We welcome you to the 3rd edition of IASPM Benelux POP TALKS. This time we will meet Amsterdance – The Amsterdam Electronic Dance Music Research Group
on:
April 20th, 15:30-17:00
https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/88384288966 (no registration required)
Beate Peter (Manchester Metropolitan University) will talk about: Experiential Knowledge and Popular Music Historiography
This talk is concerned with the use of sources in popular music historiography. With a focus on rave culture, I discuss challenges with regard to both methods and concepts that scholars might face when researching cultures and practices that cannot be captured and documented through conventional approaches of source retrieval. Raves are presented in this talk not only as being part of several discourses and debates but also as having been explored by scholars from musicology, sociology, cultural studies or performance studies. As a result, raves are part of a number of histories, the most dominant of which have informed a particular hegemonic cultural memory.
However, a common over-reliance on written documentation and a focus on what can be called theoretical knowledge has led to an exclusion of the lived experience as a method to capture raves. When included in form of, for example, participant observation, ethnographic studies or interviews with participants, paradigmatic principles of source creation, documentation and retrieval are confirmed through the scholar’s position in the research.
I propose to include experiential knowledge as source for popular music history. Rather than attempting to adapt this kind of contextualised knowledge to correspond to existing principles of source retrieval, a case is made to explore dance as both a method of participation, perception/cognition and also as a form of retrieval. In the case of raves, dance can be used to describe and explain such gatherings, both at personal and social level. It does so by allowing scholars to move away from strong discourses and focus on embodied processes. Consequently, understanding dance as/in memory provides opportunities to establish stronger links between the sociology of everyday life and the historical treatment of events.
Dr. Beate Peter is Senior Lecturer in German, Programme Leader BA Languages, Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University