Philip Tagg turned 70 last year. I shall not disclose the exact date, as his own request (as you can read on his website) is to ask him privately. In any case, it is an important birthday, one that should not be forgotten by anyone vaguely interested in popular music. Tagg is a fundamental chapter in the history of popular music studies, in the capacity of co-founder, crucial contributor, and – to an extent – generator of an ‘attitude’ (that ironic, anti-establishment meticulousness is a trademark that we find in many young scholars influenced by him).

In assuming the direction of the International Semiotics Institute at Kaunas University of Technology (inheriting it after 25 years of life in Imatra, Finland, under the direction of Eero Tarasti), and in organising the 1st International Congress of Numanities ICoN2014 (an event that follows the Summer School of Semiotics in Imatra), I had set a specific goal to give room to popular music studies (PMS). Reasons were many: on the one hand, musical semiotics had always been a privileged field of enquiry within the Summer School, the Institute's community consisting of several musical semioticians, starting from Tarasti himself, of course. Despite this, popular music was never a primary interest within this community, and we thought it was about time to fill that gap. On the other hand, Kaunas University of Technology, and the whole of Lithuania, is almost a virgin territory when it comes to PMS. This is not only a pity in general, but also in the specific context of a country that owes to popular music a good portion of its independence from the Soviet Union: events and movements like the Singing Revolution or the Rock March, plus the intellectual contribution of personalities like Algirdas Kaušpėdas (lead singer of the band Antis), were decisive in the reawakening of Lithuanian conscience and ultimately led to the events of 1991. Few Lithuanian musicological works are devoted to these unique historical changes, of which none is within the area of PMS, and none in English. This seems a real shame for a country in which popular music has had such an enormous political role.

It was my friend Franco Fabbri who reminded me of Philip's birthday: we always thought it was a shame that his 60th birthday was not properly celebrated with a Festschrift (60 being the canonic age for such publications), and – it seemed – another decade was passing by without anyone moving a finger to celebrate one of the most influential scholars of the field. Therefore, along with Franco (already scheduled as one of the plenary speakers of ICoN2014), we started developing the idea for an ‘event within the event’: while ICoN2014 was supposed to be the first congress of the first year of the new ISI with the new staff, the occasion could also be used to express our gratitude to Philip, for all he has done for PMS and for his many followers.

During the opening ceremony, scheduled for 2 June 2014 (the congress being held from the 2–7 June), we had planned to deliver a so-called ‘ICoN award’, in form of a medal, for ‘lifetime achievement’ to a senior scholar dealing with semiotics (plus another one for a young, promising scholar, but that is another story). The medal, this year, was of course meant for Eero Tarasti, not only for his endless achievements as a scholar, but also for what he specifically achieved for the institute. But, hey, who says we can't give two ‘lifetime achievement’ awards? It is the first year, after all, and a bit of extra is not only expected, but in fact due. So, to begin with, we decided to bestow a second ‘ICoN award’ for senior scholars to Philip.

It would, however, be a mistake to consider the medal a simple birthday gift. Philip, like Eero, is the perfect embodiment of the meaning we meant to attach to our medals. One key characteristic of the International Semiotics Institute has always been that of combining academic research with ethical values. The scholars that have inspired ISI, and the young ones the latter has hopefully inspired, are exactly those who contribute to the knowledge of a society, while also striving to improve it, in one way or another. Also, another major factor in choosing the recipients of the ‘senior’ awards had to (and will) be always the scholars' genuine love and support for young students. Most of the scholars of my generation, and many younger popular music researchers, have reason to be mad with some members of the previous generations for the selfish way they morbidly kept their positions and privileges without paving the way for their successors. The few exceptions, we thought, deserve to be acknowledged.

The award affair being set, a second form of celebration was a session, within the congress, that would be entirely devoted to Philip: papers did not necessarily have to be related to his work, but participants did. Towards the end of 2013 we started sending emails to a number of colleagues whose connection to Philip was evident either through their work or personal relations (more often both). We had an exceptional response, and in the end this session ended up being the second biggest of the whole congress: an exceptional result if we, indeed, consider that Lithuania had never experienced a real event related to PMS.

The session, entitled ‘Fernando, Kojak and Other Music's Meanings – In Honour of Philip Tagg’, had the following programme (in order of appearance): Keith Negus (‘The Semiotic Dialogues of the Popular Song’); Marta García Quiñones (‘Hearing Musics – Thinking of Music and Music Studies Beyond the Hearing/Listening Divide’); Dario Martinelli (‘Left and Right as Cultural Models in Popular Music’); Errico Pavese (‘A 1980s Shift: Social Imaginary and Politics in Italian Popular Music’); Gabriele Marino (‘Back to the Eighties: Past, Imitation, Nostalgia, Revival’); Jacopo Conti (‘Where's the Orchestra? – The Sanremo Festival Through the 1980s and the 1980s Through the Sanremo Festival’); Jacopo Tomatis (‘The Years of 883 – Italian Popular Music at the Time of Commercial Broadcasting’); Kaire Maimets-Volt (‘“Distant Bolero Drums” in Estonian National Mega-Hit Koit by Tõnis Mägi’); Miglė Bisigirskytė (‘It's a Kind of Queen-esque: The Influence of Queen on Popular Music’); Esa Lilja and Titti Kallio (‘Idiomatic Musical Patterns & Learning Music – Music Theory and Cognitive Psychology Considered’); Paolo Ribaldini (‘Political Significance in the Musical Work of Manowar – A Semiotic Analysis of “The Fight for Freedom”’); Joan Grimalt (‘Musical Meanings: A Systematic, Analytical and Pedagogical Approach’); and of course Philip Tagg (‘Music Theory Terminology as Ideology’). Franco Fabbri, too, intervened to open and moderate the session. At the end of it, we also scheduled a round-table to allow interested scholars to discuss Tagg's brand new project for terminological reform in music theory.

Finally, Philip was also scheduled to deliver a plenary lecture, on Wednesday 4 June, which he entitled ‘Semiotics, the Missing Link between Music and the Rest of Human Knowledge: On the Need for Terminological and Methodological Reform in Music Studies’.

There is, of course, no room here to comment in detail on each of the three symbolic forms of celebration we arranged for this great scholar. ISI, thanks to the communication department of Kaunas University of Technology, arranged a streaming broadcast of all the opening ceremony and the plenary sessions. Those interested may watch Philip receiving his ICoN award at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QySq5OZC5g (after 2 h 05'15) and giving his lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J99pt7C3BRA.

I hear from ‘trusted sources’ that Philip was rather touched by the whole event: after a whole life and career spent ‘fighting the system’ (in a broad sense, but also in the specific traditional hostility that the ‘euroclassical tradition’ – as he calls it – has reserved to PMS), it must have been a little gratifying for him to receive a prize exactly for having done that (among other things). The following was indeed the text of the motivation for his award:

However, Philip being Philip, he could not reply without a touch of his irresistible humour. Here is a transcript of his acceptance speech:

Dear Philip, happy birthday from all of us, and thank you for making it much easier and more significant to be a popular music scholar.