MA in Music: Pathway in Popular Music
Popular Music Studies at Newcastle is distinguished by its encouragement of scholarly research on Western pop alongside 'traditional' and 'world' popular musics. Members of staff at ICMuS have a lengthy track record of publication, composition, performance and recording and have received invitations to speak at major international conferences (Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Cuba, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, USA), research seminars (UK, USA) and guest lectures (Chile, UK, Puerto Rico, Sweden, USA). Cross-school collaborations have resulted in major international events such as the first Popular Musics of the Hispanic and Lusophone Worlds conference, held in Newcastle in 2006 and the ¡VAMOS! festivals (ongoing). ICMuS has also hosted the 2002 IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) UK & Ireland conference, a seminar series in collaboration with Centre for Gender and Women's Studies/Instituto Camões in 2001-2002, and the 2007 BFE (British Forum For Ethnomusicology) conference entitled ‘Between Folk and Popular’.
In this pathway, you take the usual research training and dissertation (see below) and you also choose modules that deal specifically with recent methodological developments in the field of popular music studies.
Modules on this pathway
- The core module for this pathway is Studying Popular Musics in which you look at a variety of methodological approaches utilised in popular music studies, increase your knowledge of general popular music developments in the Anglo-American world from the nineteenth century to the present and gain a more detailed knowledge of some particular repertories
- Elective modules on this pathway include Popular Music and the Politics of Authenticity, Music and Globalisation, Debates in the Philosophy and Theory of Music and Advanced Studies in Ethnomusicology
- You can also choose from final-year advanced undergraduate modules (recent modules have included Music and Identity in the Caribbean, Music Gender and Sexuality, Noise, Funk and Freedom and The Roots of Hip Hop
- Your dissertation will be on a topic related to recent debates in popular music studies, approach one or more aspects of popular music and/or the discourse attending to it, or engage in an extended study of a particular repertoire, artist or concept.
Some facts about the teaching of popular music at ICMuS
- We run a highly successful BMus degree in Popular and Contemporary Music (see here for more)
- Popular music is a vital part of ICMUS’s claim for inclusivity, as recognised in the Centre’s leadership of Centre of Excellence for Teaching and Learning (CETL) for Music and Inclusivity
- Our research profile is committed to engaging with all aspects of popular music and popular musicology (click here for more on this)
- As part of its ongoing commitment to the ‘democratisation of the possible’, ICMuS hosts the online journal Radical Musicology.
Staff teaching and researching in this area
- Paul Attinello (Modernist and Postmodernist music and theory, especially since World War II, music and gender) click here for more
- Ian Biddle (music & politics; gender & sexuality; psychoanalysis; popular musics) click here for more
- David Clarke (analysis & theory; music & culture) click here for more
- Nanette De Jong (ethnomusicology; the African diaspora; Salsa; memory; performance) click here for more
- Richard Elliott (loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music) click here for more
- Will Edmondes (improvisation, studio-based composition, Hip Hop, Funk, Jazz & counterculture) click here for more
- Kirsten Gibson (early modern English secular song; print culture; gender; historiography and critical theory) click here for more
- Bennett Hogg (composition, ethnomusicology, cultural history and theory of technology, psychoanalysis) click here for more
- Bethany Lowe (early 20th-century music, music theory and analysis, performance analysis) click here for more
- Goffredo Plastino (ethnomusicology; world music/world beat; traditional & popular musics, especially of the Mediterranean) click here for more