Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik

About Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik

Mikkel Broch Ålvik holds MA and PhD degrees in musicology from the University of Oslo. He specialises in critical musicology and popular music studies, and his teaching and research are characterised by an interdisciplinary approach that links musicology with gender, media, and identity studies.

Ålvik’s chief musicological interests are the broad field of popular music, identity politics, authenticity, theatricality, the music industry, critical historiography, and mediation. He researches into questions of musical taste, genre, language, gender and sexuality and the relationship/s between music and technology, with the voice as a central topic of interest.

He also researches into questions of Nordic music and identity, and he is an associated member of the Nordic Sounds critical research group at the University of Oslo.

In addition to his scholarly background, Ålvik also has several years’ experience as a musician in the fields of jazz, rock, and classical music.

In autumn 2025, Ålvik teaches the introductory courses, Musicology: An Introduction 1 and Musicology: An Introduction 2, in Örebro University’s BA program Musik, kultur och medier (Music, Culture, and the Media) Year 1. He also teaches recording history, cultural theory, and popular music analysis in the MA program in musicology. Moreover, he teaches research methodology and theory in the performance program, theory of identity, authenticity and marketing for musicians, and methods for analysing recorded music, field research method, and film music, semiotics and culture in the music production program.

Selected Publications

Broch Ålvik, Jon Mikkel. 2025. "The Complexity of Banality: Neoclassicism and Popular Music in Pauline Hall’s Suite for Wind Quintet". European Perspectives on the New Objectivity Movement: Entanglements of Music, Poetics, and Ideas in the Interwar Years, ed. Benedetta Zucconi & Ulrik Volgsten. Palgrave Macmillan.

Broch Ålvik, Jon Mikkel. 2021. "The Pleasure(s) of the Pop Text: Subversion and Theatricality in Cloroform and Tove Lo." In Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins, ed. Kai Arne Hansen, Eirik Askerøi, and Freya Jarman, pp. 82-96. Routledge.

Hawkins, Stan, and Broch Ålvik, Jon Mikkel. 2019. "A-ha's 'Take on Me': Melody, Vocal Compulsion, and Rotoscoping." In The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches, ed. Ciro Scotto, Kenneth Smith, and John Brackett, pp. 77-94. Routledge.