The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound - Andrew Killick

The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound - Andrew Killick

American Popular Music and the World

The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound - Andrew Killick

Andrew Killick [+-]
University of Sheffield
Andrew Killick has been teaching and writing about the world’s music professionally since 1998. His passion for all forms of music has led him literally around the world, including studies at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Washington, periods of fieldwork in India and Korea, and teaching at Illinois State University and Florida State University before taking up his current position at the University of Sheffield in 2003. Originally trained as a classical pianist, he also plays the Korean gayageum zither and an English bagpipe, the Northumbrian smallpipes. His academic publications include two books on Korean music topics, about twenty refereed journal articles and book chapters, and substantial contributions to the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. In his spare time he likes to compose “rounds” in a wide variety of musical styles.

Description

Having covered all the main roots of the American music tree, we now turn to the trunk and branches. American popular music is discussed as a distinctive cultural phenomenon in itself, describing it from an outsider’s perspective (as we have done for other cultures discussed in this book) to show how things that insiders tend to take for granted are actually the product of a specific culture and history. For all its diversity of styles, in comparison with other musical cultures of the world the American popular music culture is shown to be founded on a relatively unified set of musical practices and principles. In summarizing what these are, we reinforce the knowledge of musical terms and concepts that has been built up through previous chapters and pave the way for exploring different musical principles in the rest of the book. We also examine how American popular music has come to be globalized as a shared musical “language” that is understood around the world and spoken with a fascinating variety of local “dialects,” some of which are discussed in later chapters.

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Citation

Killick, Andrew. American Popular Music and the World. The Making of the Musical World - A Story in Sound. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. Sep 2026. ISBN 9781781793411. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=27328. Date accessed: 07 Nov 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.27328. Sep 2026

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