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Popular Music History (print) ISSN 1740-7133 Popular Music History (online) ISSN 1743-1646

Charles Hamm

Popular Music and Historiography

Charles Hamm is Professor emeritus of Music at Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA. He is one of the most prominent scholarly writers about American popular music. His numerous books include Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, Music in the New World, Putting Popular Music in its Place and, a major critical edition of all of Irving Berlins early songs, Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907 1914 Department of Music, Dartmouth College, Hinman Box 6187, Hanover NH 03755 USA. charles.hamm@dartmouth.edu

The year 1981 marked the founding of IASPM (the International Association for the Study of Popular Music) and also the publication of the rst issue of the journal Popular Music by Cambridge University Press. Though there has been no ofcial connection between IASPM and Popular Music, many of the same scholars have been involved in both ventures and it seems fair to say that the two, taken together, have played a major role in the proliferation, institutionalization and legitimization of the study of popular music over the past several decades. The study of popular music extends beyond IASPM and Popular Music, admittedly. The journal Popular Music and Society is devoted largely to sociological studies of popular music. The Society for Music Theory and the Society for American Music convene popular music study groups at their annual conventions; and the meetings of many other societies, including the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Modern Language Association, and the American Historical Society, often include papers and even entire sessions devoted to popular music. Also, individual scholars from a wide range of disciplines have written about popular music from the perspective of their respective elds. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that the axis of IASPM and Popular Music represents the mainstream of popular music studies today. IASPM is in fact a network that extends beyond the international organization and its biennial conferences to national branches in Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Scandinavia, Latin America, Australia, and elsewhere, each with its own
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW.

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conferences and publications. Members of IASPM in various countries have been instrumental in establishing institutes for the study of popular music, in setting up courses of study leading to undergraduate and advanced degrees in popular music studies, and in solidifying the legitimacy of the eld through various scholarly activities. Technically speaking, the study of popular music is a branch of musicology, a discipline that claims for itself the scholarly study of music, wherever it is found historically or geographically (Randel 2003: 524), but the new eld has established an intellectual, methodological and ideological prole that has little in common with institutionized musicology. Mainstream popular music studies, as dened above, takes a synchronic approach to its subject matter, dealing with the present state of things and how they got to that point. A tabulation of the chronological range of the subject matter of articles published in Popular Music for the years 1987 and 1993 veries this:1 19th century 19001954 post-1955 5 11 85

An additional 11 articles deal with general theoretical issues applicable to any era, and seven more discuss traditional or ethnic musics in a non-time-specic manner. By contrast, historical musicology2 deals with the entire span of Western European history, from early Christianity through the 20th century. A tabulation of articles published in The Journal of the American Musicological Society for the same period, 19871993, reveals the following coverage of chronological periods:3 early Christian era (chant) 12th14th centuries 15th16th centuries 17th century 18th century 19th century 20th century 6 9 15 3 8 10 124

1. This time span was chosen because popular music studies didnt take on a distinctive prole for several years. Special issues of the journal that appeared during this time are included in the tabulation, but not the Middle Eight section of brief commentary found in each issue. 2. Ethnomusicology is a quite different discipline from historical musicology, at least in the United States, and none of what follows is applicable to it. 3. I have tabulated articles according to century rather than the style periods constructed by musicologists (Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, etc.). 4. Almost all of these articles deal with the rst half of the 20th century. Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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Six other articles are concerned with non-Western music or with abstract theoretical issues. The methodological and ideological bias of a given discipline is more difcult to quantify than its chronological range, but one can generalize that popular music studies shares with many of the social sciences an indebtedness to theoretical and political modes of thought originating with the Frankfurt School and several generations of French theorists,5 with a particular focus on the production and reception of music and issues of gender, race, class, hegemony and postcolonialism. The chief object of study has been neither the music itself nor those who perform it, but rather the ways in which popular music functions in the social, political and economic fabric of society. By contrast, the musicologist is rst and foremost a historian, as Claude Palisca (1963: 119) put it, and Joseph Kerman (1985) famously likened mainstream historical musicology to German historiography of the 19th century,6 the practitioners of which, in the words of R. G. Collinwood, set to work to ascertain all the facts they could. The result was a vast increase of detailed historical knowledge, based to an unprecedented degree on accurate and critical examination of evidence (quoted in Kerman 1985: 43). In like fashion, 20th-century musicologists set out to amass empirical data on composers, compositions, institutions, musical instruments, and the like, and also to dene stylistic features of the music of various eras, making use of printed and manuscript music, civil and church documents, correspondence, period writings, and similar hard evidence. Oliver Strunk, a central gure in the establishment of musicology as a respected discipline in the United States, impressed on his students at Princeton that musicology was basically a problemsolving discipline dedicated to putting things in order, and Gilbert Chase would begin his lecture courses in American music with the admonition that without dates, there would be no history. This sketchy comparison of popular music studies and musicology is not offered as negative criticism of either, but rather to suggest that once a eld of study becomes institutionalized, there is a tendency for scholars within that eld to establish methodologies and ideologies that shape the perception of whatever material is under investigation. From the perspective of popular music studies, popular music is a complex social and political phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. For a musicologist, popular music is a succession of individual pieces stretching
5. Symptomatically, the rst footnote in Terry Bloomelds article on negative dialectics in popular song lyrics states simply that The main texts by Baudrillard, Lyotard, etc. are too familiar to require a reading list (1993: 29). 6. Kermans book deals with the state of musicology in the 1960s, but much of what he says is still valid for the discipline. Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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back at least three centuries, and of information on the creators and performers of this music. Again, these remarks are gross simplications, but they lead to several points that I believe are important. First, few would disagree with the notion that scholars benet from knowing the work of their peers who have studied the same or similar materials. By restricting itself to the narrow chronological period of the past half century, popular music studies has cut itself off from a vast body of music, and literature on this music, that is directly relevant to its own concerns. To take one example, the songs of 19th-century minstrel shows were, by any denition of the term, popular music. They appealed to a wide audience; they were disseminated globally on the popular stage and in the commodity form of sheet music and phonograph discs and cylinders; their musical content was simple enough, at least on the surface, to be ridiculed by elitist critics; and they were an important site of ideological struggle over race, class, gender and power. The past decade brought a proliferation of scholarship on the minstrel show and its music. Mahar (1999), for instance, offers a great deal of new empirical information on the repertory of the minstrel show and relates these data to such issues as misogyny, masculinity, and parodies of American speech and rhetoric. Lott (1993) develops a dialectic between the appropriation of black culture by white Americans and the sexual attraction that the black body held for whites, while Cockrell (1997) argues that the early minstrel show was descended from such older working-class rituals as mumming, charivari, and carnival, which themselves often featured blackface, and that the minstrel show was as much about class as race. Finally, Lhamons (1998) Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop is the story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture and a provocative look at how the outcasts of ofcial culture have made their own place in the world.7 Much of this scholarship deals with the same concerns (race, class, sexuality, the body) that popular music studies has brought to early rock and roll, blues, jazz, rap, and similar genres, which is not surprising, since the dialectic between black musicians on the one hand and white producers and performers on the other stretches back some 200 years in an unbroken continuum. But no articles dealing with the minstrel show have been published in Popular Music, nor has the literature on the subject been noted or used in popular music studies.8
7. Quoted from the dust jacket of the volume. 8. None of these books, nor any other literature on the minstrel show, is included in Everyday I Write the Book: A Bibliography of (Mostly) Academic Work on Pop and Rock Music, an online bibliography compiled by Gilbert Rodman and Norma Coates found at www.cas.usf.edu/ communication.rodman. Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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Even though many present-day musicologists approach their work in more theoretical and interpretative ways than was the case when Kerman wrote his criticism of the discipline, the compilation and interpretation of empirical data remains an important activity within the eld. A distinction can be made between two levels of empirical work: (1) the collection and sorting of raw data; and (2) the elaboration and interpretation of these data in monographs and books. Bibliographies and discographies, the systematic collection of biographical information on composers and performers, complete lists of the works of composers, and the assembling of facts pertaining to the historical development of a genre or the musical life of a community, are examples of the rst level of empirical work; biographies, monographs and books on individual genres, and national and regional histories are among the products of the second. Most scholars of popular music and many musicologists have regarded the rst level of empirical work as a menial task best left to amateur hobbyists and enthusiasts,9 but more is involved in the compilation of a database than one might think, and all databases are not equal in completeness, accuracy and usefulness. Joel Whitburns numerous volumes of chart data from Billboard magazine, beginning with Top Pop Records: 19551972 (1973), are among the databases most often used in popular music studies, but the complicated and often subjective factors that were involved in the compilation of the Billboard charts themselves make the uncritical use of Whitburns databases highly problematic. One of them, the unfortunately titled Joel Whitburns Pop Memories 18901954: The History of American Popular Music (1986), is particularly troubling because charts did not even exist for much of the time period covered by the volume. When I set out to compile a list of the early songs of Irving Berlin as a foundation for further work on these pieces, several such lists were already available, but none of these was fully complete and accurate;10 while they contained most of the published songs, there were also unpublished songs, different songs and different versions of the same song published under the same title, songs that had been recorded but not published, songs by Berlin attributed to other songwriters and vice versa, and songs brought out in formats other than sheet music. Summing up, the new and vital eld of popular music studies has developed as an ahistorical discipline, in two senses of the word history: it has focused almost
9. One is hard pressed to think of examples of empirical work produced in popular music studies, aside from a handful of exceptions that prove the rule: Trevor Herberts (1990) The Repertory of a Victorian Provincial Brass Band, which includes the complete repertory of the band in question as an appendix, and Allan Moores (1992) Patterns of Harmony with its 25-page list of chordal patterns found in a specic body of popular music. 10. Among these are a list found as an appendix to Bergreen (1990) and a catalogue brought out by Berlins own publishing company (Berlin 1958). Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

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exclusively on a single era of the centuries-long history of popular music; and empirical work, which can be an indispensable basis for historical research in any eld, has been largely avoided. This is unfortunate, because scholars trained in popular music studies would be excellently positioned to undertake the compilation of databases that would be useful for further scholarship in the eld, and to undertake biographies of musicians or monographs on given genres or repertories of popular music. It would serve no useful purpose to single out specic examples of popular music studies that have been compromised by the authors insufcient command of empirical data or lack of interest in historical methodology. I prefer to take the more optimistic view that the discipline could strengthen itself, with no damage to its vitality and distinctive character, by being more receptive to a wider chronological range of popular music and to the methodologies of empirical historical research.

References
Berlin, Irving. 1958. The Songs of Irving Berlin. New York: Irving Berlin Music Corp. Bloomeld, Terry. 1993. Resisting Songs: Negative Dialectics in Pop. Popular Music 12.1: 1331. Cockrell, Dale. 1997. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herbert, Trevor. 1990. The Repertory of a Victorian Provincial Brass Band. Popular Music 9.1: 11732. Kerman, Joseph. 1985. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lhamon, T. 1998. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahar, William J. 1999. Behind the Burnt Cork Mass: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Moore, Allan F. 1992. Patterns of Harmony. Popular Music 11.1: 73106. Palisca, Claude V. 1963. American Scholarship in Western Music. In Frank Lloyd Harrison, Mantle Hood and Claude V. Palisca, 89213. Musicology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall). Randel, Don Michael, ed. 2003. The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th edn. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Whitburn, Joel. 1973. Top Pop Records: 19551972. Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc. 1986. Joel Whitburns Pop Memories 18901954: The History of American Popular Music. Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc.

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.