Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Popular Music Study Group and the SMT Popular Music Interest Group.

As North American music departments create more and more space for the study of popular music within their disciplines and curricula, popular music scholars often find themselves having to identify primarily with one field of music studies while carrying out interdisciplinary and/or cross-methodological research. How do scholars based in music departments and schools navigate the divided terrain of music studies, whose extant fields were largely developed before the emergence of popular music studies in the academy? What challenges do they face when designing courses and curricula that include, or focus on, popular music? And how do we see the interdisciplinary field of popular music studies affecting music studies from here, now that it ostensibly has a place within academic music departments and schools?

The SMT Popular Music Interest Group, in collaboration with the AMS Popular Music Study Group, will hold a roundtable featuring panelists who are contributing exciting work to the fields of music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology with research and teaching that are inclusive of methods used across these fields, as well as of foci outside of music studies. Each panelist will spend approximately 10 minutes discussing the role of interdisciplinarity in their own research trajectory and pedagogy, as well as their thoughts on disciplinary boundaries within and around the study of popular music. The roundtable will then open to the audience for a discussion of the limits and possibilities for navigating research and teaching across our divided disciplinary, methodological, and pedagogical terrain. By discussing the ways in which we, as popular music scholars and educators, engage in studies that straddle lines between music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology—as well as those outside of music entirely—we aim to draw attention to the ways we are, and can continue to be, “undisciplining” popular music studies.