Dr Kayla Rush, Dublin City University, 'Riff Culture: Toward an Ethnomusicology of Fees-Based Rock Music Schools'

Abstract

Private, fees-based rock music schools have spread rapidly during the past twenty years, spurred on in part by the success of the 2003 film School of Rock. Despite their international reach, however, this global phenomenon has until now remained completely unstudied in any academic discipline. Based on the first-ever (and still ongoing) research on fees-based rock schools, this paper sets forth a preliminary ethnomusicological understanding of these institutions.

To understand the culture of rock schools, one must begin with riffs - short, meme-like musical hooks. Riffs spread virally, and at times by unclear means, and they circulate largely independent of their musical contexts. This paper examines the centrality of riffs in rock school culture, placing their performance and circulation at the heart of what happens in these institutions. It details the ways in which riffs shape student learning, pedagogy, and cultural capital. It interrogates whether contemporary riff culture signals and reflects a turn toward 'cultural omnivorism', or whether riffs constitute a mode of defining and clarifying genre boundaries.

Speaker Bio

Dr Kayla Rush is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow in the School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music at Dublin City University. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Queen's University Belfast in 2018. Dr Rush's current work examines private fees-based and for-profit rock music schools in Ireland and the United States. Her first article on this new research was recently published by the Journal of Popular Music Education, and it will shortly be available in gold open-access form. Her first monograph, The Cracked Art World: Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland, will be published by Berghahn in spring 2022.

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