The course offerings of the Chair for Popular Music History & Theory are grouped around the following themes:
History of Popular Music
The historical roots of pop music go deep. At the turn of the 19th century, folk music began to be written down and published in mass quantities. In the middle of the 19th century, the "Wiener Waltz" swept through Europe. Then the newly-born recording industry ushered in an era of nationalization and internationalization of popular music forms; rock n' roll brought globalization and a musical spectrum reaching from world music and ethnopop to house and techno. The course attempts to sketch the history of a way of making music in all its variety, the development of the cultural context in which it must be understood, the breadth of styles and manners of playing into which it has branched out, and the media and technology without which it could not exist. The goal of the course is to make pop music understandable as a historical process. Seminars cover particular forms (e.g., rock) of pop music.
Basic Reading: History of Popular Music
Music as Industry
The forms in which we experience pop music are very much a result of an industry-wide process. What are the basic cultural, economic, technological and legal assumptions in this process? The answer to this question leads to a consideration of the structure of the music industry, which, in the course of its development, has occasionally depended on or generated quite specific organizational forms and strategies, distributing and marketing techniques. Record companies are only one aspect of the music industry -- even if a central one. Radio and television have had just as powerful an influence on the process of making and popularizing music, through their programming strategies, as have new music production technologies. In this course the student gets both an overview and a factual grounding in these aspects of pop music. Seminars then explore theoretically and analytically individual characteristics of the field (e.g., the star-cult, indie music, sponsoring, MTV, VIVA TV, ( pop)music and the internet).
Basic Reading: Music as Industry
Pop Music in Social Use
The forms of popular music are developed within the framework of a cultural context, which in turn is decided by the use of the music. Pop is music that is used in highly differentiated ways, from the disco to stadium concerts to everyday media usage. Through fan cults, pop music makes itself felt in lifestyles, fashion and psychological symbol systems. The music expresses itself in its own particular style, which is then set into these and other contexts. Seminars organize projects around these types of relationships (e.g., heavy metal and its fans, women in rock).
Basic Reading: Pop Music in Social Use
Pop Music as a Theoretical Subject
This area of musicological research has generated a wide range of theoretical approaches. Pop music has been explored as a topic of sociology, cultural analysis, feminism, psychology, psychoanalysis, and media and communications theory. Thus a critical understanding of the terminology and theoretical positions that have developed in this branch of musicology is essential before one begins one's own analysis. Work on the most important theoretical texts discussing the forms of popular music is done in seminars.
Basic Reading: Pop Music as a Theoretical Subject