Meet the Taylor Swift musicologist
NewsThe Glenn Korff School of Music at the University of Nebraska has hired a new assistant professor of musicology, Dr Paula Harper.
So what’s she going to teach – late Brahms? history of the zither? counterpoints in human conflict?
None of the above. Harper, an expert in the pop songs of Taylor Swift, ‘is at the forefront of her field with a wave of scholars who are broadening the definition of a musicologist in the globally connected 21st century.’
Her favourite topics are “Swiftian lyrical analysis,” “reception and the music industry,” and “music theorizing Taylor Swift.”
Swiftian, huh? Oh my Defoe, and my Johnson, my Addison and my Swift.
As an music alumni of the University of Nebraska, I am appalled by this! So ridiculous.
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake…
Well, you obviously didn’t major in Latin there!
So? What’s wrong with all that?
you need to calm down …..
Universities have to offer the customers what they want.
I remember when universities were meant to be places of learning, not marketplaces and training centres.
When I was a graduate student, spending time in the UK, I was told rather enviously by an old family friend that it must be wonderful to be studying, not “training.”
I remember when only 5% of school leavers matriculated in British universities. And there was no tuition charge, no student debt. Those were the days, for the fortunate few!
But leaving nostalgia aside, surely the huge global phenomenon of popular music in the broadest sense, the impact of the internet and the way it is used to disseminate music, is a legitimate area for students of musicology? As for Taylor Swift, her songs are well worth listening to, even if not as much to my taste as Schubert/Schumann||Müller/Heine.
Swiftian? Blefuscudian.
Chair of Blefuscudian Studies,
Department of Critical Little-Endian Theory.
Shameful. Yet another sign of how far we have fallen as a civilization.
An endowed chair in analyzing the lyricism in rap lyrics is coming soon.
I think you are right.
It had to happen. I wonder if the course will be available online for us Swifties who cant attend in person.
Musicology has been off the chain for years; a field fiddled with English majors (like Dr Harper) who needed some arena to exercise their thesaurus flipping.
Now, if studies of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift is her guilty pleasure, I’d say let it go on; that music has about as much historical significance as H&M has on fashion; big numbers, fast fashion, landfill next year.
Could you be any more petty and spiteful? Paula is an amazing scholar.
Get a life, Lebrecht!
Not sure what the issue is here…how is she different from any other musicologist specializing in popular/vernacular music?
What’s actually the purpose of turning this website into a smear campaign? Don’t you have better things to do than diss musicologists? Do you honestly think that people shouldn’t study pop culture? Great idea, yeah, let’s mock everyone who studies contemporary / popular literature, film, TV, art, culture…because who cares about the modern world, right? It was sooooo much better 200 years ago, right?
I agree. Dissing musicologists is a futile task, because they accomplish that themselves so much more effectively.
Let’s recall the musicologist who wanted global abstinence from Beethoven performances in the 250th anniversary year.
My favourite Beechamism: “Someone who can read music, but not hear it.”
You must mean the musicologist who said
“Anniversary-year celebrations ask us — or should ask us — to rethink composers, reconsider their legacies, hear something new in their familiar music. Letting Beethoven’s music fall silent for the duration of his 250th anniversary year might give us a new way into hearing it live again.”
and
“I’d further propose that we fill the Beethoven-sized hole in our repertoire with new music. There is a rather pallid anniversary tradition of commissioning pieces “inspired by” the honoree, although of course there are some powerful pieces that were written as homages or responses. But we can think bigger. With Beethoven’s nine symphonies at the core of the orchestral repertoire, what about a bold commissioning project? It could aim to produce nine new symphonies, from the broadest range of composers imaginable. And five new piano concertos, 16 new string quartets, 32 sonatas — not as responses to the Beethoven works, but as a way to hear these genres utterly re-imagined.”
Andrea Moore, a person who puts some thought into what she says, whereas many on this site simply go into automatic ‘disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’ mode to any click-bait offered..
Who decides what is music worth studying at the university? Who decides when a musical output constitutes an important social phenomenon? Or when it is, in fact, art? Or when, after the passage of time, it has become “classical”? It is a complex decision made by many, not only the power-bearers in academia, who make errors all the time, like all of us; but also by the representatives of gradual developments in the whole of society. Some may protest that the nationalist styles of modernist Latin American composers deserve further study; or that music and perception courses could be more frequent… but as someone commented earlier, students are interested in Taylor Swift, and I, for one, will check the writings of Dr. Harper.
Well, everyone is free to choose how to spend (or lose) your time and money.
Et alors?
Threadbare scholarship.
This is really low. She’s a highly regarded young scholar of popular music–a legitimate field of inquiry, whether this site and its hounds like it or not. I know it’s a lot to ask, but do better.
Coming to a university near you, Norman. The first jazz studies program in the U.S. was in 1947 (UNT)… in Europe, 1965 (Leeds). The horror of America’s cultural exports
Really, why remain a mere fan of tepid pop music when you can scrounge your own hustle as part of the larger grift of academia?
Folks, she’s at the University of Nebraska. Columbia University isn’t calling….yet.
I take that back, apparently she was a teaching fellow at Columbia for a time. Whoops.