Studying Popular Music by Richard Middleton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Middleton takes a discursive formalist view of popular music. As he probably meant this to be a marker to define the study of music by bringing in a syntax-Foucaultean view, Middleton splits his time between talking about what others have said of music with how to dissolve music into pure syntax.
The view of a complete atomization of music in order to highlight the study of music betrays a kind of Newtonianism in Middleton… his extensive survey of musicology likewise does the same thing. The assumption here is that there is an objective stable view of music “outside of music” that allows all the characteristics of music to be understood. This view however, is one that is immanent within musical discourse (what critics say, what listeners say, the flux of what we understand to be the content of the study) without much appeal to other terms. But Middleton is not looking to study music as a science. Middleton doesn’t try and examine music as a physics (like Philip Ball) or in terms of brain chemistry or larger social movies of history qua subjectivity (although he does to some degree involve class struggle and technology). Instead, Middleton expects to be able to calibrate music to some kind of non-atomization that is atomization or pure structure in order be able to measure the torsions in music.
Since Middleton has not established a particular view he is sticking to, this book wanders. He of course, doesn’t want to venture too far into philosophy or metaphysics, so he ends up without much of a point. In the end of the book, he ventures to talk of a “history of the future” thinking that some utopic ideal of subjectivity will provide the unit of measurement for music. Of course, this doesn’t happen either.
While this is a great resource for a bibliography, and Middleton has done lots of work, the question he doesn’t fully get to, but only hints at, is “what is at stake (in the study of music)?” This will answer why we should study music. Unfortunately this is a work of nearly pure academia, so he doesn’t seem to think this question needs answering, as study is its own reward. Unfortunately without knowing what is at stake we have no way of deciding what approach is appropriate. We can’t find a completeness in our approach either, because we have very ill defined borders for what music is (that is, where it ends, and other subject matters begin, such as materialism, or consciousness and so on).
On the one hand it’s too easy to say “so what?” but being able to answer this question will provide a view by which Middleton can stop wandering and start to intrumentalize his vast number of theories.
