In this thesis I aim to uncover the nature, quality and implications of audience engagement with popular music in everyday life. Specifically, I look at two post-war generations in modern Japan and analyse their listening practices and interpretations of music encounters. To investigate this, a mixed-method approach is used based on focus group and individual interviews, questionnaires, participant observation and expert interviews with industry representatives – 100 study participants overall. Emerging patterns and themes are identified through qualitative thematic analysis. In two case studies – of idol groups and vocaloid music - I focus on how audiences, especially fans, and producers interact, with a close bond emerging over a process of cultural co-evolution of production and reception. Then, I position this map of engagements within the experiences of two Japanese cohorts, “the lost” and “the relaxed”. I argue that their generational experiences and localities guide the frames through which they interpret music. I argue that listening to music is a complex social practice whose significance has been undervalued in audience research. Audiences make music choices and engage with musical texts according to specific modes and routines which should be analysed together. Following the legacy of literary and television audience studies, I propose an account of music listening in terms of a spectrum of audience engagements linked to texts, contexts, performances and authorship. The concepts of proximity (cultural proximity and the proximity between performers and audiences) inform the analysis of the circuit of culture, offering new insight into modes of engagement and production processes. Japan, home of the Walkman and karaoke, emerges from the analysis as not only the land of technological innovations in music, but also as a culture with wider implications for media and audience research.

Over the past decade, popular music in Iran has steadily gained recognition beyond its borders. The Western media has increasingly provided an idealised and romanticised view of music-making in the Iranian underground. These reports create an image of popular musicians united under the same political and social challenges, while struggling to be heard against an oppressive regime. Contrary to these often overly politicised accounts, the current Iranian youth generation continues to explore its identity through the creation of new hybridised forms of popular music. This dissertation utilises first-hand accounts of musicians and those involved in Iranian popular music to analyse the current state of popular music in Iran since 1979. By recognising the heterogeneity of the Iranian post-revolutionary pop world, this study distinguishes the individual voices and experiences that make up the dynamic and multifaceted popular music scene in young, urban Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Opening with a historical account of music’s fluctuating relationship with regime censorship, this dissertation illuminates the many contradictions of popular music practice in a controlled climate that are also embedded within youth identity. Dichotomies continually emerge during this discourse, including globalisation vs. localism, authentic vs. borrowed, and home vs. homeland. These themes are prolific throughout the discussions of the illegal underground music scene in Tehran, the complexities of music in exile, and the final discussion of the role of popular music in the 2009 presidential election and subsequent Green Movement. Popular music continues to serve as an outlet for pleasure and entertainment while simultaneously representing the diverse voices of the young generation of Iranians in the world, as they seek to assert their identity and establish a future of their own.

Originality is an important social and cultural value. In pop music its influence is comprehensive: it shapes the economics of an industry through copyright law, and the temperament of musical culture through its place as keystone of the prevailing Romantic tradition. The concept extends beyond issues of artistic and technical innovation: a point of origin is fundamental to the stories we tell about pop. What these stories tell us about ourselves and the way we use music, though, may be more complex than the orthodoxy allows; while the moderns from Eliot and Frye through Barthes and Foucault have sliced and diced originality in text, its interrogation in popular music is overdue. This study seeks to address the social and cultural context, the implications for individual identity and the issues of creative intention, status, popularity and profitability that come into play at those moments when the cultural honours of “originality” are conferred. Working from archival and textual resources, the research explores the entry of “black music” into pop culture with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, who can be seen both as the source of several cultural streams which remain influential in popular music, and as the source of a popular mythology which has become detached from historical fact. It then proceeds to three case studies. The problem of what it means to start something new is developed in the story of Elvis Presley and the foundation myth of rock & roll. The professional use of originality is interrogated in the work of the Beatles, a foursome with a strong claim to be the greatest plagiarists, if not the greatest originators in pop. And the artistic idea of originality and its contingencies are addressed through the case of Lou Reed and the changing status of his album Metal Machine Music. A final chapter assesses the conclusions which can be made from these explorations, and the implications for future research.

This submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy focuses on works for large instrumental ensemble in conjunction with the voice. Instrumental ensemble and vocal mediums such as the orchestral art song, the song cycle and the opera in one act, provide platforms to explore the expressiveness of the lyrical dramatic voice and the dialectic tension between composing for the solo voice with a range of instrumental ensemble forces. The portfolio of compositions includes the orchestral song, The Woman Who Refused to Dance; the orchestral song trilogy, Spirit Songs; and the opera in one act, Queen Nanny of the Maroons. Issues of composition technique, vocal expression and operatic narrative are examined and in addition the three named works explore notions of post-colonial heroic representation of subjects that might not usually attract ideological recognition in Western European art music contexts. Methods for developing inclusive, post-modern musical language for the mixed instrumental and vocal ensemble are explored; including the employment of spoken word expression and the integration of popular music idioms within contemporary Western European art music contexts. In the writing of lyrics for the songs and libretto for the opera, increased responsibility is assumed in the completion of vocal works in addition to musical consideration to find the effects on the works when the roles of composer and writer are combined. With the opera in one act for solo voice, forming the major contribution to the portfolio, critical components that lead to effective music drama are assessed.