The Danish Centre for Popular Music Culture at Aarhus University was established in 2021 in order to facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation on popular music cultures in a broadly historical perspective. The centre will also facilitate cooperation at national and international levels with scholars and scholarly institutions of education, as well as non-academic institutions such as museums and archives.
Popular music has increasingly permeated human life worlds throughout modern history. It has contributed to the definition of communities and to distinctions between communities. Modern popular music and its many cultures - praising youth, challenging established notions of class, gender and race, and distinctions between body and spirit, instinct and deliberation, 'proper' music and 'improper' noise - can be understood as significant manifestations of important cultural negotiations. Accordingly, we use the term popular music in an inclusive sense and without fixed boundaries. It is a global and local field for the production of meaning, practices and identities in relation to the mass-oriented production of cultural goods and aesthetic objects and in dialogue with other, sometimes highbrow, cultural positions.
Popular music has been and continues to be a driving force and a point of reference in cultural processes of globalisation, while at the same time being intimately embedded in local practices. This fact calls for the dual perspective of glocalisation. Apart from this global/local perspective, the centre encourages comparative studies of various local/national practices. Music is central, but due to its innumerable mediations it is also important to involve the many different kinds of popular culture including film, literature, printed media, television, radio and the internet, all of which contribute to the increasingly marked processes of musicalisation and mediatisation.
The centre has a specific interest in twentieth-century historical perspectives and in meetings between - among other things - historiographical and musicological issues. This entails a wide array of theoretical and methodological challenges for the historiography of popular music culture in general, for example questions concerning cultural remembrance, distributed history, citizen science and digital archives.
In collaboration with other Danish and international research institutions and other institutions of knowledge dissemination, the researchers affiliated with the centre produce both scholarly and popular publications, papers, presentations and teaching. The centre seeks to develop new knowledge and to contribute to the consolidation of its fields of research as integral parts of the cultural and social sciences.
