Rupert Till
University of Huddersfield, Music, Faculty Member
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Archaeology, Music, Prehistoric Archaeology, Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Experimental Archaeology, and 18 moreNeolithic Archaeology, Popular Music, Music Technology, Computer Music, Musical Composition, Music Psychology, Popular Music Studies, Film Music And Sound, Composition (Music), Improvisation, Space and Music, Church Music, Acoustic Modelling, Songwriting, Rhythm, Record Production, Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC), and Electronic Dance Music edit
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Dr. Rupert Till is Professor of Music, and Associate Dean International in the School of Music, Humanities and Media ... moreDr. Rupert Till is Professor of Music, and Associate Dean International in the School of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield. He is also Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and Series Editor of Elements in Popular Music published by Cambridge University Press. He teaches music, music technology and popular music. Much of his work focuses on composition and performance of popular music, as well as the musicology of popular music, and computer composition. He is a composer of electronic and acoustic ambient music, having studied composition with Gavin Bryars, Katharine Norman, Christopher Hobbs and george Nicholson. He has also explored the relationships between music, sound, and ancient cultures, carrying out research about the sound archaeology of prehistoric archaeological sites, including stone circles and painted caves, and is involved in archaeoacoustics and music archaeology. He released an electronica album "Dub Archaeology" in 2018, which features recordings of ancient instrument replicas, as well as curating and co-producing 5 albums of more purist recordings on Delphian Records. His book 'Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music' was published in 2010 by Continuum, and investigates the cults that surround popular music, including the death cults of rock music, personality cults of pop music and trance cults of electronic dance music. edit
Music and Ritual: Bridging Material and Living Cultures (Raquel Jiménez, Rupert Till and Mark Howell eds.). ICTM Music Archaeology Series, Vol.1. (2013) Ekho-Verlag, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-944415-11-6 [available at... more
Music and Ritual: Bridging Material and Living Cultures (Raquel Jiménez, Rupert Till and Mark Howell eds.). ICTM Music Archaeology Series, Vol.1. (2013) Ekho-Verlag, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-944415-11-6 [available at https://www.ekho-verlag.com/music-and-ritual/]
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This book explores the development of a range of cults of popular music as a response to changes in attitudes to meaning, spirituality and religion in society. At a time when fundamentalism is on the rise, traditional religions are in... more
This book explores the development of a range of cults of popular music as a response to changes in attitudes to meaning, spirituality and religion in society. At a time when fundamentalism is on the rise, traditional religions are in decline and postmodernity has challenged any system that claims to be all-defining, young people have left their traditional places of worship and set up their own, in clubs, at festivals and within music culture. "Pop Cults" investigates the ways in which popular music and its surrounding culture have become a primary site for the location of meaning, belief and identity. It provides an introduction to the history of the interactions of vernacular music and religion, and the role of music in religious culture. Rupert Till explores the cults of heavy metal, pop stars, club culture and virtual popular music worlds, investigating the sex, drug, local and death cults of the sacred popular, and their relationships with traditional religions. He concludes by discussing how and why popular music cultures have taken on many of the roles of traditional religions in contemporary society.
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This chapter explores ritual and trance in popular music contexts, focusing on the UK and Anglo-American traditions, but with relevance elsewhere. It begins by discussing conflict between and positioning of popular music and Christian... more
This chapter explores ritual and trance in popular music contexts, focusing on the UK and Anglo-American traditions, but with relevance elsewhere. It begins by discussing conflict between and positioning of popular music and Christian traditions, and a wider opposition between popular and official (or high) culture. This is explored broadly through discussing examples of collective effervescence and trance practices in popular music fields, including in particular music festival traditions. Activities at the annual Buddhafields music festival in the UK are explored as a specific case study, discussing shamanic trance and ecstatic dance workshops. These are compared briefly with other trance and dance practices within electronic dance music culture. The chapter concludes by discussing how postmodernity has seen the erosion of boundaries between high art and popular culture, resulting in the field of religion, meaning and spirituality in a re-enchantment (Partridge 2005). The end of the modern experiment, that began with the rationalist enlightenment, has allowed ritual and trance practices to emerge within popular music cultures. It is interesting to compare these new cultural formations, influenced as they are by traditional and ancient practices, with their antecedents. This provides us with an opportunity to further inform our understanding of the significance of for example trance practices within human cultures.
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Reprinted by permission of the Publishers from ‘Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the... more
Reprinted by permission of the Publishers from ‘Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the Community’, in Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age ed. Christopher Deacy and Elizabeth Arweck Aldershot etc.: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 169–188. Copyright © 2009 ISBN 978-0-7546-6527-4
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Religion, Sociology, Popular Music Studies, Spirituality, Music And Religion, and 14 moreElectronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC), Ritual induction of trance, Dance, Religion and Popular Culture, Electronic Dance Music, Implicit Religion, ML, Bl, Trance, Religion and Popular Music, Ashgate, Psychedelic Trance, Hm, and Possession (Linguistics)
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Engineering, Music, Music Education, Education, Popular Music, and 15 moreMusic Technology in Music Education, Jazz, Popular Music Pedagogy, Learning, HE, Higher Education Popular Music Studies, Music Pedagogy, Popular, Music and Music Education, Popular Music Education Creative Industries, Popular Music Education, Creativity in Music Education, IASPM, M, and Higher Popular Music Education
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This chapter explores how the representation of music has developed within human cultures. It begins by discussing the soundscapes of prehistoric landscapes, in order to better understand the acoustic ecologies of the past. This is... more
This chapter explores how the representation of music has developed within human cultures. It begins by discussing the soundscapes of prehistoric landscapes, in order to better understand the acoustic ecologies of the past. This is followed by investigating the role of music within societies, addressing how music interacts with work, ritual, and trance. Discussion of lithophones, drums, and dancing is followed by addressing bone pipes, the earliest musical instrument archaeologists found, exploring music as technology for socialization and community. Bronze horns in Europe such as the Carnyx and Greek and Roman music provide evidence of complex technological processes applied to music making, showing an increasing sophistication in the use of technology to create sonic meanings. The paper concludes that the representation of meaning in sound through an aural symbolic language, combines semiotics and embodied knowledge in complex networks of understanding that play a significant role in human cultures.
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Till, Rupert (2011) 21st Century Trance Cult: Electronic Dance Music Culture as a Form of Possession Trance, and its Role in Replacing the Traditional Roles of Religions Within Western European Popular Youth Culture. In: Religion and... more
Till, Rupert (2011) 21st Century Trance Cult: Electronic Dance Music Culture as a Form of Possession Trance, and its Role in Replacing the Traditional Roles of Religions Within Western European Popular Youth Culture. In: Religion and Popular Music in Europe: New Expressions of Sacred and Secular Identity. I. B. Tauris Library of Modern Religion (18). I. B. Tauris, London/New York, pp. 145-162. ISBN 9781848858091
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Art, Music And Religion, Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC), Ritual induction of trance, Dance, and 13 moreReligion and Popular Culture, Electronic Dance Music, Theology and Popular Culture, Cult, Entrainment, Popular Music and Culture, Bl, Trance, Religion and Popular Music, Psychedelic Trance, Psychedelic/Goa Trance music, M, and Possession (Linguistics)
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History, Archaeology, Acoustics, Music, Sound, and 10 moreTheatre, Prehistory, Cave, Music Archaeology, Clarity, Archaeoacoustics, Stonehenge, Paphos, Reverberation, and EDT
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Sociology, Popular Music, Production, Research, Composition, and 3 moreNovelty, IASPM, and Practice based
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The International Association for the Study of Popular Music's biennial international conference took place in July this year in Mexico City. The facilities in the Universidad Iberoamericana, a modern private Jesuit University in the... more
The International Association for the Study of Popular Music's biennial international conference took place in July this year in Mexico City. The facilities in the Universidad Iberoamericana, a modern private Jesuit University in the city's business quarter, were excellent, with video ...
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The biennial IASPM conference in Liverpool organised by the current IASPM Executive and the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, was an enormously well-organised event, with well-linked papers in themed sessions. Papers... more
The biennial IASPM conference in Liverpool organised by the current IASPM Executive and the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, was an enormously well-organised event, with well-linked papers in themed sessions. Papers were kept to time, making it easy to slip between rooms and flow with appropriate liquidity around the programme. The few sessions with three or four papers that had been grouped by their writers rather than the conference organisers worked especially well to dissolve the layers of mist disguising the intricacies of the chosen topics, and perhaps in future more such sessions will be proposed and encouraged. Despite the British weather, which attempted to dampen the atmosphere, as one would expect, this was a friendly, open conference with well-planned social events. The nature of these events pointed towards the overarching themes emerging from the conference. A phenomenological field study of mid-twentieth century performance of the authentically local, a trip to see a Beatles tribute act at the Cavern Club, was far more enlightening and enchanting than expected: the Beatles-esque band performing in the not-entirely-unlike-the-original Cavern Club replica gave the night-time economy delegate remnant present a feeling of what made the Fab Four so successful. The combination of real songs and fake band and venue confused the concept of authenticity, a recurrent theme at the conference. In many papers, a discussion of aura and the authentic was focused on a discussion of how audience perceptions of such concepts were constructed and performed. Presentations avoided the valuation of the live, performed, intellectual or rock as being of more interest than the mimed, recorded, physical or pop. Particular scenes or interests were studied with a broad and detailed methodology without privileging or valorising them, implying authenticity to be a performed construction, implicating it in the attempted regulation of taste by the music industry. Popular Music (2010) Volume 29/1. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 149–153
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This movie uses interviews with people on the street and contributions from members of staff at both the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, to explore some of the science behind the iPod's capacity to store large... more
This movie uses interviews with people on the street and contributions from members of staff at both the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, to explore some of the science behind the iPod's capacity to store large amounts of music and other data in such a small space. You can get songs and videos off the internet, store and play them whenever you want, but what enables it to do this? At the heart of an MP3 player such as the iPod is a small hard drive that works in a similar way to a stylus on a record player; except in this case, the record is a magnetic disc, on which the music is stored digitally and the stylus is a very sensitive pickup. This minute read head is an example of nanotechnology in action; it is made of a sandwich of very narrow layers of magnetic and non-magnetic materials. When this read head is exposed to a small change in magnetic field, it experiences a large change in electrical resistance. This effect is called Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR) and is central to all modern, high capacity disc drives. Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg were both awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 2007 for their discovery of GMR, back in 1988.
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History and Archaeology
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Ambient music, alongside related forms such as chill out, muzak and easy listening, fulfills a very particular function, providing moments of stillness in a constantly moving world. This chapter explores the relationships of ambient music... more
Ambient music, alongside related forms such as chill out, muzak and easy listening, fulfills a very particular function, providing moments of stillness in a constantly moving world. This chapter explores the relationships of ambient music to religion and new age concepts of spirituality. It asks how this music has been used by religion, and how it has used religion, examining religion and popular music from the perspective of this genre and musical style. This involves exploring the nature of ambient music, beginning with its prehistory in a range of religious traditions that focus on meditation, ecstatic states and stillness. The study traces the development of ambient music, addressing the integration of mysticism and spirituality, Eastern religious thinking within 1960s counter-culture, experimental art music traditions and minimalism, with reference to the term new age, and reflecting a post-secular search for meaning. Discussion of European electronic music focused on soundscape and a sense of space further investigates the aesthetic and cultural characteristics of ambient music. The emergence and definition of the term ambient music is discussed, along with its popularization in the nineties, following the Orb and KLF into the electronic dance music culture (EDMC) and electronica of club chill out rooms. The religious and spiritual role of ambient music illustrates a re-enchantment of daily lives, an everyday spirituality of sacralized popular culture that breaks down separations between sacred and secular.
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This short film was created as a part of the Songs of the Caves research project. This aimed to explore the sounds of 5 caves that are part of the Cave of Altamira and Palaeolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain World Heritage Site. In the... more
This short film was created as a part of the Songs of the Caves research project. This aimed to explore the sounds of 5 caves that are part of the Cave of Altamira and Palaeolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain World Heritage Site. In the caves of La Garma, El Castillo, Las Chimineas, El Pasiega and Tito Bustillo the team explored the acoustics of the caves and their relationships with the cave art present. The art in the caves is up to 40,000 years old, and the team tested whether there was any evidence that sound played a part in where these visual motifs were placed. In addition various instruments were played and recorded in the caves, to demonstrate their acoustics and see what the caves might sound like with different sound sources. Many of the instruments were reconstructions of archaeological finds, including bone flutes which were made up to 30 or 40,000 years ago.
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... Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the Community. ...
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This paper explores the acoustics of three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: five caves in Spain that feature prehistoric paintings that are up to 40,000 years old; Stonehenge stone circle in England, which is over 4000 years old; and Paphos... more
This paper explores the acoustics of three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: five caves in Spain that feature prehistoric paintings that are up to 40,000 years old; Stonehenge stone circle in England, which is over 4000 years old; and Paphos Theatre in Cyprus, which is 2000 years old. Issues with standard acoustic methods are discussed, and a range of different possible approaches are explored for sound archaeology studies, also known as archaeoacoustics. The context of the three sites are examined followed by an analysis of their acoustic properties. Firstly, early decay time is explored, including a comparison of these sites to contemporary concert halls. Subsequently, reverberation, clarity of speech, and bass response are examined. Results show that the caves have a wide range of different naturally occurring acoustics, including reverberation, and strong bass effects. Stonehenge has acoustics that change as the design of the site develops, with some similarities to the effects in th...
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History, Archaeology, Acoustics, Music, Sound, and 4 moreMusic Archaeology, Archaeoacoustics, Stonehenge, and Paphos
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This study addresses how singer-songwriters engage with emotion, unconscious processes, and effect, and therefore embodiment, feelings, and experiences. It also considers reception and various forms of mediation. This involves a... more
This study addresses how singer-songwriters engage with emotion, unconscious processes, and effect, and therefore embodiment, feelings, and experiences. It also considers reception and various forms of mediation. This involves a discussion of authenticity of various types, of inscribing and ascribing authentication. It questions the use of the term singer-songwriter, what it means to use this term to refer to popular music composition, and whether it relates to a set of practices or a genre. Adele’s song ‘Someone Like You’ is used as a case study that illustrates these issues. Additionally, this chapter will also draw upon interviews with successful musicians in order to answer these questions. While such an approach raises the issue of authorial intent as valuable to the study of texts, popular music, as a highly performative text, requires a differing approach. Even if one cannot be certain of the veracity of the opinions expressed by musicians in interviews, these reported opinions, as well as the other ways musicians present themselves to audiences, form an important element of their performativity, and greatly affect its reception. Whether or not addressing authorial intent is thought of as problematic or useful, it is in this situation certainly relevant, as it forms part of the artist’s field of activity, the artist acting as or constructing a frame around the music.
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Draft paper for Till, Rupert (2009) Songs of the stones: the acoustics of Stonehenge. In: The Sounds of Stonehenge. Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth. CHOMBEC Working Papers No. 1 . Hadrian Books.... more
Draft paper for Till, Rupert (2009) Songs of the stones: the acoustics of Stonehenge. In: The Sounds of Stonehenge. Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth. CHOMBEC Working Papers No. 1 . Hadrian Books. ISBN 9781407306308
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Engineering, Music Education, Popular Music Studies, Music Technology in Music Education, Teaching, and 10 morePopular Music Pedagogy, Learning, Higher Education Popular Music Studies, Music Pedagogy, Music and Music Education, Popular Music Education Creative Industries, Popular Music Education, Creativity in Music Education, IASPM, and Higher Popular Music Education
St John bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. He makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of... more
St John bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. He makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. ...
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The International Association for the Study of Popular Music's biennial international conference took place in July this year in Mexico City. The facilities in the Universidad Iberoamericana, a modern private Jesuit University in the... more
The International Association for the Study of Popular Music's biennial international conference took place in July this year in Mexico City. The facilities in the Universidad Iberoamericana, a modern private Jesuit University in the city's business quarter, were excellent, with video ...