| Preface |
| This course is principally
an introduction to musicians and musical styles of British popular music
in the 1960s. In the process, we will also consider the cultural contexts
of this music and the people who made it. Students will learn about the
antecedents of British rock, the social contexts in which it flourished,
and the evolution of the musical styles and forms in this milieu. A student
should be able to describe the origins and manifestations of British popular
music (and rock and roll in particular) and the relationship between music
and culture in this specific milieu. We will also learn a little about
musical analysis as a way of mapping social and cultural relationships.
Ultimately we should gain a better understanding of life in the Britain
(and specifically London) of the 1960s. |
|
Confessions
Everybody has a point of view. Our background shapes how we see and understand
things and how we communicate these ideas to others. My background forms
a fairly important part of my approach, from my experiences as a teenager
to my interactions with students. Academically, I am an ethnomusicologist
and work in a relatively new discipline that emerged from the Euro-American
interest in "folk music" which flourished during the 19th and early 20th
centuries. When scholars like Francis Child collected ballads about elf
kings, knights, ladies, and such, they started an interest in the relationship
between music and culture. Europe's imperialistic view of the world broadened
the scope of this study to include musics from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
By the mid 20th century, this collecting had become rather established
and began to borrow more heavily from anthropology in the interpretation
of what music was in relationship to people. When I approach music, I
do so in part with the attitude that music is a manifestation of culture
and that music, like everything else people do, is shaped by the ways
in which they perceive and think about the world around them. |
| The world around me during
the 1960s, when British popular music became an international phenomenon,
was that of a small Canadian industrial city in the shadow of Detroit.
Ours was a world dominated by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors and calibrated
by next year's model. As an Anglophone Canadian with substantial, though
distant, ancestral ties with the British Isles, I had mixed but generally
positive feelings about the British. The thousands of British expatriates
who emigrated to Canada in the 40s and 50s made the accent familiar. Our
schooling reminded us that our affiliation with Britain was what made
us Canadian, and not American. Our money had a picture of the Queen (and
occassionally her father) and our flag at that point had a union jack
in the corner. But we had a curiously simultaneous sense of superiority
and inferiority formed by an inherited condescending British noblesse
oblige combined with the recognition that Americans had much more material
wealth. |
| Of the four television stations
available to us, three were in Detroit and these American stations advertised
products which were never available in Canada. We had to cross the river
and the border in order to see those things. Of course, almost everyone
had relatives on the other side of the river so trips to Detroit were
not rare. However, we never purchased anything large: Her Majesty's Customs
missed only the small things. |
| We had no "hi-fi" system and
our only radio was a small box that sat on top of a tall cabinet in the
kitchen. Perhaps it wasn't until I became a teenager that I was able to
reach this radio to sample the music. Perhaps it was an adolescent awareness
of sex and the role of popular music as an acceptable medium of contact
with females that got me listening to the radio. Whatever it was, I was
just becoming aware of music other than the hymns I sang in the church
choir (where I had learned to read music) and/or the ditties my dad sang
around the house when he was happy. So, I was ripe for pop music that
cold winter night when the Beatles made their historic appearance on the
"big shew." |
| In February 1964, I was 14.
A regular family event -- provided all the homework was done and we were
not late returning from a visit to relatives -- was sitting down to watch
the Ed Sullivan Show. Except for the comedians, I had begun to
find the show a bit boring. Topo Gigo just wasn't that entertaining anymore,
but I stayed for the comedians. However, the excitement at school about
this band called the Beatles and their appearance on the Ed Sullivan
Show had me excited. The music was exciting and the band seemed genuinely
to be having a good time; but what really struck me was the reaction of
the audience. Girls were screaming and crying and the boys in the audience
sat with their mouths open. This was something special. |
| After that night, there was
no end to my appetite for music and especially for English pop music.
In a rather implausible and rapid sequence of events, I became the owner
of a set of drums (it looked easy) and was playing music a month
later (terribly). Practice might not make perfect (and my neighbors would
have attested to that), but practice did vastly improve my ability to
sound like the guys on the radio. And living so close to Detroit there,
was no shortage of a great range of music to hear on the radio and to
imitate. |
| To cut a rather self-obsessed
and probably boring story short, I became a musician. I learned the rudiments
of theory and harmony, became the president of my high school's concert
band, played in more bands than I can remember, and somehow ended up a
music major in the local university. During the end of the sixties and
in the early 70s, I began learning about the West's art traditions and
about the music of South Asia. I learned that studying the relationship
between the people for whom and by whom music is made is what an ethnomusicologist
did, and I went on to earn graduate degrees in that discipline. |
| Now that I've been an academic
for a while, I find myself going back to those heady days when music addicted
me and when I began to ponder the social forces that drove the creation
of the great art of noise. |
| Honor Code |