Revisiting the Popular in Music History

This book brings together a significant part of Derek B. Scott’s diverse academic work, showing that the cultural history of music matters not only for the understanding it can bring to the meaning and purpose of music-making, but also because it can play a role in the development of social justice and a democratic culture. Where music history is concerned, Scott argues that we should offer interpretations that question the extent to which critics and historians have prized ethnicity and nationality in artistic works. No branch of the arts furnishes more examples of borrowing, re-using, and appropriating across cultures than music, and this is especially evident today in forms of popular music on all continents around the world. The global and the local are not the oppositional entities they once were. A history that focuses on cosmopolitanism resonates with the world in which we now live: a world of migration and tourism, involving the constant transfer, exchange, translation, and adaptation of different cultural practices and artifacts. Most of the articles in the collection have previously been published in hard-to-find conference proceedings and edited volumes or have not been published at all. The book will be important for those studying musicology, music history (especially of popular music styles), and cosmopolitanism.

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology (Emeritus) at the University of Leeds. His research field is music, cultural history, and ideology, and his books include Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). He was the General Editor of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series for fifteen years, overseeing the publication of more than 100 books between 2000 and 2015.