Category: General Issues around Pop Practice As Research

This month I have been having an interesting discussion with colleagues at the University of the West of Scotland about submitting popular music to the REF. (For those readers who don't work in a university environment, the Research Excellence Framework [REF] is the system that rates the quality of research carried out in HE institutions… Continue reading Pop As Research and the REF

When I started on my journey as an academic - studying music and musicology in a university department with a heavy focus on what we might call 'classical music' - I kept my performing world separate. By day I read and wrote about Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, by night I wrote and performed what might be considered new- or alt-folk songs at gigs in dark cellars and bars around Glasgow. But I didn't read or write about new-folk. Rightly or wrongly, at the time, I didn't consider writing or performing popular music to be part of my developing research tool kit....