“I Can’t Read Music”—Music Reading as a Cultural Practice in Popular Music

In my paper, I present one part of a joint-cooperation project currently under review for bilateral funding. The whole project carries the title “Reading Music: Modes, Dimensions and Scenes of a Cultural Technique,” aiming to formulate, on the basis of concrete situations and practices, a theory of music reading as a multimodal cultural technique. My own subproject proposal deals with the role and discursification of music reading in popular music, considering that an integral part of the self-promotion of many famous artist personae of popular music concerns their ignorance of traditional musical notation. These ‘reading difficulties’ often appear in the context of an opposing concept that eschews formal training and production principles in favor of increased artistic freedom and authenticity.

This raises several issues regarding genre-typical processes of transmedial transcription between the spheres of the visual, the auditive, and the physical-performative that have as yet been explored only seldom in popular music studies. Research questions concern, e.g., the analytical and reenacting modes and dimensions of music reading in scenes of learning and composition, asking to what extent acts of reading differ according to different popular music genres (specifically rock, electronic dance music, and hip-hop). Moreover, also the sociality dimension of music reading in contexts of performance and interaction is planned to be examined in this subproject, focusing on the role of notation in staging practices, live rituals, and practices of rehearsing and remembering.

In my paper, I outline the cornerstones of my planned project including its mixed-methods approach, striving to stimulate discussion and gain feedback and further ideas from experts in the new AMS Study Group.