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Jean Burgess, "Beyond the High-Popular Divide: Cultural Studies and 'Art Music'" As a result of several decades of cultural studies research into music as social practice, we now understand music cultures to involve complex negotiations of the tensions between various discourses of value. Contemporary studies of popular music subcultures have developed sophisticated accounts of these negotiations as they occur around particular styles of music, for particular groups of people, in particular locations and times. However, neither traditional nor avant-garde "art music" cultures have been examined in such terms. Even though cultural studies practitioners were among the first to problematise the "great divide" between high and popular or mass culture, the persistent and highly selective emphasis on particular (marginal, "resistant" or spectacular) "popular" music genres (however politically necessary at an earlier stage) now seems to re-inscribe the same boundaries, albeit in inversion. At the same time, the silence around the contemporary production and consumption of high culture either grants some cultural formations immunity from analysis, or leaves us with increasingly unworkable explanations predicated on universal and monolithic structures of class power and aesthetic value. As one way of both interrogating and moving beyond the high-popular divide in the context of music, I apply contemporary subculture theory to Brisbane's contemporary chamber music scene. This paper will be concerned specifically with the local chamber group Topology's modes of representation and performance as the basis for a discussion of the ways in which some of the key discursive tensions common to all contemporary music subcultures are being managed in our changing cultural landscape. Biography: Jean Burgess has a background in music performance and production, and is currently a M.Phil candidate in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include consumption and cultural tastes, identity representations, culture and technology, and music. |
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