Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Modernist narratives and popular music
- 2 Rock and the facts of life
- 3 Changing patterns in society and music: the US since World War II
- 4 “If I Were a Voice”: or, The Hutchinson Family and popular song as political and social protest
- 5 Some thoughts on the measurement of popularity in music
- 6 Elvis, a review
- 7 Home cooking and American soul in black South African popular music
- 8 Rock ‘n’ roll in a very strange society
- 9 African-American music, South Africa, and apartheid
- 10 “The constant companion of man”: Separate Development, Radio Bantu, and music
- 11 Privileging the moment of reception: music and radio in South Africa
- 12 Music and radio in the People's Republic of China
- 13 Towards a new reading of Gershwin
- 14 A blues for the ages
- 15 Graceland revisited
- 16 Dvořák in America: nationalism, racism, and national race
- 17 The last minstrel show?
- 18 The Role of Rock, a review
- 19 Genre, performance, and ideology in the early songs of Irving Berlin
- 20 Epilogue: John Cage revisited
- Index
3 - Changing patterns in society and music: the US since World War II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Modernist narratives and popular music
- 2 Rock and the facts of life
- 3 Changing patterns in society and music: the US since World War II
- 4 “If I Were a Voice”: or, The Hutchinson Family and popular song as political and social protest
- 5 Some thoughts on the measurement of popularity in music
- 6 Elvis, a review
- 7 Home cooking and American soul in black South African popular music
- 8 Rock ‘n’ roll in a very strange society
- 9 African-American music, South Africa, and apartheid
- 10 “The constant companion of man”: Separate Development, Radio Bantu, and music
- 11 Privileging the moment of reception: music and radio in South Africa
- 12 Music and radio in the People's Republic of China
- 13 Towards a new reading of Gershwin
- 14 A blues for the ages
- 15 Graceland revisited
- 16 Dvořák in America: nationalism, racism, and national race
- 17 The last minstrel show?
- 18 The Role of Rock, a review
- 19 Genre, performance, and ideology in the early songs of Irving Berlin
- 20 Epilogue: John Cage revisited
- Index
Summary
The department of musicology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where I taught from 1964 to 1976, was a hotbed of radicalism in comparison with such faculties elsewhere. Under the delusion that the millenium in American education was at hand, my colleagues and I set out to dismantle barriers between historical musicology and ethnomusicology, and between all genres and styles of music. An epiphany came in the spring of 1970, when students on the campus joined others across the country in protesting the American bombing of Cambodia and the shooting of protesting students at Kent State and Jackson State. As Bruno Nettl remembers it:
Many on campus decided that students and faculty should strike, and so on the Sunday before, the musicology faculty and graduate students met, and decided not to hold classes the next week. But of course the purpose was not to do nothing, so … we planned to cancel our classes and to institute instead a group of lectures and presentations which we called “liberation classes.” … I have ever since been impressed by the ability of my colleagues to put together with hardly any notice an interesting and educational and, however one would define that, a relevant set of lectures.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Putting Popular Music in its Place , pp. 55 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995