Since Lautréamont, the encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a vivisection table no longer surprises anyone. But the encounter in a book between the score of an Abba hit (Fernando) and that of the Passion according to Saint Matthew by Johann Sebastian Bach can still surprise. It is not, however, a provocation, as the musicologist Philip Tagg explains in the beautiful collection of studies on pop music published by the Philharmonie de Paris: Abba and Bach have in common the same musical motif, the “diatonic tritone “.
Looking back: since Boxing Day 1963, a music critic from the Times identified in a Beatles song a wind cadence worthy of Mahler, an immense field of research opened up. Why wouldn’t the little pop song be a great song? Why does it sound so good and mark the memories, even of those who hate it? Where does the delicate balance of You Can’t Hurry Love of the Supremes or the malignant efficiency of Like A Virgin of Madonna? As the academic Simon Frith reminds us in these pages, it was necessary to counter many prejudices to give birth, in the Anglo-American world – and even more timidly in France – to this field which is so dynamic today. Popular Music Studies.
The twenty-five scholarly studies presented by Gérôme Guibert and Guillaume Heuguet, most of them unpublished in French, cover nearly half a century of research on recorded popular music and cross musicology, sociology, ethnology, technology, and even economics. . This congestion of disciplines testifies to the diversity of the problems that pop poses for science: can commercial music have artistic pretensions? Why do songs have lyrics (since no one pays attention to them)? Is the cover of a work a new work – a crucial question for sampled (sampled) electronic music? How to be a punk fan and be old?
A thought of pop that has too often become a performance
So many points of view which do not form a school but outline an attitude: to take this music seriously by considering it as aesthetic objects in their own right, despite their particular production conditions (technical, economic). A tough challenge: it is a question of analyzing pop without losing its spontaneity, of grasping its singularity without ignoring long-term developments, of finally placing it at the right height: not reducing it to standardized refrains without lending it a complexity that it does not claim. It is not sure that a sweetness of Petula Clark (Downtown) offers the listener “the most powerful diatonic exhortation since Mendelssohn”, as Glenn Gould boldly defended.
It took all the erudition and the seriousness of the two book editors to avoid the pitfalls of a thought of pop that has too often become a performance, a way for some academics to slum it cheaply, without concern for rigor. historical or musical. This anthology, often arid, offers access to researchers who are little known in France, and as such provides a nice surprise in its selection. In the midst of these clerics from the countries of the Stones and the Beatles slipped a French maverick: the sociologist Antoine Hennion, professor at Mines ParisTech. His 2013 article “The Production of Success” is, by far, the most thrilling in the volume; the only one who closely embraces concrete production, live, of the song ; the only one who approaches the materiality of the miracle through an ethnology of recording studios.
We regret that no note recalls that this text is partly extracted from his master-book The recording professionals (Métailié, 1981); just as we can quibble over some of the choices made: the selected text by Simon Frith – a simple introduction – is surprising, as is the absence of philosophy. This anthology is nonetheless a useful book, essential even, which opens the mind without preventing you from tapping your foot. Philippe Chevallier
Thinking about popular music
An anthology compiled by Gérôme Guibert and Guillaume Heuguet, PHILHARMONIE DE PARIS, 480 p., €25.