Spotify’s “Browse” tab lists a bunch of “Genres & Moods” for a user to browse through, with categories that range from the eponymous genres and moods, to activities, identity, and a whole bunch of sorts of things. Each of these Categories has a little icon and image attached to them. My eye caught this one on the way through: Continue reading
Billboard has kept a chart of their top 100 musicians since July 19, 2014, and like any of Billboard’s charts/lists/etc., the “Artist 100” attempts to measure, sanction, and archive the popularity or success of contemporary music in real time. Unfortunately, I can’t find any sort of announcement from Billboard outlining why the company instituted this new chart when it did, or what sorts of justification they used, and there’s no Billboard magazine from July 19, 2014, nor the week prior. An obvious difference between the Artist 100 and any of Billboard’s other charts is its focus on the musician rather than on a song or album. Continue reading
Well it’s been quite a while since I posted something, the reasons for which will constitute another post soon. Basically, the better part of the past year involved struggling through the uncertain, difficult precarity that is the academic job market while finishing the bulk of my dissertation. Anyone interested in the music theory job market in general should check out Prof. Megan Lavengood’s excellent post on her own experience with some nice overall stats, and Kris Shaffer’s post from a couple years ago. My experience in short: I was lucky, thankful, and extremely relieved to receive a 2-year visiting position after a grueling process that lasted from August until late April. I worry the market will be even worse during the next go around. Such is life in the academic rat race.
This post, though, is a brief summary of a side project I undertook smack in the middle of the job market process back in February. This exercise was basically a way for me to learn some new Python data management and graphing stuff, and was initially meant as a fun thing to do (i.e., procrastinate) to practice some programming. Essentially, I wanted to build a database of all songs to appear on the weekly Billboard Hot-100 charts, which I could then use to search for correlations or trends between genre tags, intertextual connections, or acoustic phenomena. I didn’t do much besides make some figures that track trends, but I’m hoping this can serve as the basis for a larger project. Continue reading
I’ve been busy with application materials and revisions of a largely unrelated article, so my dissertation work has lagged a bit this past month. Since it’s high time for me to write a post on my work, I figured this would be a good opportunity to oil up the gears again. This will end up being a multi-part entry spread over a few weeks, but I’d like to at least begin to share what I’ve been dealing with for the past semester or so. The current post is meant to set the scene of the project, so don’t expect many conclusions just yet.
Essentially, this series will run through the highlights from one of my chapters about how genre is used and experienced in popular music, broadly construed, during our current era of streaming and easy-access. One of my points in a larger project is to explore how ideas of pop categorization and genre signification have perhaps mutated throughout time; how do current understandings and experiences of genre differ from those during other tumultuous, rapidly shifting times in popular music? This particular chapter takes a synchronic slice of the pop pie, comparing some academic, amateur, and critical discourses from the past couple of years with a set of Spotify’s metadata from the spring of 2017. Continue reading
Now that the conference season has wound down for me (after 5 in about 6 weeks), I have had some time to reflect on the process. And, like my colleague and friend, Megan Lavengood, I think we all benefit by speaking freely about our experiences in the professional circuit (cf. the end of her post). All told I presented at 4 conferences and attended a grad student workshop, and, in short, I’d recommend against squishing so many conferences into such a condensed time. I was utterly wiped by the last couple, and though I really appreciated the variety of feedback I got on my work from multiple places, it was simply too much.
I’ll get to my talk itself and the feedback in my next post, but I’ve come to appreciate conferences as vehicles for scholarly and professional discourse. My very first conference was the mega-SMT/AMS/SEM joint conference in New Orleans, which was a bit overwhelming to say the least. I knew almost no one, the conference was spread throughout multiple buildings, and I wasn’t even sure I’d want to stay in either music theory or academia. I went to a bunch of papers I barely understood, and asked a critical but incoherent question to a senior scholar and was immediately shot down by another senior scholar in the audience. Overall, it was less than ideal and fostered a clear sense of hierarchized proceedings and competitive discourse.
Now that I’ve co-chaired CUNY’s music grad conference, gotten to know some people in the field, and have an adequate background in music scholarship, these meetings are generally more enjoyable. But, as a recent thread in SMT-Discuss revealed, there are still a bunch of issues, especially at our big national conference. Lots of smart people brought up lots of important points in that thread, and, writing weeks after, I’m not adding much to the discussion. I’m also ignoring the selection process, which can be problematic itself, of course. But I hope my personal mini-distillation might bring some of our tiny subfield’s problems into dialogue with broader issues rumbling throughout higher ed.
Short of adopting the free beer standard of some other conferences, a couple of things I wouldn’t mind seeing. (There’s also been a lot written about making conferences more accessible in general, so I won’t rehash these valuable perspectives here, but I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with some of the ways to make presentations and meetings more inclusive and accommodating.) Continue reading
Besides consistency and repetition, reading is perhaps the most important part of writing. Much like learning to speak, we glean stylistic tendencies to incorporate or avoid, whether consciously or not, and accumulate new vocabulary, syntactic strategies, and modes of engagement by submerging into the writing of others. In a reflection on her analytical methodology, Marion Guck lays out a model of listening that seems just as appropriate for reading: Continue reading
Hello, world!
I’ve decided to start a blog for a whole bunch of reasons. First and foremost is to open a space to share my work and thoughts. As someone nearing completion of a PhD in the esoteric and maligned field of music theory during an era wrestling with the “death of the humanities,” I’ve welcomed the move towards accessible scholarship. The multitude of conferences, sites, lectures, and courses on public musicology are clear manifestations of a shift in the field, necessitated by the rise of STEM and the increasing costs of tuition to the detriment of the humanities and the arts. Hopefully this move can help show folks outside the academy some of what’s valuable in our work. Continue reading
Tom Johnson 