ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on interviews with prominent academics engaged in popular music studies, and on personal experience as a teacher, researcher and programme designer/leader in popular music studies, in considering the history of the two Leeds University BAs on which the curtain has now fallen. It identifies four main and recurring themes which emerged from among the exchanges. These are: tensions between practical activity and critical studies, art music traditions and discourses of the popular, the vocational emphasis of degree courses, and the rise of private provision in the sector and its potential implications for the field of study. A number of commentators raise the issue and place of practical activity – performance, composition, technology and business – in this sphere and its relation to the intellectual or critical dimension that was originally at the core of popular music studies as established in some institutions.
