I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like for the last few days, but I have a good reason – I’m officially submitting my Masters thesis on 20/01/04, which is only 8 days away. I’m sure this will seem very exciting once it is printed, bound and submitted (mmmm…beer), but at the moment I have my head very much down and my bum very much up, and I am feeling very tired. Not much left to go in the thesis though, just adding a paragraph here and there, rewording some clunky expression, adding some references and making sure everything is formatted correctly. And, I’m sure, visiting the library yet again. Here’s the abstract:

High Culture as Subculture: Brisbane’s Contemporary Chamber Music Scene

The aim of the dissertation is to discover the extent to which methodologies and conceptual frameworks used to understand popular culture may also be useful in the attempt to understand contemporary high culture. The dissertation addresses this question through the application of subculture theory to Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene, drawing on a detailed case study of the contemporary chamber ensemble Topology and their audiences.

The dissertation begins by establishing the logic and necessity of applying cultural studies methodologies to contemporary high culture. This argument is supported by a discussion of the conceptual relationships between cultural studies, high culture, and popular culture, and the methodological consequences of these relationships. In the first chapter, a brief overview of cultural studies approaches to music reveals the central importance of subculture theory, and a detailed survey of the history of cultural studies research into music subcultures follows. Five investigative themes are identified as being crucial to all forms of contemporary subculture theory: the symbolic; the spatial; the social; the temporal; the ideological and political. The second part of the chapter explains how this formulation of contemporary subculture theory was applied to a ?high cultural? case study, and outlines the methods adopted.

Chapters Two and Three present the findings of the case study, and tentatively map the production and consumption of contemporary chamber music in Brisbane onto contemporary subculture theory and its five investigative themes. The concluding chapter argues that while participation in contemporary chamber music is not as intense or pervasive as is the case with the most researched street-based youth subcultures, it is nevertheless possible to describe Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture. The dissertation closes by reflecting on the ways in which the subcultural analysis of contemporary chamber music has yielded some insight into the lived practices of high culture in contemporary urban contexts.

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

There have been some lively discussions at Anne Galloway’s blog about technological determinism, binary/linear thinking, and the dialogue between academic and non- academic specialists.

At antipopper, jebni has followed up on the pleasures of production stuff I posted about a few days back with a fascinating idea about (hypothetically, I think?) designing software with not-quite-random, antonymic, and ‘auto-mistake’ features. His approach challenges the dominant thinking about the benefits and uses of a semantic application of computer technologies in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere – not that I know of anyway. In particular, I really like the shift from (more, better) “knowledge” to affective (different, surprising, frightening) and even therapeutic uses of these technologies.

At Mt. Disappointment (cool name by the way), the appropriation in hip hop issue has resurfaced.

Ludologist Jesper Juul has posted his dissertation abstract – the tension he identifies between “rules and fictional worlds” correlates in certain ways with the tensions between design and creativity that we’ve been discussing here.

And in 8 days I will be able to think, read, and write exclusively about this stuff instead of contemporary chamber music. That will be really, really good.