Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology
ROCK AND BRITISH MUSICAL CULTURE 1995-2005
A series of six public lectures by
SMION FRITH (University of Edinburgh)
Sponsored by the Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of
London, supported by the British Library
23 and 30 January, 6, 13, and 27 February, and 5 March 2008 from 6 pm to
7 pm at the British Library Conference Centre
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Lecture 1, 23 January: Abstract
In the 1950s, I think it is safe to say, what one might call socio-musical distinctions were clear-cut. There was serious music, music to be appreciated, and there was popular music, music by which to be passingly entertained. This distinction marked the ways in which British musical institutions worked (the Arts Council, the BBC, the education system, the academy) and was clearly tied up with the social organisation of taste (the 1950s was, after all, when Bourdieu did his original research into 'distinction'). Classical music, serious music, defined bourgeois (or aspiring bourgeois) taste; popular music, trivial music, was provided commercially for the masses. Such distinctions and social attitudes haven't disappeared, of course, but the Beatles did confuse them, not simply in the unprecedented scale of their sales success but in the musical quality of their records and the nature of their cultural ambition. The Beatles made popular British (as against American) music that serious critics (such as William Mann and Wilfrid Mellers) took seriously which, in turn, reinforced the Beatles' own seriousness. After the Beatles the distinctions between serious/popular, high/low and valuable/worthless music became less clear-and harder to maintain. Hence rock music's emergence from pop; hence the changes in British musical culture with which these lectures are concerned.
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Admission is free, without ticket
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