| Abstract: | The division of music into art, popular and folk music is a social rather than a stylistic one, and the distinctions between them are maintained through discursive work rather than through musical performance. Still, in research they are normally treated as distinct autonomous sectors functioning according to their own inherent logics. In the research program “The conditions of music-making – between cultural policy, economics and aesthetics”, including researchers at Umeå university Department of Culture and Media Studies and Svenskt Visarkiv (the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research), we try to apply a comparative perspective to them, by focusing on musicians relying on an image of autonomous artistic individuality, regardless of genre.1 This includes musicians/composers within contemporary art music, jazz, folk and rock/pop – genres all accepted in the Swedish cultural policy grants system, although treated in different ways. Immediately it should be said that although we put the musicians on par with each other, and that the crossing, blurring and dissolution of genre borders are constantly hailed as desirable qualities in music of artistic pretentions, the same borders are effectively at work in the ways music is socially organised, with different clubs, concert halls, radio shows, festivals and academic programs keeping up genre borders just by labelling. As the subtitle indicates, we study how music made with artistic ambitions is produced on fields where the forces of cultural policy, mediatisation, commercialism, event-making, and audiences are in various combinations forming the space available. |
Ph.D., Lic. Theses
