Research in Musicology

The research conducted in the area of dance and music cultures is rarely about dance and music per se, often focusing instead on everything surrounding these two common and important cultural expressions. When, where and why is music heard and performed, and by whom? The same questions apply to dance: who dances what, when and why? Some of these issues are always addressed in some form, but rarely or never do they all appear in the same project or study.

Practically everyone encounters dance and/or music in some form. Music in particular is all around us almost all the time, but dance is also something that everyone relates to, whether or not they dance themselves or watch performances. The plethora of opinions about dance and music are what make these cultural expressions an interesting object of study.

Those of us researching dance and music cultures at the Department include musicologists, ethnologists and art historians.

The main focus of the research field Youth and Popular Culture is directed towards the life conditions of the modern individual and their need for a sense of meaning and community. Contemporary social and cultural processes of change – such as globalisation and mediatisation – have led to the dissolving of traditional patterns of identity once connected to class, gender, ethnicity, nation and religion. The central interest for our research is to study how children, young people and adults use symbols, styles, cultural codes and consumption, and the production and uses of music, dance, film and fashion, to deal with changes in their contemporary life world. By putting phenomena like these into their social and historical contexts, we can study their functions and understand them as signifying practices. Seen through this kind of theoretical lens, these cultural phenomena can all be seen as symbolic expressions for the struggles of the contemporary individual to deal with and understand the life conditions of late modernity.