Abstract
As both popular media and media of the popular, words and music occupy endless streams of media combinations that forge both ordinary and extraordinary intermedial relationships. Understanding these relationships allows us better to comprehend the political implications of various media interactions while also shedding light on their potential to dominate and reinforce master narratives and the power structures that govern our everyday lives. This collection goes beyond typology by exploring the relation of words and music to issues of the popular: What is popularity or ‘the’ popular and what role(s) does music play in it? What is the function of the popular, and is ‘pop’ a system? How can popularity be explained in certain historical and political contexts? How do class, gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to and complicate an understanding of the ‘popular’? What of the popularity of verbal art forms? How do they interact with music at particular times and throughout different media?
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Notes
- 1.
Our decision to regard words and music as media follows the practice of the scholarship in the field of Word-Music Studies undertaken by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and the Word and Music Association Forum (WMAF) as well as in the field of intermediality in general.
- 2.
The complexities of a systems-theory approach to the popular cannot be explicated here in detail. In this context it shall suffice to quote from Markus Heidingsfelder’s Pop als System (2011): ‘The functional differentiation of the system [pop] is established through its originary form of autopoietic reproduction, i.e. by connecting songs to songs. Through the medium [of music], the autopoiesis of pop is oriented to function; it does so by encoding the operations of the system in terms of the distinction hit or flop […]’ (154, our translation).
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Gurke, T., Winnett, S. (2021). Words, Music, and the Popular. In: Gurke, T., Winnett, S. (eds) Words, Music, and the Popular. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_1
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