Till Örebro universitet

The issue of change has long been a central focus in critical studies on men and masculinities. The issue of if, how and why men and masculinity/masculinities change has been central to feminist strategy as well as a question of explanation. Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have pointed frequently to contemporary popular music as evidence of broader cultural shifts in changing masculinities, whereby the question of change is viewed in positive terms though exploring open emotional expression, or as stasis, where very little changes. 

Importantly, popular music scholars are interested between the idea of changing representations and what these representations say about culture more generally; both in terms of musical texts as cultural representations and the power of music to shape gendered norms within cultures. Yet the question is how to study and how to ascertain cultural shifts as well as the impact of music is a tricky one. A well-worn sociological critique of musicological research on the issue is twofold: firstly that the tendency to argue on the basis of selected examples seeks confirm a particular interpretation (“cherry picking”); secondly that a methodology which seeks to locate meaning through an analysis of cultural texts does explain how they are interpreted by groups. The counter argument, however, is that sociological approaches reduce music to mere symbol, ignoring the specifically musical properties which convey meaning and failing to offer an explanation as to why and how and why the “music itself” resonates.

This paper focuses on understanding the cultural resonance of popular musics in relation to theories around changing men, masculinity/masculinities. It offers a model which explores the link between text and interpretation through a framework of creation, representation, mediation and reception. In doing so it makes two main arguments: firstly that change is not necessarily progressive or egalitarian, with reference to the way in which right-wing movements mobilise masculinism and the idea of overly emotional men as a central resource in aesthetic critique; secondly that the increasing fragmentation of representations of masculinity in popular music, still require an analysis of the structural conditions under which multiple representations flourish.

With some notable exceptions, research on the far-right and music has historically focused on rock-derived genres such as punk and metal. As the far-right have shifted political emphasis and sought to mainstream their political views, so, too, has research into the contemporary far-right demonstrated a distancing among political ideologues and parties as well as groups from both extreme lyrics and ‘harsher’ sounding elements. This has gone hand-in-hand with an embracing of a wider range of musical styles. Focusing on the music associated with the Alt-Right, a broad movement which sought to mainstream far-right politics, this article suggests that a cultural shift within the far-right went hand-in-hand with a mode of aesthetic appreciation among Alt-Right adherents, which has implications for the mainstreaming of far-right politics in relation to musical cultures and aesthetics. This form of musical metapolitics emphasized dissonant principles of irony and aesthetic pluralism as a form of strategic ambiguity, but still retained notions of racial superiority at its core despite an avowed openness to genre-based pluralism. Importantly, this process has implications for the mainstreaming of far-right messaging today using a wide variety of musical aesthetics.

Music spaces, from conservatories to recording studios, have proven themselves unequal and exclusionary. To investigate how power relations condition present-day musical life, the research environment in musicology at Örebro university has been awarded funding for the three-year research program Music, Power, and Inequity (MPI).

The aim of this paper is two-fold. To contextualize our studies, we will initially give a brief presentation of the research program MPI. With the specific aim of discussing power relations in music society, we will secondly introduce two studies in their initial phase. Both studies investigate inequalities and hierarchies affecting the underprivileged in musical life, focusing on issues with regards to the music elite and freelance musicians' working lives.

The studies' methodologies build on a mixed-method approach. They map socio-economic characteristics of (i) freelance musicians, and (ii) people in power within central music organizations, conduct interviews focusing on musicians' life stories from a feminist intersectional perspective, and perform critical discourse analysis and multimodal analyses of home pages and official social media accounts.

Together, the projects contribute a crucial critical analysis of the constitution of the elite in musical life, clarifying the consequences of social distinctions as well as discussing what is required in terms of risk, support, and various forms of social, cultural, and economic background to lead a sustainable working life in music.

Higher music education (HME) institutions, globally, have increasingly been expected to incorporate research into teaching in music performance programs (MPPs). This feature of "musical academization" arguably conflicts with a longstanding focus on the development of practical playing skills as part of a music performance education. Whilst academic literature has outlined how to conduct research supervision in performance programs at universities, the question of how students and educators understand research-led teaching and implementation strategies is lacking. This article highlights challenges to implementing research-led teaching in HME, exploring how research and research-led teaching is understood and implemented in MPPs at a medium sized Swedish university. Drawing on 13 semi-structured interviews with students and educators across different MPPs, it asks: (1) how are research and research-led teaching conceptualized and understood amongst music performance students and educators? and (2) what do students and educators see as the potential of research-led teaching for MPPs specifically? The article divides research in music performance programs into three themes: research as a noun, research-competent educators, and student-centered artistic research. Through this, the article informs discussions relating to implementing research in HME and to demonstrate students and educators' perspectives on the value of research-led teaching in music performance programs.

This chapter explores the role of emotions and affect in terms of men’s organizing from a predominantly sociological focus, including some approaches from cultural studies and social psychology. It starts with an explanation of the differences between approaches to emotions and affect, as well as key differences within traditions. The chapter observes that while the literature on emotions has often looked at emotions as properties of individuals, which can be “worked on” approaches to affect have conceptualized embodied responses more in terms of how they circulate and structure relations between people. In relation to men and masculinity/ies, while there has been a tendency to view acceptable and unacceptable emotions within organizations as inherently gendered – including a focus on men’s unemotionality – there has been a move towards exploring how men express emotions within and in relation to organizations as part of a broader discourse around “softening” and “caring” masculinity. The chapter finally draws on the affective turn in feminist theory, to indicate how thinking about men’s organizational behaviour and organizing as structured through affective practice is a means to avoid the progressive/regressive binary associated with a focus on men’s emotional expression while still foregrounding emotional experience.

The article is a review of Gender Issues in Scandinavian Education: From Stereotypes to Multiple Possibilities (Silje Valde Onsrud, Hilde Synnøve Blix and Ingeborg Lunde Vestad, editors) by Sam de Boise (School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro University, Sweden).

This chapter reviews empirical and theoretical work within critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM), drawing on extensive empirical and theoretical studies relevant to psychology and social psychology. The chapter focuses on gender relations and power dynamics, social structures, intersectionality, bodies, practices, and identities, both individual and collective. The chapter first maps the key theoretical developments of CSMM, historically and conceptually, before moving to focus on two important contemporary issues: first, the development of more egalitarian masculinities, and, second, the explanations for various non-egalitarian masculinities, such those linked to incel and Alt-Right movements, both online and offline. 

Historically, when music has been studied in relation to radical-right movements, there has been a focuson totalitarian regimes or white power “hate rock”, with a specific emphasis on Nazi-punk and NationalSocialist Black metal (NSBM). Existing research has either focused on the preferences of organisers andactivists whilst or analyses of musical media with a focus on lyrics.The former approach overlooks how the music works as a recruitment tool amongst the movements as awhole whilst musical media analyses of various kinds have instead honed in on sensational andunrepresentative examples. In the latter case, these approaches adopt a simplistic “sender-receiver”model which emphasizes a one-to-one link between music and interpretation. This is a problem becausea) there is no guarantee that those accessing radical-right spaces listen primarily to radical-right artists; b)radical-right strategists have moved away from explicitly extreme aesthetics to target extreme messages;c) these models are weak in explaining music without lyrics; and d) It is necessary to explore how theculture around music – talking about, sharing and experiencing music collectively - reinforces particularways of seeing the world, in order to understand its appeal.This paper maps out the ways in which music’s role has been theorized and studied in relation to theradical-right. It argues for a need to recognize the way in which a reconfiguration of the radical-right atlarge has had implications for the music associated with it. There is evidence that, as radical right cultureshave shifted, so too have the musical aesthetics associated with them. Based on network, content anddiscourse analysis of radical right online spaces it proceeds to show how by exploiting loopholes in contentregulation, radical right artists have managed to target music to unsuspecting mainstream audiences.