Presentation
Musical aesthetics and philosophy of music, more interested in discourses about classical music or purely philosophical analysis, usually contain very few discussions about popular music. Although the 20th century saw the birth of new musical expressions, thanks to previously non-existent technological resources, they did not arouse substantial interest on the part of philosophy. This situation has begun to change in recent years and, more and more, different genres of popular music are being examined with philosophical approaches. Thus, to mention just a few, there are important studies by Gracyk (1996), Darby and Shelby (2005), Gayraud (2018) and Vera (2019). The International Conference of Musical Countercultures: Aesthetics and Processes of Rock and Metal, is positioned as heir to this recent interest and seeks to generate solid and interdisciplinary knowledge about the social, creative, technical and economic processes that involve rock and metal, mainly in Peru and in Latin America. Our objective is to establish academic bases for the study of these musical genres, on which it could be possible to carry out further aesthetic and philosophical analyzes, in necessary dialogue with other disciplines, such as musicology, sociology, psychology, among others. We start from the conviction that a philosophical reflection on popular music has to be based on the phenomenological manifestations and the ontological conditions that make it up. Therefore, it is necessary to first understand how these musical expressions are generated (the types of instruments used, the role of the media, the production processes, the different local scenes, etc.) before proposing relevant philosophical studies. In a particular way, the Laboratory of Musical Aesthetics of the Research Group on Art and Aesthetics (GAE-PUCP) will use this interdisciplinary event to, later, investigate the most relevant philosophical assumptions and problems associated with rock and metal within urban popular music.
On the side of Peruvian musical research, likewise, recent years have shown a growing interest in studying urban popular music that, due to its global nature, did not have until recently a full citizenship certificate in academic studies. That has been the case with rock throughout Latin America. As Juan Pablo González points out: “Determining the existence of a national rock seems a fundamental requirement for Latin American musicology to be interested in the phenomenon” (2008: 6). That requirement was forged, in the Peruvian case, mainly from journalism and historical publications; operating, for its part, a vindication of subcultures or countercultures as generators of cultural traditions. Despite having achieved a certain legitimacy as a national musical culture, it is nevertheless necessary to deepen our knowledge and reflection on rock based on academic research that transcends biography, chronicle and periodization. The case of metal is even more complex, inasmuch as it has not had this legitimizing process or is only tentatively beginning to have it with the activities of the Peruvian Metal Studies Group. According to López and Risica (2018: 8), among the reasons why Peruvian metal has hardly been studied, nor is it part of the collective memory of national music, is that music scholars found it alien to nationalist discourse or to the political ideology that they found in other movements or musical cultures. Deena Weinstein had already argued (2000) that American heavy metal had had to face two main detractors: the progressive academics of the left and the Christian and conservative right-wing movements. To this must be added the difficulty of accessing the sounds, letters and icons of metal in general, with which, rather than constituting explicitly political acts, metalheads sought above all to represent the darkness of human existence.
Consequently, faced with the need to deepen the academic studies on rock and metal in Peru, the Research Group on Art and Aesthetics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the Peruvian Group of Metal Studies organize the International Conference on Musical Countercultures: Aesthetics and Processes of Rock and Metal, which will be carried out virtually, through Zoom and Facebook Live, from August 18 to 21, 2021.
Participation certificate will be delivered with 70% attendance by Zoom, with prior registration.