Profile: Tony Mitchell
Meredith Connie

This article was published in Articulation Volume 1, no.1: July 1998, and is the first of Meredith Connie's series on "Active Figures in Music Research in Sydney".

More 'Active Figures': Peter Dunbar-Hall from Vol. 1 no. 2: November 1998

Over lunch in a resident cafeteria in the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), near the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences where Tony Mitchell spends much of his time, we discussed not only his current projects and goals, but also what research in music means for him.

At first hesitant in reply to my request for an interview over a cup of coffee, we discussed why the words Musicological Society had evoked this response in him. He explained that 'a kind of argument foes on between people who are musicologists and people who aren't ... There's this sort of debate about whether people who aren't actually musicians and who don't read music have the right to talk about music and write about music.' Mitchell regards the split as playing a prominent role in popular music studies. Some theorists apporach popular music as trained musicians, whereas his approach is closer to cultural studies. He continued: 'It's a slightly sensitive area. I'm not a musicologist in that I can read music, and I used to sort of fiddle around with guitar and piano when I was younger, but I don't consider myself a musician.'

Why is this a sensitive area? 'People who are musicologists, particularly people who are kind of involved in classical music, still tend to regard studies in popular music as a bit of a joke. It's been quite a struggle to actually get popular music into the curriculum, and syllabuses in Australia. It's only recently that that's happened.' This is not, however, the case with the University of Technology, attributable to the relative youth of the university, as evidenced by the somewhat plastic office buildings that house the faculties situated near Railway Square. 'UTS has always taught courses on popular culture, right from the beginning.'

Mitchell teaches courses not only on popular music but also on cinema, and a course called Writing for Performance, for both theatre and film. I asked him how his approach to a visual medium and a sonic medium differed. 'Not a lot. I'm looking at both of them in terms of how they construct place, not so much how they reflect place but how they construct space in an imaginative way. So they're quite similar in that sense.' This approach he terms cultural geography: 'the study of places and spaces and what people do with them.'

In film, one of the ways this is manifested is in studying soundtracks, looking at the function they have in films ... One of the good things about soundtracks is that they can function on their own without the film, you can make up your own images.' Some of this research has recently been published in a book on Australian film soundtracks, edited by Rebecca Coyle.

In music research, cultural geography forms the theoretical backbone of his book, Popular Music and Local Identity, published in 1996. He described it as an attempt to 'look at four different countries in terms of how music-making practices reflected particular kinds of political and social concerns.' I asked why that research concentrates on underground forms of music, rather than mainstream. In particular reference to Australian music, is this because they don't get enough attention, or is it a more interesting area of Australian identity? Mitchell replied: 'Both.' He explained that 'it reflects my interests in that I'm much more interested in forms of music that are submerged, that you have to dig out to find. And because I'm also interested in music as a form of opposition, whether it's political opposition or cultural opposition or social opposition. I come from a sort of 60s Marxist background. I was very influenced by British subcultural studies, so I kind of like to look at music-making practices which I think are oppositional.

Finally, I asked if he would regard the state of music research as healthy? He replied in the affirmative, referring in particular to the work submitted and published as part of conferences held by The International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). Mitchell is currently the treasurer and membership secretary of the organisation, and is also the chairperson for the forthcoming 10th IASPM International Conference, to be held at UTS in July next year [1999]. 'There's a hell of a lot of stuff being produced. It's a real growth area, and there are more courses being taught.'