History of Popular Music and Framing

Abstract

The patent difficulties involved in the question of the proper philosophical treatment of popular music are of various kinds. The history of philosophy has departed from the premise that this music is not artistic or serious, and then gave priority to its social insertion, defining it as nothing more than merchandise. In this essay, I claim that the definition of artistic music belongs to the history of music as taken as master narrative. The very way of telling the history of music contains standards that make it difficult to classify popular music as artistic music. Avant-garde or modernist music plays a special role in such narrative. The so-called post-historicity does not deny the legitimacy of art history; it does question its normative and excluding character as a standard of measurement (or “framing”). The liberation from traditional categories (or “disenframing”) allows us an insight into an inceptive history of popular music, explored here through the analyses of specific literature. In the already substantial Brazilian literature, would there be an attempt to determine the way of being of popular music and, therefore, its criteria of achievement or failure?