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Popular music is produced, listened to and distributed all over the world. While there is no

doubt that popular music studies, as well as popular music histories and the commercial

popular music industry is predominantly Anglophone, popular music is not. This might

seem like an obvious statement but looking at current discussions in the field of popular

music studies it is a statement that needs to be made again. While there are exceptions,

popular music studies in general have a problem with pseudo-universalism. As if the

Western English-speaking mainstream reflected ‘popular music’ as a whole. This special

issue of IASPM Journal focuses on popular music in the post-Soviet space, imagined as

located between Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but also all over the world

in reproduction of sounds and the diaspora. The contributions challenge the Anglophone

center of popular music studies.

This chapter considers the representation of students, faculty and classical music on the websites of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (Estonia), the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts (Finland) and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music (Hungary) in the context of neoliberalism affecting higher music education and the classical music labour market. Based on our study of the website’s images and texts, we explore how students are constructed as classical musicians in terms of employability and whiteness. Our analysis shows that most of the images are used to market the institutions, and their classical music programmes depict white students and faculty, while pages labelled ‘international’ or ‘exchange programmes’ include images of East Asian students. Further, we suggest that the websites of the higher music education institutions construct white students as ‘employable’ classical musicians and, as a result, affirm the historically established association of classical music practice with whiteness.

Classical music is an artform symbolically and materially constructing ideas about nation and gender. The conservatoire, the highest music education institution, is a central institution of classical music, gendering instruments and building on ideas about feminine and masculine styles of music. Further, patriotism and nationalism have been evident in higher classical music education’s selection of repertoire. The aim of this article is to investigate how three European higher music education institutions (The Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Estonia, University of the Arts Helsinki, The Sibelius Academy, Finland, and The Liszt Academy of Music, Hungary). represent nation, gender, and classical music on their websites. The material analyzed here consists of selected multimodal pages from the institutions’ websites: video, text, links, and pictures. They are analyzed in a discourse-theoretical manner focusing on the construction of nation, gender, and classical music. Conclusions discuss the (white) male European master as integral to the heritage of classical music on the websites as well as differences in how the institutions present themselves as national. The article illustrates how classical music higher education in Europe today is relying on representations of national and masculine traditions despite being part of the contemporary European Union higher education initiatives around internationalization and gender equality. 

What could create more displeasure in the performing arts than silence about power, sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination? Swedish performing arts has been described as a place where a code of silence rules, a code that has been challenged after the Swedish #MeToo movement of 2017 in film and performing arts. In this article, we aim to theoretically and empirically examine what silence around sexual harassment in the performing arts is, using feminist theory.¹ And further, we discuss how it creates negative affect² in the performing arts work environment. Silence or “theatre without action” as described by Rancière,³ has traditionally been regarded as a valuable creative tool in rehearsal work. However, the #MeToo movements have shone a light on how silence contributes to the prevalence of sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in film and the performing arts. Building on discourse analysis of qualitative individual interviews and recordings of rehearsals with employees of four performing arts institutions in Sweden, we examine the discursive and affective shape of silence in the performing arts today. Challenging the idea that great art comes out of suffering, we discuss how silence in the performing arts has consequences that risk being harmful, not only for the employees, but for art itself, as well as the audiences experiencing it.

Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.

In this article interpersonal communication in Gender Studies teaching is mapped and compared in feminist pedagogy in three universities: Södertörn University in Sweden, Novgorod State University in Russia and Vilnius University in Lithuania. The aim of this article is, first, to compare the uses of feminist methodologies in teaching during the first semester undergraduate Gender Studies courses in a cross-case comparison. And secondly, to suggest developments needed to pursue teaching in Gender Studies in the three countries. Scholarly discussions about feminist pedagogies are accounted for and characteristics from the field are identified and compared in the three empirical cases. The article further draws on qualitative feminist methodology and concludes that while the contexts investigated are different, the methodologies used have similarities. In all three universities the teaching methods focus on students’ experiences and differences, teacher’s reflexivity, working in smaller groups, highlighting community building and empowerment. In the conclusion these teaching holdings are discussed, and further development of interpersonal communication in Gender Studies teaching is suggested.

Straipsnyje aptariama tarpasmeninė komunikacija lyčių studijose, ją lyginant su feministinės pedagogikos principais 3 universitetuose: Siodertiorno universitete Švedijoje, Novgorodo valstybiniame universitete Rusijoje ir Vilniaus universitete Lietuvoje. Straipsnyje siekiama, pirma, palyginti, kaip naudojamos feministinės metodologijos dėstant lyčių studijų kursus pirmos pakopos studentėms (-ams) sukryžminant lyginamus atvejus. Antra, straipsnyje siekiama pateikti siūlymus, kaip toliau plėtoti lyčių studijų dėstymą 3 šalyse. Straipsnyje pristatoma mokslinė diskusija apie feministines pedagogikas, identifikuotos analizuojamo lauko charaktristikos ir trijų empirinių atvejų palyginimas. Remiantis kokybine feministine tyrimo metodologija paremta analize, straipsnyje daroma išvada, kad nors lyginti atvejai veikia skirtinguose kontekstuose, naudojamos dėstymo metodologijos turi panašumų. T. y. visuose 3 universitetuose dėstymo metodai fokusuojami į studenčių (-tų) patirtis ir skirtumus, dėstytojų reflektyvumą, darbą mažomis grupėmis akcentuojant bendruomenės kūrimą ir įgalinimą. Apibendrinant aptariami šie dėstymo ypatumai ir pasiūlomi galimi sprendimai, kaip plėtoti tarpasmeninę komunikaciją lyčių studijų kursuose.