SMT Conference Activities
The Popular Music Interest Group has hosted a variety of special sessions and activities at the annual national meetings of the Society for Music Theory. Other conference sessions on related topics have also featured many of the group’s members. Below is a summary of the group’s activities in past conferences.
2022 New Orleans, LA:
For the AMS-SEM-SMT Joint Meeting, the PMIG hosted an interdisciplinary panel entitled “Interpreting and Analyzing Timbre and Production in Popular Music” as a short-paper session. These five presenters were featured, followed a 15-minute group discussion of their research:
- Richard Ashley (Northwestern University) – “Timbral Contrast, Space, and Trajectory: An Approach to Popular Music Drum Parts”
- Madison Stepherson (University of Oregon) – “Sounding Country: Timbre and Texture in Post-Millennial Country Music”
- Drake Anderson (Vassar College) – “‘When the Earth Split in Two’: Timbre and the Cyclic Concept in St. Vincent’s Masseducation (2017)”
- Emily Milius (University of Oregon) – “Bikini Kill’s ‘Liar’: Trauma, Screams, and Embodied Confusion”
- Cory Hunter (Eastman School of Music) – “Gospel Love Albums: Love, Eroticism, and Spirituality”
Additionally, Trevor De Clercq (Middle Tennessee State University) spoke briefly to the group about his idea to splinter the PMIG in to a variety of smaller, genre-specific interest groups, informing the PMIG membership of the work he and others had undertaken to form the Hip-Hop/Rap Interest Group throughout the previous year.
2021 Virtual Conference:
We hosted a session entitled, “Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On at 50;” featuring invited guest Andy Flory. Flory spoke about the album, and then led a song-comparison activity with four breakout rooms. We then heard a short paper by Jeremy Tatar, comparing Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone in dialog, followed by a response from Flory, and Q & A session.
2020 Virtual Conference:
Panel Discussion: The Music of “Monstrous Men”: Negotiating Popular Music and the Musicians Who Make It.
While the “monstrous men” of the 2017 Paris Review article include artists of many ilks, the recent releases of documentaries Surviving R. Kelly (2019) and Leaving Neverland (2019), alongside highly publicized allegations and trials against prominent pop music figures like Ryan Adams and Dr. Luke have brought renewed attention to abuses within the pop music industry. Within academia, this question has been recently addressed by Will Cheng, Phillip Ewell, and Ellie Hisama.
This discussion focused on our research and teaching as popular music scholars, educators, and historians. Do we avoid the music of these problematic creators and find other examples to use in our articles and in the classroom? Or do we lean into the discomfort that these examples might provoke and use them as jumping-off points for discussions about power, danger, and prejudice? Additionally, how are these issues articulated in the musical syntax that we study as music theorists?
Panelists:
- Maya Gibson (University of Missouri): “Monstrous Men”
- Tanya Honerman (University of Kansas): “Teaching the Music of Monstrous Men‘”
- Trevor de Clercq (Middle Tennessee State University): “The Musicians Behind the Monsters” (text, slides)
- Emily Milius (University of Oregon): “Monstrosity in the Classroom: Is it Really Worth It?”
- Will Cheng (Dartmouth College): Response
2019 Columbus, OH:
Administration and Upload-a-thon
We spent a portion of our meeting touring the new site and features of Humanities commons. Then, members were encouraged to submit their work (published work, as well as pedagogical materials) to the appropriate locations on the Humanities Commons site.
The final portion of our time was devoted to discussing and approving bylaws for the Interest Group. These bylaws are available here.
2018 San Antonio, TX:
Small Group Discussion
We spent the majority of our time in small group discussion. We broke into smaller groups based on common interests, and used that time to network and share ideas. The topics were determined by a pre-conference survey disseminated through the Humanities Commons page. The topics were:
- lyrics
- timbre
- cognition
- performance
- tonality/modality
- topic theory
- corpus study
- rhythm/meter
2017 Arlington, Virginia:
- Jeff Yunek (Kennesaw State University): “Perceiving the Mosaic: Form in the Mashups of DJ Earworm” (Co-authored by Benjamin Wadsworth and Simon Needle)
- Lydia Huang, (Temple University): “The Chinese Mistress: Analyzing Wang Leehom’s ‘Hua Tian Cuo’”
- Chantal Lemire (Western University): “Speaking Songs: Tom Waits and the Music of Spoken Word”
- Grant Sawatzky (University of British Columbia): “Pitch-shift, Tempo, ‘Playback Speed’: On Collage Technique and the Construction of Nostalgia in Vaporwave”
- Jesse Kinne (University of Cincinnati): “The Grooves of Swordplay in Samurai Champloo”
2016 Vancouver, British Columbia
Analytic Round Table
To Pimp A Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar
(Saturday Nov. 5, 5:30-7:30 PM)
- Nancy Murphy (University of Chicago), Moderator
- Jim Bungert (Rocky Mountain College): “What’s the Yams?”
- Noriko Manabe (Temple University): “An Ironic Protest Song?: The Ambiguity of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’”
- John Mattessich (Florida State University): “Generative Elements in the Music of Kendrick Lamar”
- Mitch Ohriner (University of Denver): “Quantizability in ‘Momma,’ Verse Two”
- Robin Attas (Elon University): “Pedagogical Applications of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly“
2015 St. Louis, MO
(Saturday, Nov. 1, 5:00-7:00 PM)”Skill Share”
- Stefanie Acevedo (Yale University) and Janet Bourne (Northwestern): “Using Empirical Methods to Study Popular Music”
- Trevor de Clercq (Middle Tennessee State University): “The Nashville Number System: A Harmonic Notation for Popular Music”
- Nancy Murphy (University of British Columbia): “Text, Timing, and the Blues in Dylan’s ‘Down the Highway’”
2014 Milwaukee, WI
Panel Discussion and Meeting
(Saturday, Nov. 8, 5:30-7:30 PM)
Panel Discussion: “What should be the role of the PMIG within our society as a whole?”
- Nicole Biamonte, McGill University
- Christine Boone, UNC-Asheville
- John Covach, University of Rochester
- Jocelyn Neal, UNC-Chapel Hill
- Drew Nobile, University of Chicago
- Joti Rockwell, Pomona College
2013 Charlotte, NC
Panel Discussion and Meeting
(Saturday, Nov. 2, 5:30-7:30 PM)
Panel Discussion: “Popular Music and Urban Geography”
- Robin Attas (Elon University): “Personalizing the Urban Ethos”
- David Blake (Stony Brook University): “Sonic Cartographies and Cultural Geographies: Canonizing the Athens Sound”
- Thomas Robinson (University of Alabama): “Martin Hannett’s Mancunian Sound”
- Joti Rockwell (Pomona College): “Mashing down Babylon?: Bad Brains, Urban Geography, and Hardcore Music in Washington, DC”
2012 New Orleans, LA
Special Session, Panel Discussion, and Meeting
Special Session: “Popular Music and Protest”
(Sponsored by the AMS Popular Music SG, the Popular Music Section of SEM, and the SMT Popular Music IG)
S. Alexander Reed (University of Florida), Chair
- Griffin Woodworth (MakeMusic, Inc.): “Synthesizers as Social Protest in Early 1970s Funk”
- Noriko Manabe (Princeton University): “Remixing the Revolution: A Typology of Intertextuality in Protest Songs, as Evidenced by Antinuclear Songs of Post-Fukushima Japan”
- Holly Holmes (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “‘With a Voice Like a Gun’: Brazilian Popular Music, Censorship, and Strategies of Resistance during the Military Dictatorship, 1964-85”
- Barbara Milewski (Swarthmore College), “Peace, Love and . . . Concentration Camp Music? Aleksander Kulisiewicz and His Concerts of Prisoners’ Songs at the West German Protest Song Festivals of the 1960s”
Panel Discussion: “What does it mean to analyze popular music?”and “Approaches and methodologies to analyzing popular music”
(2012 Panel Abstracts)
Panelists: Kyle Adams (Indiana University), Nicole Biamonte (McGill University), Tim Hughes (University of Surrey), Fred Maus (University of Virginia), Brad Osborn (Ohio University), and Melissa Wong (University of Cambridge).
2011 Minneapolis, MN
Special Session and Meeting
Special Session: “Your Old-Fashioned Music, Your Old Ideas: Prince, Minneapolis, and the Sounds of Diversity”
(Co-sponsored with the Committee on Diversity)
Christopher Doll (Rutgers University), Chair
- Griffin Woodworth (MakeMusic, Inc.): Uptown Controversy: Genre, Location, and Confrontation in Prince’s Early Guitar Music
- Matthew Valnes (University of Pennsylvania): “If You Can Describe It, It Ain’t Funky”: Prince, Improvisation, and the Concept of “Genre Works” in Musical Performance
- Dana Baitz (York University, Toronto): Let a Woman Be a Woman and a Man Be a Man: On the Conditions Facilitating Liberatory Themes in Prince’s Music
- Emily M. Gale (University of Virginia): Prince and the Postmodern Politics of Stylistic Promiscuity in “Willing and Able”
Round-table Discussion: “Metric Fake-Outs and Surprises in Popular Music”
Justin London (Carleton College), Chair
Popular music is rich with instances of withholding, denying, and fulfilling listeners’ expectations, and Prof. London presented examples collected from numerous scholars and lead a discussion regarding the processes underlying the music’s rhythmic, metric, and harmonic effects. “Metric Fake Outs” and “Pop Music Harmonic Surprises” spreadsheets containing the examples can be found at http://people.carleton.edu/~jlondon/.
2010 Indianapolis, IN
Meeting and Special Session
Special session: “(Per)Form In(g) Rock”
(The session resulted in a special issue of Music Theory Online.)
Nicole Biamonte (McGill University), Moderator; Mark Spicer (Hunter College / Graduate Center, CUNY), Respondent
- Jay Summach (Yale University), “The Structural Origins of the Prechorus”
- Christopher Doll (Rutgers University), “Rockin’ Out: Expressive Modulation in Verse-Chorus Form”
- Brad Osborn (Rhodes College), “A Genetic Taxonomy of Through-Composition in Post-Millennial Rock”
- Timothy Koozin (University of Houston), “Musical Form and Guitar Voicing in Pop-Rock Music: A Performance-Based Analytical Approach”
Presentation and discussion on women in popular music scholarship
Robin Attas (University of British Columbia), Chair
Panelists: Nicole Biamonte (McGill University), David Brackett (McGill University), and Stephanie Doktor (University of Virginia).
2009 Montreal, QC:
Popular Music Interest Group Business Meeting and Discussion
2008 Nashville, TN
Popular Music Interest Group Meeting
Panel Discussion: “Career Issues in Popular-Music Scholarship”
Nicole Biamonte (University of Iowa), Chair and Moderator
Invited panelists: Walter Everett (University of Michigan), Ellie Hisama (Columbia University), Tim Hughes (University of Surrey), and Mark Spicer (CUNY)
2007 Baltimore, MD
Special Session on the SMT Program
“Theory, Meta-Theory, and Popular Music”
Ellie Hisama (Columbia University), Moderator
- Fred Everett Maus (University of Virginia), “Conversations about Popular Music”
- Akitsugu Kawamoto (Durham, North Carolina), “Theorizing the Variety of Intertextuality in Popular Music”
- Mark Butler (University of Pennsylvania and the American Academy in Berlin), “Analyzing Performance in Popular Music: New Methodologies for Unstable Ontologies”
- Andrew Robbie (Harvard University), “Multimodal Metatheory and the Structure of Music Video”
2006 Los Angeles, CA
Popular Music Interest Group Meeting
“Popular Music Pedagogy “
The presence of popular music within university curricula has increased exponentially within the past two decades, and courses in music theory and analysis have been an important part of this trend.
- How are music theorists currently involved in the teaching of popular music?
- What issues do they face in bringing their pedagogical expertise to bear on repertories outside the Western art-music canon?
- What kinds of creative solutions have they devised?
The Popular-Music Interest Group will consider these questions in a roundtable discussion at our 2006 meeting. We will focus on three broad areas in relation to the pedagogy of popular music: teaching undergraduate nonmajors, teaching undergraduate majors, and teaching graduate students preparing for academic careers. Panelists including John Covach, Timothy Hughes, Fred Maus, Eugene Montague, Jocelyn Neal, and Mark Butler will discuss teaching approaches, challenges, course design, and sample assignments. Between presentations, substantial time will be reserved for discussion and questions from the audience.
Preparatory Materials for SMT 2006 (Los Angeles)
Butler, Graduate Course
Butler, Nonmajor Survey Course
Butler, Undergraduate Major Course
Hughes, Popular Song Analysis
Hughes, Advanced Popular Music Harmony
Hughes, Advanced Popular Music Harmony Outline
Hughes, Advanced Popular Music Harmony Film List
Hughes, APMH Group Analysis Assignment
Hughes, APMH Group Recording Assignment
Hughes, Music with Computer Sound Design Modules
Maus, Gender and Sexuality in Popular Music
Maus, Theory I
Neal, Undergrad Survey Course (Rock)
Neal, Analysis Course (Undergrad Majors)
2005 Boston, MA
Analytic Round Table
“The Smile Album”
Lori Burns (University of Ottawa), Moderator
Invited Panelists: Daniel Harrison (Yale University), Rob Wegman (Princeton University), and Andy Flory (UNC Chapel Hill)
2004 Seattle, WA
Analytic Round Table
Panelists and members of the pop music interest group selected an album and specific track for a round-table discussion. Participants prepared in advance, and a lively session was hosted at the conference.
“Sam Phillips’ ‘Fan Dance’”
Jocelyn Neal, Moderator
Invited panelists: Walter Everett, Adam Krims, and Albin Zak
2003 Madison, WI: Special Session on the SMT Program
“From Motive to Mixdown: Influence, Inspiration, and Innovation in Popular Music”
Adam Krims, Chair
- John Brackett: “The Wall Cycle: The Concept Album Trilogy of Pink Floyd and Roger Waters”
- Jocelyn Neal: “Narrative Paradigms and Musical Signifiers in Country Music Songwriting”
- Andrew Flory: “Marvin Gaye as Vocal Composer”
- David Carson Berry: “The Structural Roles of Pentatonicism in Tin Pan Alley Songs”
2002 Columbus, OH
Special Session on the SMT Program
“Rock, Folk, and the Great White Way: Twentieth-Century Popular Music from a Post-Millenial Perspective”
Mark Spicer, Chair
- William Marvin: “Simulating Counterpoint in Broadway Musicals: The Quodlibet as Compositional Procedure”
- Scott Murphy: “Re-Solving One Kind of Metrical Dissonance”
- Anna K. Stephan-Robinson: “Phrase Rhythm in Paul Simon’s Simon and Garfunkel Songs”
- David Temperley: “The Plagal Stop Cadence in Rock”
- Kevin Holm-Hudson: “A Study of Maximally Smooth Voice Leading in the Mid-1970s Music of Genesis”
2001 Philadelphia, PA
Popular-Music Interest Group Business Meeting and Discussion
2000 Toronto, ON
Special Session on the SMT Program
“Sketch and Style Studies in Popular Music: A Theorist’s Perspective”
Dave Headlam, Chair
- Albin Zak, Respondent
- Walter Everett: “The Values of Traditional Historiographical and Theoretical Approaches for the Study of Rock Music”
- Mark Butler: “‘Taking it Seriously’: Intertexuality and Authenticity in Two Covers by the Pet Shop Boys”
- Mark Spicer: “Ghosts in the Machine: Analyzing Style in the Music of the Police”
- John Covach: “The Big Jingle-Jangle: Folk Rock, the Byrds, and the Electric Twelve-String Guitar”
1999 Atlanta, GA
Special Session on the SMT Program
“Timbre and Technology in Rock and Rap”
John Covach, Chair
- John Cotner: “Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’ (ca. 1968-1969): A Study of Genre, Texture, Medium, and Structure”
- Shaugn O’Donnell: “‘Mind Your Throats Please’: Collage as Retransition in Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother Suite”
- Kevin Holm-Hudson: “(Re)mixing as (Re)orchestration: Textural Revision in Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge“
- Ciro Scotto: “Conflict Between Pitch-Class and Timbre Functions in Metallica’s ‘Devil’s Dance’ and ‘Enter Sandman’”
- Tim Hughes: “‘Now’ Sandwiches: The Use of Quotation in Rap Music”
1998 Chapel Hill, NC
Initial organizational meeting of the SMT Popular Music Interest Group
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