Music, culture and interdisciplinarity: reflections on relationships

This special issue of Popular Music honours the contribution of a distinguished musicologist to the study of popular music. It was Wilfrid Mellers who, together with Charles Hamm, pioneered the study of popular music as a respectable undertaking within musicology before popular music studies itself began to become a continuing and critical intellectual tradition in the late 1970s. As with Charles Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music has not been restricted to scholarship alone. As founding Chair of the Department of Music at the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers created an intellectual and institutional environment within which it was possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike to undertake the serious academic study of popular music. Without this environment it is possible that the careers both of Richard Middleton and myself would have turned out differently.