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Stan Hawkins
Edgar Stanley Hawkins is a British musicologist, music analyst, composer, and cultural analyst, specializing in popular music studies. He currently holds a professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Contents

Background

He holds qualifications in music from the Department of Music, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, Hochschüle für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Frankfurt-am-main, Germany, and a doctorate from the Department of Music, University of York.

In 1990 he founded the Popular Music Research Unit at the School of Music, Media & Performance, Salford University, Manchester, United Kingdom, where he helped establish the first degrees in Popular Music in the UK, with Beatle’s producer, Sir George Martin as patron to the courses. He worked at Salford as senior lecturer before being offered a post the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo in 1995, where he has been instrumental in establishing degree programmes in popular music and producing new perspectives in music research. He has contributed to Norwegian research projects, such as, CULCOM, a programme that involved five faculties: The Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Theology and Faculty of Education, under the leadership of Thomas Hylland Eriksen, one of Norway’s leading anthropologists. A joint project with music anthropologist, Jan Sverre Knudsen, Musical Bonds & Boundaries, opened up a dialogue that contributed to a greater understanding of the musical-making phenomena found in contemporary Norwegian society. Hawkins has also been involved in a project led by John Richardson, Contemporary Music, Media and Mediation (CMMM), at the Department of Music, University of Jvyäskyla, Finland. This project was engaged with contemporary music as a cultural phenomenon, with particular reference to the relationship between music and visual media, and to the influence of technology on musical production, performance, and reception. In 2009 the Norwegian Research Council awarded a grant to fund a four year project proposed by Hawkins, entitled ‘Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context‘, which will run from 2010-2014.

Hawkins has been active in IASPM (The International Association for the Study of Popular Music), where he served as President of the UK branch from 1991 to 1994, and Norwegian representative of the Nordic branch of IASPM, from 1996 to 2004.

2. Popular Musicology Together with musicologist, Derek Scott, Hawkins coined the term ‘popular musicology’ in 1994, with the launch of the journal Popular Musicology Quarterly at the University of Salford. The journal continues today online as Popular Musicology Online. The earliest usage of the term found in the RILM database is Hawkins’s article, ‘Perspectives in Popular Musicology: Music, Lennox, and Meaning in 1990s Pop’, published in the journal Popular Music 15/1 (1996).

Popular musicology constitutes a part of critical musicology that focuses on the signification of the ‘popular’ within a music industry context, where aspects of style, form, technology, and music production are taken seriously. Popular musicology is also concerned with political, social, cultural and gendered meanings. Hawkins’s research has been primarily focused on theorizing the body in relation to gender, sexuality and ethnicity, uncovering issues of subjectivity through specific analysis of vocality.

3. Settling the Pop Score Arguing that music not only affects our identities but shapes them, this book, published in 2002, explores the interpretation of popular music within a broad, interdisciplinary framework of musicology. Hawkins’s critique is around the functions of pop music within a constantly shifting social plane from the 1980s onwards, suggesting various approaches for the analysis of pop music. The author examines selected case-studies – Madonna, Morrissey, Prince, Annie Lennox and the Pet Shop Boys – and asks what these "pop texts" have signified for him in his particular social context, leading him to consider how musical meaning resides in social values. He also focuses on the authorial identity and the problems associated with musicological practice, making a strong argument for an approach within ‘popular musicology’.

Through an analysis the compositional design and musical structures of songs by these pop artists, Hawkins suggests ways in which stylistic and technical elements of the music relate to identity formation and its political motivations. Settling the Pop Score examines the role of irony and empathy, the question of gender, race and sexuality, and the relevance of textual analysis to the study of popular music. Interpreting pop music within the framework of musicology, Settling the Pop Score takes a critical look at the structures of pleasure that impact audiences around the world. “To settle the pop score then brings into line my endeavour to address the study of commercial pop music alongside the many developments taking place in other interrelated disciplines. Daunting, yet necessary, the mission is to uncover some of the qualities that are implicit within the provocation of pop music texts.” (p. 33)

4. Pop Dandyism In The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture presents a concept of pop dandyism that seeks to discover what distinguishes a range of British male pop stars down the ages. What defines a pop dandy, and why are stars such as David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Doherty, Bryan Ferry and numerous others so convincing in their performances? Hawkins insists that pop performances can be understood through characteristics that relate to camp and glamour as he draws on the work of Charles Baudelaire, Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Susan Sontag, Susan McClary and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Crucially, the characteristics of the pop dandy are conceived in the recorded space and transported down the production line. Pop dandyism therefore occasions a colourful spectrum of cultural practices, prompting a range of ontological consideration points.” (p. 184)

5. Prince Hawkins’ musicological work on Prince is internationally acclaimed with several articles and a book published. Co-authored with Sarah Niblock, Prince: The Making of a Pop Phenomenon provides an interdisciplinary analysis of Prince’s music, his performances, productions and lyrics, with an aim to ponder over the artist’s self-fashioning and dazzling musicianship skills. Instrumental proficiency is one of the main areas of research in this book, which is dealt with alongside a detailed analysis of many of his songs. “When all’s said and done, Prince’s voice fashions an aesthetic that falls outside the domain of verbal communication – this is because his vocal sensibility functions as a barometer for sublime play within a highly charged context of erotic desire.” (p. 94).