Music

David Brackett

Pop goes the world

Balbir Gill | David Brackett can talk about music ranging from punk to rap to classical.

Owen Egan

He can compose contemporary classical music. But these days, he's probably spending more time than he ever could have predicted listening to the not-too-subtle strains of kiddie music. With his two-year-old daughter, Sophie, in the back seat, Brackett listens to The Wiggles and other children's tapes while driving about town.

Brackett was hired by the Faculty of Music's theory department in August. He currently teaches two courses, Popular Music and Genre and The Art of Listening: an introduction to classical music for art students.

Popular Music and Genre is a course that most music students end up taking. Brackett says that musical genres that you find on radio or videos indicate a lot about the society in which they exist.

His book, Interpreting Popular Music was published in 1995 and places popular music in a social and historical context. More recently, his essay "What a Difference a Name Makes: Two Instances of African-American Popular Music" was published in The Cultural Study of Music, edited by Clayton, Herbert and Middleton.

"I started teaching in 1991 and I've seen a big change in how accepted popular music is -- even 12 years ago it was a very new field and there was a fair amount of skepticism. [Now] there's a much wider range of music studied and much wider range of approaches used."

Other than the focus on popular music as a somewhat nontraditional subject for serious study, Brackett says academics in the field can also be a bit unconventional in their methodology. "It's a very interdisciplinary field. Not only does the subject matter face resistance, but also the people working on it tend to use methodologies from many disciplines. Even the approach to the work can be foreign to people."

Both his parents listened to a lot of different types of music. It evidently influenced the children, because both of Brackett's brothers are musicians as well.

He notes that today's popular music is very eclectic. "You have Norah Jones, doing jazz-influenced easy-listening music, neo-punk groups like The Strokes, and fusions of rap and metal."

He says technology allows easy access to music from all parts of the world. "Technology has made cultural products from around the world more accessible than ever have been. Artists are coming from different parts of the world, such as Björk. Or you get people who incorporate aspects of popular music or traditional music from other parts of the world and put them into their recordings." He says musicians such as UK's Talvin Singh generate "interesting fusions that come from immigrant populations who take something from their family's background and also their new environment."

Brackett points out that digital technology affects music, and he expects this trend to continue over the long term. "More and more sound is [being generated by] computers, from previously recorded music or sounds."

Brackett is completing an anthology of source readings to be published by Oxford University Press next year. He is also working on a book entitled Crossover Dreams: Style and Identity in 20th Century Popular Music that he expects to finish by 2005, which will use musical genres to examine topics such as race and class. "For example, looking at why categories like rhythm and blues is associated with African Americans even though the music has changed over time. How is it that country music is still associated with rural white people? How do these connections come about?"

As for his new familiarity with children's music, Brackett intends to put his time in the car to good use, "My wife, who's also a musicologist, and I are going to write an article about children's music because we're listening to it all the time and have all these conversations about it. There are certain themes come up over and over again, certain ideas and musical styles. It's interesting what constitutes appropriate music for children."