representations of boy bands on the American TV shows The Monkees (1966-8) and Making the Band (2000-) in order to highlight shifts in the ways the performers and production personnel have been represented and have sought to represent themselves. The internal push for legitimacy and autonomy of the young stars of these shows, acting from within a perceived but unstable gap between ‘musician’ and ‘employee’, exists in tension with the external push of TV and music producers, network, record label and marketing departments for rational, predictable products and behaviours that fit within an overall business plan. While the rock ideology of authenticity has lost much of the force it had in the 1960s and change in representational conventions seem to indicate a general acceptance of the overt commercialism of chart-busting pop, this article shows that even within the mainstream flows a strong current of concern over issues of authenticity, legitimacy and autonomy.

Recent years have seen an increase in pop music on television, replacing its more traditional incidental music. It is now dominant as stock music on television, filling expanding continuity and advertising spaces. The licensing of pop music for screen use is increasingly important for the music industry, spawning a new form of ‘multipurpose music’ which, as well as being music in its own right, can also be resold as stock music for television. While in the 1980s there was a rush to tie-in pop music with films, in the 1990s, it increasingly was to tie pop music with television. This article documents and explores this transition.

There are few studies offering a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between popular music and youth cutting across both school and leisure sites. This article bridges missing links between girls and boys as performers and listeners of popular music in school and leisure sites. The aim is to investigate how high school pupils' discourses on popular music take place in different settings (i) with relation to gender, and (ii) with relation to the nature of musical practices. Through my ethnographic study conducted in Japan, pupils' techniques for employing popular music in various sites are clarified; firstly, in the formal site (classroom); secondly, in the semi-formal site (brass band club in school / high school band event); thirdly, in the informal site (boys as performers / visual band costume play gatherings). Three categorisations of popular music are theorised: ‘personal’, ‘common’ and ‘standard’. Boys' strategies for negotiation and differentiation, and girls' tactics for utilising common music in order to conceal their own personal music are found in each site.

Against theories of cultural hybridity and disembodied flows of recorded media, this article argues for the continued relevance of the concept of regional musical scenes. It takes as examples contemporary punk as it exists in four cities and shows that there are different local accents in Washington D.C., Austin, Texas, Toronto and Mexico City. The conclusion describes some aspects of the social organisation of cultural contacts between these scenes. The article is part of a larger project of multi-site ethnography of youth subculture and resistance to globalisation.

Identifying a television channel on-air has become increasingly important in the multi-channel age. For viewers it is a navigational necessity; for broadcasting executives it contributes to corporate branding. But despite the fact that television is an audiovisual medium, the so-called channel idents which appear between programmes are almost always discussed in terms of their visual rather than their audio characteristics. This article aims to go some way to correct this imbalance in arguing that the latter have evolved in a distinctive manner. Initially borrowing the idea of the fanfare from the cinema, UK broadcasters in recent years have developed a softer style, then drawn on dance and other forms of popular music and finally employed sound effects in the production of channel idents.