The Foundations of House Project aims to:
“Explore, examine, and document the musical, social and cultural heritage of house music.”
The story of house music is often hidden and marginalised as an irrelevant fragment of the greater narrative of popular music. But house music's signs and signifiers, as well as its musical/stylistic elements, are deeply engrained into contemporary popular music from many different genres. Taking its cue from disco, it is often seen as a purely musical development, when in actuality the seeds of house music were sown with Stonewall and the liberation movement. And is arguably the original derivation of electronic dance music, pre-dating Detroit's techno scene.
The project has a broad remit, aiming to examine, document, preserve and comment on house music in its various forms. This breadth of focus is necessitated by the lack of any consistent heritage work performed into the area anywhere. Although some isolated pockets of expertise and enthusiasm exist, the resources available are limited in the extreme, and fairly disparate or dislocated from one another. This is surprising given that electronic music (of which house forms one of the two key genres) is a 7.3 billion dollar industry (pre Covid-19). Yet, there are no attempts to record and archive the materials of the culture, or create any record of the events and outputs of the culture. As such, in space where little research has been performed, and little recording has been done, the field is left unexplored and ripe for investigation.
Here, we identify several key strands that cover many facets of house music’s history and current manifestation. These strands, whilst not exhaustive, cover the majority of the research explored in this project. They are:
Aural Histories – concerned with recording and preserving histories of house music from those who created and played music to audiences i.e. DJs and producers.
Sociomusicological Factors in House Music’s Creation – an examination of the socioeconomic and musical factors that inform house music; particularly concerned with redlining
The Language of Emancipation – a focus on the lexicon used in house music that typically concerns emancipatory, religious and celebratory language
The Technologies of House Music – sound studies and listening studies approaches to analysing the impact of certain technologies and processes on house music
Challenges to Scholarship and Supporting Research – identifying resources and providing a ‘hub’ for further house music scholarship.
Clearly, these various strands are somewhat interrelated and resonate with one another. In some instances identifying a point of division or difference between them becomes rather challenging. This is perhaps best demonstrated in recent publications where aspects of all five themes coalesced to delineate and explain the possible roots of religious musical components in 1980s and 1990s Chicago house music.
Foundations of House is an academic project exploring the house music from its early musical features appearing in disco, through the ‘lost years’, and through outs time as the largest electronic dance music genre in the world. This work is an attempt to understand the history of house music, its roots in disco and early dance music, and its continuing relevance and impact today.
The project is run my Liam Maloney, based at the University of York, and was made possible with the kind help and support of The Finzi Trust. There are a growing number of publications associated with the project, and these can be found here.