Public Lecture on Popular Music

Join us as music scholars Kyle Devine (University of Oslo) and Tami Gadir (RMIT University, Melbourne) deliver back-to-back talks in the UCPH Musicology Division’s second annual “Public Lecture on Popular Music".

Recomposed: Music Climate Crisis Change (Kyle Devine)

Everywhere you look, music is changing – overhauling itself in response to the climate crisis. There are records made of plants and stereos that run on sunshine. There are sector-specific carbon calculators and literacy programs, organizations that size up (and draw down) the environmental impact of music on all levels. There are declarations of emergency, anthems for the Anthropocene, and playlists for the planet. Top to bottom, we are witnessing a climate-oriented recomposition of what music is and how it comes to be.

Music’s recomposition probably seems like a good thing. It is. And it isn’t. In this talk, I’ll highlight what is good about the good things, drawing on years of work with the people devoted to change. I’ll also explain what is not so good about the not-so-good things, showing how music gets stuck in ruts that turn even the best intentions into the problems they hope to solve. And I’ll suggest what could change to authorize the most daring hopes and audacious plans for rescuing the future of music – along with everything else.

Musicking as Politicking: from Clubs to Choirs (Tami Gadir)

Electronic dance music, DJ culture, and clubbing provide many people with meaningful opportunities to engage in small-scale acts of political resistance, echoing the disco cultures of the 1970s. Because dance music is an outcome of the larger material and ideological conditions of its emergence, however, its subversive dynamics tend to be contained by the spatiotemporal bounds of the dance floor. Meanwhile, labour choirs sing about the past and present in an international ensemble from within a living history of more than 120 years. Such choirs neither compete in a mass music market nor strive for high aesthetic standards, adopting democratic socialist organisational models while supporting political action on the ground through song. Yet, despite this enduring practice and efforts to adapt to contemporary reality, their futures are fragile.

This talk will compare these two unlikely companion case studies of music in the contemporary, global political landscape: dance music and labour choirs raise questions about what precisely is called forth by political acts of musicking, or by musical acts of politicking; and what might be learned from the past, for the benefit of the present and the future.

Bios

Kyle Devine works in the Department of Musicology and the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo. His books include Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT, 2019) and Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (Oxford University Press, 2021). His next book will be published by Verso in 2025.

Tami Gadir is a Lecturer in Music Industry at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Gadir’s book Dance Music: A Feminist Account of an Ordinary Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) is a critical appraisal of global DJ cultures. Gadir’s current project addresses the social life and politics of labour and trade union choirs.