All music is popular music?

Johnson, Bruce

The relationship between sound and power is as old as recorded history. From the location of ancient cave paintings at sites of intensified acoustics to the destructive power of the Sirens or Joshua's trumpets at Jericho, sound has defined territory and 'zones of contestation'. Livy attached great significance to the cohesive war cries of the Romans in their victory over Hannibal, with his more heterogeneous sonorities, at Zama in 202 BC--anticipating a similar observation about the difference in morale between Russia's First and Second Armies in 1812.1 But 'earshot' marked the radius of the power of sound, exceeded immeasurably by that of the printed text, until the advent of such sonic information technologies as morse code, the telephone, and above all, the sound recording (patented in 1877), followed by electrical amplification, the microphone, and the radio. The increased range and volume of sound made it a key to power in the 20th century, as Hitler and Goebbels notably understood. Their insights survive in modified form in the use of amplified music for interrogation and torture in such troubled regions as Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. In our everyday lives, sound defines and contests, often violently, personal and collective boundaries. If we are trying to make any predictive sense of the (post)modern era, we have to recognize that absolutely distinctive to it is the amount, diversity and density of sonic information.

As one of the most finely articulated forms of human sound, music is central, not just incidental, to an understanding of the emergence of the modern. Music aesthetics do not help us here/hear while they persist in the fastidious fiction of autonomy, denying precisely the source of their immense power. It is as a resonator of both social meanings and material culture that music becomes a key to modernity. Even the unusual mobility that for centuries characterized elements of the music community made it a harbinger of the dynamics of the modern world. The peripatetic careers of 19th-century musicians in the Baltic region, documented by Hannu Salmi, marks them as conspicuous agents of cultural diaspora, assisted by early channels of 20th-century mass circulation such as the telegraph, steam ships and railway systems. (2) Salmi is the current head of the pioneering Department of Cultural History at Finland's University of Turku, and his study of Wagnerism is one of three recent books that remind us how music intervenes in relations of power. One of the great attractions of Finnish scholarship is that it provides entry into a polyglot academic community, simply because all Finnish scholars are necessarily multilingual. Salmi draws on sources otherwise inaccessible to me, not only linguistically, but also logistically. This is evident in his study of the reception and social meanings of Wagner and his music. An illustration of the author's ingenuity and thoroughness is his examination of the visitor lists to Bayreuth, the records of the Wagner societies, reviews, correspondence, distribution records for what we would now think of as fanzines--Bayreuther Blatter--music catalogues, shops and libraries. From these Salmi forms rigorously tentative speculations about the gender, class and professional profiles of regional audiences, with extrapolations elegantly exemplified in conjunction with his analyses of equivalent national figures, as in the case of Riga. (3)

The Baltic has particular interest as a region in which the idea of a centre and margins is so evanescent, (4) foreshadowing the later disruption of such a bland social model in cultural analysis. Wagnerism provides an early example of the dynamic of technologically mediated musical migration such as that of jazz and subsequent popular musics that were often first heard in circumstances significantly different from their points of origin, with transformed social reverberations and meanings. We think of Wagner in terms of carefully regimented, epic concert spaces, but prior to the 1870s in Scandinavia his music 'was mainly heard at home, in restaurants, and in concerts, not in opera houses'. (5) The other performance spaces were extremely important in spreading and shaping the composer's reputation, especially with the extension of salon music from aristocratic salons to bourgeois homes. The effects of this shift included the production of shorter pieces of music for domestic consumption and the further spread of music 'even to the remotest towns'. (6)

This democratization of art music involved the transcription, publication and distribution in bulk (in music shops and libraries from the 1850s) of symphonic and operatic work for single instruments, especially the piano (often for four hands), simplified for pianists of 'mediocre abilities', and often produced without the composers' permission. (7) For that reason as well as for questions of intellectual copyright, Wagner often disapproved of such transcriptions, even though they gave him broader recognition than full-blown concert performances. (8) In this scenario we see in embryo the connection among 'popular', artistic and legal dubiety: the simplifying of the work of genius, and theft of it at that, heralds of piratical shareware and the role of the mass media in popularizing music, or the 'making over' of art music into popular music. The publisher's response to Wagner's objections ('we are unable to follow the author's wishes in every regard' (9)) is a polite anticipation of the politics of contemporary intellectual copyright.

Popular transcriptions also portended what we would now think of as 'greatest hits' compilations or covers, with names like 'potpourri' and 'bouquet', (10) shades of the ABC's Swoon series or of dance/techno versions of Carmina Burana in collections of tunes from Lohengrin 'arranged in the rhythms of the most fashionable dance of the period: the polka'. (11) Encouraged by the popularity of such pot-pourris, 'dance music composer' Josef Harzer then produced a compilation of Wagner tunes in the style of the French dance, the francaise, notwithstanding Wagner's criticism of French culture vis-a-vis the German national spirit. (12) These salon music arrangements of Wagner proliferated over the 1850s and 1860s, (13) and included settings for different instruments, rather like Gershwin for Strings or The Beatles go Brass.

Wagner also gave us models for modern fandom and fan clubs, the first composer to found 'societies of enthusiasts' that developed first in Germany during the 1870s. Salmi uses the records of these societies in the way that popular music scholars use fan-base data: in his exploration of the reception and semiosis of the artist and his music. In a further pre-echo of 20th-century class and gender music politics, it was asserted that 'the real moving force of Wagnerism' was 'the famous aristocratic ladies from Berlin, Vienna, and St Petersburg' and that Wagner fandom exhibited a significant level, for its time, of female representation. (14)

Wagner's attitude to 'popular' access was ambivalent. He tried to make his work 'unsuitable for performance in local, hence often modest, conditions', (15) yet he 'characterised himself as a genius through whom the nation spoke'. (16) Press critics nonetheless noted that his work was elitist, 'his melodies ... less than popular; ... for the most part accessible only to an insignificant circle of musicians and educated music lovers'. (17) Given the adaptability of his 'tunes' to immensely popular pot-pourris, this characterization of his music rings oddly.

Salmi's study provides both prefiguration and confirmation of the importance of context in 20th-century readings of musical texts, and most particularly, in constructing and filling the category 'popular music'. In Wagner's ambiguous location and his ambivalence regarding the competing attractions of fame (popularity and commercial success) and of artistic integrity (noncommercial inaccessibility and aloof genius) there is an anticipation of the contradictions that inform 20th-century pop celebrity--the ironies that made Nirvana the most commercially successful band of its time but desperate to sustain the lonely martyrdom of alternativity; or the dilemma in 'classical' music sectors of those wishing to extend audiences but at the same time nervous about losing a sense of exclusivity. Musical snobbism. Such lists as 'The 100 Best Pop Albums of All Time', drawn up by committees of cognoscenti, reflect a disdain for greatest hits compilations, film music and the bestselling records. The binaries of common popularity and artistic integrity, the synthetic and the authentic, exist on both sides of the border between 'art' and 'popular' music, and thus identify affinities between the two in fandom politics, particularly as the groups making the pop selections are largely 'of higher education and income'. (18) Popular music audiences cannot be dismissed as lacking the same canon-forming discrimination as art music audiences, nor exculpated from exercising it on the same specious and ill-considered criteria.

George Mackay identifies parallel anomalies in his study of 'the cultural politics of jazz in Britain'. As in other Anglophone jazz communities, there is a widespread condescension towards particular forms of jazz, based on a formalist teleology: bop is superior to traditional and swing because it is music at a higher and more complex level of formal evolution. Post-bop is superior to bop, and so on. It is a highly dubious position, made possible by a narrow fixation on the musical text (and fatuous as an understanding of sonic complexity). McKay notes the reluctance of jazz musicians to contextually theorize themselves,19 a pattern that has also afflicted the Australian scene, at least until very recently. One of the consequent ironies has been that supposedly musically progressive jazz sectors are often characterized by political conservatism or apathy20 and therefore self-disempowerment regarding the forces shaping their careers. The hiatus in understanding the relationship between expressive forms and contemporary socio-technological realities is also apparent in the quixotic attempt to protect musical meanings from 'contamination'. McKay records the attempt by Robert Wyatt to write his music in such a way that it could not be politically misappropriated. (21) Affective misappropriation is highly constrained (certain musical sounds cannot express tenderness or violence, for example), but in the context of contemporary technologies, it is impossible to quarantine musical meanings, as notoriously exemplified in the Howard Government's use of Joe Cocker's version of 'Unchain My Heart' to sell tax reform. Wyatt was talking over twenty-five years ago, and the insights into musical cultures that have become familiar over that period might have been expected to render such beliefs questionable. It should not be necessary to say these things by now ... but even on the day I draft this, senior Australian music administrator Greg Barns is aggrieved to discover that some of his axioms are leaking ... of which, more below.

Context of course can be used very selectively to validate a musical preference as an objective critique, as for example, traditional jazz is trivial because it is played in street parades. McKay opens up this contextualization, pulling back further for a perspective that makes nonsense of judgements based on 'corniness' and that is disinclined to apportion gravitas on exclusively formal grounds. What, to go a further step, is the context of the street parade? He addresses also a similar narrowness of historical perspective that produces generalized nonsense like Andrew Blake's 'the Soviet hatred of jazz'. (22) My question would be, which Soviet era or group? A jazz craze swept Stalinist Russia in 1938, embracing the top echelons of the party, including Kaganovich, who described it as 'above all the friend of the jolly, the musical organiser of our high-spirited youth', and with jazz figure Leonid Utesov, he wrote a jazz guide leaflet entitled How to Organize Railway Ensembles of Song and Dance and Jazz Orchestras, and commanded 'that there should be a "dzhaz" band at every Soviet station'. (23)

McKay's study is the antithesis of and antidote to such lazy cultural schemata. Overlapping with the themes explored by Salmi and Smith, his basic thesis concerns the way jazz in the United Kingdom became the site of various identity formations, along axes including ethnicity, political belief, gender and class. The study includes correspondence and interviews conducted specifically for this project, and in evaluating such evidence, McKay manifests that crucial characteristic associated with the best research, a readiness to be surprised and puzzled at what he discovers, leading to parenthetical hesitancies that more theoretically inflexible academics prefer to suppress. Inevitably, his investigation traverses issues of modern musical diaspora, incidentally throwing up pieces of information of particular interest in relation to Australian jazz history. His suggestion that bop arrived in England in 1948, for example, chimes interestingly with the evidence that Australians had begun actively to assimilate it two years earlier. (24) Other data he deploys act as invaluable correctives to aimlessly floating and barely explicit presumptions: for example, his documentation of early connections between pop and jazz, (25) including the latter's influence on reggae. (26) McKay's generous indifference to the imperatives of pop snobbism also enables him to give credit to Winifred Atwell, a musician whose significance to the popular culture of both England and Australia, where she later settled, has been smothered by disdain.

The larger value of his study is, like those of Salmi and Graeme Smith, the incisive analysis of the way context creates the meaning and function of text. His enquiry into the role of UK jazz in articulating various identity formations leads him into spaces overshadowed by the hipper image of UK, white, male bop-heroism, such as the contributions of Jamaicans and South Africans, of women, and of the oft-scorned traditional movement with its image of the musical folk primitive. Like Smith, he rescues certain kinds of musics from the realm of corniness to which much scholarship has consigned them. Of particular interest to me is the association with the Left. As with the Australian variety, in English jazz this connection has been most evident in the traditional scene, in the activities of Ken Colyer and the New Orleans revival movement in association with, for example, the CND and the Aldermaston marches. Testing this link, McKay found, as I have in Australia, that it involves a less than doctrinaire conception of 'the Left'. McKay's informant, Ken Hayton, in recalling his enthusiasm for the music in the 1950s explicitly denies the importance of the overt political connection. (27) Interestingly, however, he goes on to talk about the appeal of the music's 'stand against commercialisation'. This echoes what I have speculated to be part of a larger connection between traditional jazz and what Arnold Toynbee described in the 1940s as the growth of an 'internal proletariat', a 'class' that is 'defined by its cultural loss or scarcity, rather than sociological position ... to be found at all levels of society'. (28)

Sixty years on, public debate suggests a continuing if not deepening sense of 'cultural loss', the disappearance of something essential to human welfare. In such a climate, the power of sound and music in political critique is more significant and signifying than ever. Mainstream media are increasingly drawn into 'monovocal' hegemonic alliances, public services are politicized, and economic globalization is totalized at the cost of human wellbeing. On a micro- and macro- level (in corporations and across nations), citizens by the millions are displaced and disempowered as a scarcely relevant by-product of the economic-management sensibility that is replacing political leadership. At all levels, such peoples require voices, and those voices are most often set to music, especially as its technologies become more accessible. Studies conducted under the rubrics of ethnomusicology and popular music have demonstrated that, from localized ethnic hiphops to more traditional 'folk forms', grassroots communities are activated through music of all styles. That musical range is illustrated in the collection of Australian anti-IR laws songs assembled online by Mark Gregory, (29) critiques of a dementia in government for whom the 'normalization of unethical behaviour' is a policy instrument, not an aberration. (30) As administrations probe for the receding envelope--the limits of permissibility--in societies in which the official limiting mechanisms are being dismantled, such voices are crucial.

An axiom informing all three of these studies is that music is one of the most powerful sites of the definition and proclamation of communities of interest, particularly so for those deprived of other channels of expression. In conjunction with resurgent nationalisms and tribalisms, the size, heterogeneity and intensity of the music communities they generate constitute vigorous counter-discourses to the 'master narrative' of globalization and its supposed march towards cultural homogenization. Such musics and the circumstances of their distribution and reception, reflect the local conditions they articulate structurally as well as semiotically, providing alternative models of social organization beyond the dominant managerial imagination. The world's first, and now oldest, annual jazz festival, the Australian Jazz Convention, developed structurally as well as musically as a counter-model to the commercial music industry. (31) Apart from his own arguments, McKay assembles other sources to this effect, as for example the early British socialist movement, whose 'main cultural thrust ... was in music', seeking 'a socialist musical structure that stressed the importance of communal participation'.

Graeme Smith's forensic but magnanimous study of Australian folk and country makes the same points. (32) People choose a music not merely because it talks about their life, but because it talks like their life. Different genres require different listening subjects and different sorts of emotional commitment (33):

 [T]o understand the ways folk, country and multicultural/world
 music have been able to develop and put forward their claims to
 national representativeness ... [w]e need to consider the
 specifically musical elements of the musics, the performative
 contexts and modes of performer-audience interaction and the
 characteristic organizational styles. This latter is particularly
 important for exploring the ways music represents the nation, for
 it is in the ideas and practices which shape notions of a musical
 community that we find idealized notions of the imagined national
 community. (34)

He exemplifies this through the way in which the emerging folk movement in the late 1950s generated new performance venues that tended to be the relatively intimate coffee lounges that proliferated at the same time.

 These small, intimate venues required a new type of performance and
 address to the audience, quite different from the first generation
 of folk-song enthusiasts' theatrical enactments of the folk song
 milieu, with their false beards and coloured neckerchiefs evoking
 late nineteenth-century bush workers. (35)

Smith discusses the way in which these physical settings contributed to the reconfiguration of performance styles and the meaning of the music. The small scale of these venues made possible a finger-style guitar playing that for its followers could distinguish their milieu from the chord thrashing of what they regarded as 'mindless mass culture'. (36) We can take these homologies further. Not only was this style a distinguishing marker of a community, it also became a musical trope of the identity that that community sought to construct and project: tight-knit and intimate, the fine discrimination of its sensibilities projected in the delicate intricacy of its finger style, the freedom from artifice in the minimal technological mediation (acoustic music in a non-amplified setting), and in the 'performed' naturalness of the singing style.

The intimacy of individual performance spaces might belie the surprising popularity of the genres under investigation by Smith. By 2000 there were about forty annual folk festivals in Australia. (37) One of them, Woodford in Queensland, has about 50 000 attendees. (38) As far as bush bands are concerned: 'A 1984 survey of young Australians found that 46 per cent of Melbourne teenagers had attended a bush dance'. (39) And we are not talking about passively regimented fans. The energy of that '46 per cent of Melbourne teenagers' exceeds even that of those early rockers whose extravagant responses to the music alerted the establishment to the existence of a powerful emerging social force. Smith describes the conduct of pub audiences for The Bushwackers in the late 1970s, which included dancing and, in the breaks, jumping on tables and singing 'Skippy the Bush Kangaroo'. (40) As this carnivalesque scenario suggests, music is one of the most powerful ways of harnessing social energies; the question is, harnessed to what?

Citing Bourdieu's well-known argument that nothing identifies class affiliations more clearly than music, Smith inspects the foundations of class differences that correspond to various music tastes. In terms of class as defined by education, country music is

 ... the most socially marked musical genre. In a 1992 Saulwick poll
 it was popular with 6% of the tertiary-educated, ompared with 22%
 of those who had completed 'some secondary education'. This was a
 far greater education-based difference than registered by any other
 music genre. (41)

Country music is a major international music enthusiasm that paradoxically asserts dispersed localisms. Smith speaks of what Aaron Fox called global country musics--the appearance in widely dispersed places of a form of country music. It exhibits local variations, but carries certain core meanings:

 For example, although the idea that the land (or the country) is
 the basis of national experience and identity is widespread, this
 land or country is differently imagined in different national
 histories. With increasing urbanization the country may become an
 idealized place, a nostalgic mythologised reconstruction onto which
 we deflect the traumas of rural-urban migrations; or the
 celebration of rurality may inform an urban-based class conflict in
 which the 'groundedness' of the countryside becomes a defence for
 those who feel threatened by increasingly abstract structures of
 social power; or rural narratives may obscure both past and present
 power relations within an idealized rural order, seeking to
 marginalize it, or in extreme cases ethnically cleanse, particular
 social groups. Global country musics are never far from such
 political and social issues. (42)

Pauline Hanson instinctively grasped the magnitude of Australian grassroots resentment of the forces of economic globalization and harnessed it through country music. (43) And the nostalgia for the traditional rural values that seem to embody Australia is part of a global reaction against those forces.

Smith and McKay have documented the massive energies shaped and channelled by music, and when it intervenes in relations of power, music usually attracts the rather dismissive epithet 'popular'. As Salmi documents, the politicization of Wagner's 'art' music was bitterly debated, as well as being regarded as unprecedented. (44) So, what does the 'popular' in 'popular music' actually mean? In many ways that is the question at the heart of popular music studies, as exemplified in a recent online debate among the International Advisory Editors of probably the world's leading academic journal in the field, Popular Music. (45) The debate was conducted in order to ventilate the enormous range of scholarly views about the usage and meaning of 'popular' in popular music, opening with Simon Frith's reference to the importance of its commercial and technological frameworks, its social and physical references, and its hybridity. Frith concluded with the unqualified declaration that popular music 'is a specific object of study here that must be approached differently from other kinds of music'. In the context of the diversity of opinions presented in the debate, this reminds us again that the category 'popular' has to be acknowledged, but must also be problematized.

Used unreflectively by music journalists, the term usually refers to specific (pop) music texts. 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is popular music; Lohengrin is not (even the standard typography tells us that). But where do we put, say the Three Tenors performing material from the art music canon? That is just one obvious way of demonstrating the problems of a text-centred definition. This is not an idle academic question. It seems almost impossible to come up with a definition, yet the term continues to be used daily, in reviews, in press and record industry taxonomy, and in the deliberations of arts administrators. And as Greg Barns demonstrates, it is used as a cultural lever, a weapon, a means of disenfranchisement, of distinguishing the masses from the discriminating elite of which he is clearly a member, and who are identified by their understanding of what he calls 'classical music'. (46)

Salmi uses the term also: 'A figure like Wagner has often been presented as an embodiment of highbrow culture, but his music also spread in popular forms, perhaps more than Wagnerians and Wagner scholars have been willing to admit'. (47) In his carefully considered comment, we glimpse a way into an understanding of the way the term is used, if not what might be called a 'definition'. Barns offers us the same glimpse, though without understanding as much. 'Popular' seems to be attached to music not on the basis of the text--Barns is livid at such releases as ABC's Classic 100 and Swoon, bestselling compilations of art music texts. For him these represent the reduction of classical music 'to the level of popular music'. So what demeans music to the status of popular seems to be in the way, and by whom, it gets circulated and used. It is (odiously) 'popular' when it is dislodged from its sacred autonomy (access limited) to become in some way a component and instrument of everyday lives, a Timeless Music (another of Barns' demonized recordings) relocated in time.

Not for a moment would I question his love of music, but I would wonder what it is about it he loves. If I were a member of one of the two ensembles for whose future direction Barns carries a significant degree of responsibility, I would be seriously disconcerted at the sight of my guide so bewildered about his own location, he sees nothing at all of a way forward for his diminishing flock in the projects he so despises.

Some background would help, and it is not hard to find. Here is the merest, crudest sketch. Debates about the word 'popular' as we now deploy the term gained momentum during the 18th century, contemporaneously with debates about aesthetics, taste and culture, and with such other emergent forces as the nation-state and the idea of the 'folk', which is largely an invention of the bourgeoisie who were also consolidating their power over the same period. For cultural commentators like von Herder, the dispersed 'folk' became an agreeably picturesque embodiment of national spirit, as an alternative to the urban masses concentrating in industrial conurbations, and threatening to contaminate culture--or, increasingly, Culture--by their proximity. (48) Separating expressive forms into the categories of high and popular culture became a way of establishing distinctions between refinement (the privileged) and vulgarity (the underclasses). It was not primarily an aesthetic distinction, but functioned to maintain a political one--as it remains today.

In the early stages of discourses on the popular, it was relatively easy to sustain that distinction spatially and economically. Put music into concert halls or wealthy, private homes, both of which, incidentally are at a considerable distance from the common sort (how often do you see a concert hall in a slum?). Who among them can afford to hire an orchestra? Everything outside, whatever it sounds like, is vulgar: it is noise not music. But Something Dreadful happened over the 19th century and into the 20th centuries: the development of technologies for the cheap production and reproduction of information--improved printing technologies and tabloid press, cameras, sound recordings, radio, movies, television, even the typewriter, that could be used by women who could not write. The spatial separations that enabled the privileged to lock away their cultural capital were breaking down. By the mid-20th century, even a (ugh!) typist could listen to Beethoven in her flat adorned with an Old Master image while browsing through a home journal that offered her what had hitherto been luxury items, opportunities for travel and cheap access to a range of entertainments. She could read, and paperbacks were cheap. It was no longer easy to separate high culture from the popular just by pointing to particular texts, because technological mediations made them widely available. The mediations themselves came to seem part of the problem, signs of low culture in themselves. The difference between high and low is increasingly contextual, and in fact texts can now move back and forth into the notional space called popular culture. No text is inaccessible to technological reproduction, circulation and deployment in ordinary life. In terms of use, all music is potentially popular, since none can be quarantined. It has escaped the barns into the fields, rampaging and rallying.

'Popular' defined a particular cultural space that has now disappeared or coalesced with others, like countries on old maps. Talking about popular music in a text-oriented way, as though it is there, is like talking about Tanganyika. It is not there anymore. Yet it is still talked about, deployed, and mostly as a class-weapon. And when it is, it seems to be most often in relation to music that has been circulated technologically (49) and promiscuously--available to anyone, to be used in whatever way and with whatever meaning. Carmina Burana is art music in a concert hall, but migrates to the 'popular' when it sells coffee or the Sydney Olympics on the media.

The old map that divided music into two hemispheres, Art (or classical) and Popular, each of which defined the shape of the other, appears to be inadequate. It will not guide us. The media have changed it. But where does this media-centred use of the word leave a host of other musics that, well, are not really art music either? What kind of music is sports-stadium and locker-room singing, street busking, shower singing and other domestic music-making, political march chanting, low-church hymn singing? If they are written out of the taxonomy by a media-oriented understanding of the 'popular', we lose track of extremely intense sites of musical identity formation, arguably more immediate than any other. They are not 'art music', but nor are they normally circulated technologically to a mass audience, and in fact the producers and the audiences are close to identical. On that distinctive basis, the term 'vernacular music' is useful. The etymology certainly works. Try this: the music coming out of the car radio is popular, but the singing along with it by the driver is vernacular. Of course this conceit then raises its own problems, but the point of it is to extrapolate from the usage of the term 'popular music' some sense of the logical difficulties that arise from its implausible elasticity. At the same time, I mean to underline the radical importance of contexts of production, consumption and modes of attentiveness in locating musical texts.

We know that music is immensely powerful as a political force. It is a potential aggressor, a line of defence, a lethal force in the encounter between the local and the global. We need new maps to identify allies, enemies, sovereign territories, and unoccupied spaces. We define cultural spaces in relation to an Other. The term 'popular', as defined against 'art' or 'classical' music is inadequate except as a way of allowing a self-accredited elite to live in never-never land, a flat earth. But as ways of arming ourselves for action, it is as useless as taking a centuries-old map--for that is how old the high/low definition of 'popular' is--into often violent conflict--for that is where music is deployed.

(1.) See further, M. Cloonan and B. Johnson, 'Killing Me Softly with His Song: An Initial Investigation into the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression', Popular Music, vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 27-39. On Russia's armies, see A. Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow, London, Harper Perennial, 2005, p. 207.

(2.) H. Salmi, Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult, Rochester NY, University of Rochester Press, 2005, pp. 4-5, 10-13, 23, 33-4.

(3.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 221.

(4.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 5.

(5.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 56.

(6.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 35.

(7.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 35.

(8.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 54.

(9.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 36.

(10.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 38.

(11.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 39.

(12.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 39.

(13.) Salmi, Wagner, pp. 41-3.

(14.) Salmi, Wagner, pp. 186-7.

(15.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 168.

(16.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 184.

(17.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 184.

(18.) See R. Von Appen and A. Doehring, 'Nevermind The Beatles, Here's Exile 61 and Nico: "The Top 100 Records of All Time"--A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective', Popular Music, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, pp. 21-40.

(19.) G. McKay, Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2005, p. 94.

(20.) McKay, Circular Breathing, p. 179.

(21.) McKay, Circular Breathing, p. 222.

(22.) McKay, Circular Breathing, p. 51.

(23.) See S. S. Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, London, Phoenix, 2003, p. 262; see further, F. S. Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983.

(24.) See B. Johnson, The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 37-9.

(25.) McKay, Circular Breathing, p. 220.

(26.) McKay, Circular Breathing, p. 319.

(27.) McKay, Circular Breathing, p. 311.

(28.) See B. Johnson, 'Naturalising the Exotic: The Australian Jazz Convention', in E. Taylor Atkins (ed.), Jazz Planet, Jackson Miss., University of Mississippi Press, 2003, pp. 151-69.

(29.) See <unionsong.com/reviews/irlaws.html>.

(30.) The quote is from J. R. Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, London, Viking, 2005, p. 68. Saul provides figures on displaced worker populations in Europe, pp. 96-7. Documentation as disparate as Saul's and Gregory's reflects some of the conditions underpinning the idea of 'cultural loss' both locally and internationally.

(31.) See further, Johnson, 'Naturalising the Exotic'.

(32.) The following comments complement and only slightly overlap with my longer review of Smith's book for the Australia / New Zealand chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, available online at <www.iaspm.net/smithreview.htm>.

(33.) G. Smith, Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music, North Melbourne, Pluto Press, 2005, p. 83.

(34.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. xiii.

(35.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 27.

(36.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 31.

(37.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 66.

(38.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 70.

(39.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 45.

(40.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 41.

(41.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 84.

(42.) Smith, Singing Australian, p. 106.

(43.) See B. Johnson, 'Two Paulines, Two Nations: An Australian Case Study in the Intersection of Popular Music and Politics', Popular Music and Society, vol. 26, no 1, 2003, pp. 53-72.

(44.) Salmi, Wagner, pp. 86-7.

(45.) 'Can We Get Rid of the "Popular" in Popular Music? A Virtual Symposium with Contributions from the International Advisory Editiors of Popular Music', Popular Music, vol. 24, no. 1, 2005, pp. 133-45.

(46.) G. Barns, 'Attitude to Classical Music a Few Notes Short of a Symphony', Sydney Morning Herald online, <www.smh.com.au>, 25 April 2006.

(47.) Salmi, Wagner, p. 6.

(48.) See further, B. Johnson, 'Divided Loyalties: Literary Responses to the Rise of Oral Authority in the Modern Era', Textus, vol. 19, 2006, pp. 285-384.

(49.) See, for example, the frequency of this criterion in Popular Music's 'Can We Get Rid of the "Popular" in Popular Music?'