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This article gives an insight into the past and current state of popular music studies and research in the Netherlands and Flanders as well as outlines some of its future challenges. Starting with a brief review of its origins and role in the establishment of IASPM International, this article continues with providing an overview of IASPM Benelux's branch activities as well as popular music curricula and emerging research trends in the Benelux region. By focusing on three centres of popular music studies and research in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Groningen and Rotterdam), as well as Flanders in Belgium, the article provides an overview of the different study programs and methodological approaches as well as leading scholars and main trends in the field. Finally, a number of current and future challenges, including equal gender representation, austerity measures, and an increasingly hostile political climate in the Low Countries (and beyond), are outlined.

The article explores the teaching methods of music and training a future music teacher in the system of professional music education in the historical and cultural context at universities and colleges in China.

"Artistic Dynamos: An Ethnography on Music in Central African Kingdoms uses stories and research from the Ngiemboon community of West Cameroon as touchstones for proposing new approaches to arts scholarship and community development. Building on the results of ethnographic research, artistic action is viewed through the lens of communication. This view brings a picture of increased cultural energy in the enactment of artistic genres -- melodic, rhythmic, poetic, dramatic, visual, and performative. Schrag's treatise will change how scholars across disciplines understand and engage with the arts. This volume offers methods for improved scholarship, resulting in communities living better lives. The author's website contains the video and audio recordings discussed in the book, plus full color versions of many photos and diagrams"--

This collection seeks to locate the sex in the well-known trilogy of sex & drugs & rock n roll . By looking at how sex and sexuality were expressed, presented and received, the collection shows youth culture to be crucial to the changes and challenges that informed British society into the late twentieth century

This essay explores the links among intellectual history, social history and cultural history. It suggests that the recent turn in American historiography to cultural history is vitally important for communication studies because communication has now been thrust to center stage in virtually every subfield of history. But it warns that communication historians should not rashly and heedlessly jump into cultural history before an adequate foundation has been laid in the economic and institutional social history of mass media.

This dissertation examines the connections between music and sentimentalism in Mexico, particularly as expressed in the popular songs known as boleros, and it considers how the genre developed in conjunction with Mexico's recording industry from the 1930s onward. The bolero became a crucial element in the formation of an imagined community, particularly for those in urban areas, and the preferred musical packaging in which sentimentalism was commercialized, circulated, and consumed. I examine the bolero, and the sentimentalism associated with it, as a "field of cultural production." In its simplest terms, this dissertation is about the connections between music and sentimentalism in the middle of the twentieth century, and how these connect with socio-political and economic events. I explore how musical sentimentalism is the deep expression of societal disappointments and at the same time a means for social mobility through the competition for symbolic capital. Analysis is centered on the following groups, chosen for their popularity and their unique positions in the field of bolero: Los Panchos, Los Tres Diamantes, Los Ases, Los Caballeros, Los Tecolines, Los Dandys, Los Santos, and Los Tres Reyes. In providing a contemporary reading of the bolero, I also assess a recent bolero revival as a possible indicator of Mexicans' optimistic attachment to a political project yet to be realized.

Even before signing the pact between Japan and Germany, Japanese musicians performed in the concert halls of the Third Reich. In particular, there was an active demand due to propagandistic performances such as German–Japanese concerts or concerts for German soldiers on the Eastern front or occupied territories. This study describes the activities of two "Japanese" conductors who became members of the Reich Chamber of Culture and performed with the Berliner Philharmonic orchestra: Ahn Ekitai (Iktae) from colonial Korea and Konoye Hidemaro, a high-ranking Japanese peer. Extracted from documents of the German–Japanese Society at the Federal Archives Koblenz (Germany), this article explores the cultural and political functions that these conductors faced in terms of German war propaganda and how their different musical compositions, both named "Etenraku", related to propagandistic values. This essay further shows that Ahn, whom Koreans considered a patriot and fighter against Japanese colonial power in Europe for a long time, was active as a Japanese conductor in the Third Reich, calling Konoye's assertion that he was pursued by the Nazis into question.

The diffusion of jazz into the musical mainstream during the 1920s served as a site for the struggle to define ongoing changes both in the arts and in the broader society. I analyze the discursive themes that framed the contention over the music by connecting the notion of boundary-work to fields of cultural production. In doing so, I demonstrate that the content of boundary-work is shaped by the field in which a speaker is positioned. 'High' and popular artists, civic and political leaders, and general cultural critics defined differently the alleged impact of jazz. These differences in content fueled the dynamism of the contention by giving expression to the different interests at stake, interests that reflect the specific authority to name the truth generated by a given field.