Author Archives: IASPM webmaster

Brian Eno edited collection‏

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Call for contributions

On the back of his published diary (A Year with Swollen Appendices, Faber 1996) Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer- user, an interviewee, and a ‘drifting clarifier’. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airports); a trusted producer (for Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and a host of other artists); the maker of large scale video and installation artworks; a maker of apps and interactive software; and so on, and so on. All in all, he is one of the most feted and most influential musical figures of the past forty years (even though he himself has consistently downplayed his musical abilities, describing himself as an anti-musician on more than one occasion). Continue reading →

Charles Hamm (1925-2011)

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A personal tribute by Philip Tagg

Charles Hamm, founder member of IASPM and distinguished music scholar, died on 16 October 2011. He will be sorely missed.

I was delighted when, in 1981, Charles agreed to deliver a paper at the first IASPM international conference in Amsterdam. And what a paper it was! If only we’d paid more attention to what was really popular on TV — The Osmonds and Sousa marches rather than to what was #1 in the charts (Kim Carnes) or particularly cool among rockologists— we “could easily have predicted the outcome of last fall’s presidential election”, he argued, “and anticipated other recent events in the United States signalling a massive swing to the right, politically and socially” (Hamm, 1982: 13). Continue reading →

Perspectives on Musical Improvisation

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Call for papers
10th-13th September 2012
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

Conference theme
Improvisation is arguably the most widely distributed form of musical practice – and yet remains the least studied or understood. Indeed, even the boundaries of what is or is not regarded as improvisation remain unclear. This conference will address the many faces of improvisation from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives – historical, psychological, ethnomusicological, analytical, technological, sociological, organological, and pedagogical. Over the course of four days, the conference will include papers, practical sessions, and poster presentations.

The conference is affiliated to the AHRC-funded Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) and enjoys the support of SEMPRE, IMR, BFE, and SMA. Continue reading →

University of Maryland Ethnomusicology Position‏

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University of Maryland School of Music
Faculty vacancy in ethnomusicology: beginning August 2012
Position: Ethnomusicologist

Rank and salary: Assistant Professor, tenure track; salary commensurate with experience.

Qualifications: Ph.D. in ethnomusicology or related field; strong background in both cultural anthropology and historical musicology; fieldwork experience; evidence or promise of excellence in research, undergraduate and graduate teaching, and advising at the graduate level. Continue reading →

The Future of Arts Research Conference‏

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A one-day postgraduate conference to be held at the British Library, Friday 18th November 2011, 9.30-5.00 sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, in partnership with the British Library.

Keynote speakers: Professor Martin McQuillan, Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis, Kingston University; David Cross, freelance artist and Reader in Art and Design at the University of the Arts London

The Future of Arts Research is an interdisciplinary conference in which all papers apart from the initial keynotes will be given by research students from across the UK. Papers will seek to define what current research students see as the true value of their academic activity within the cultural and creative sphere referred to as ‘the arts’. This is an interdisciplinary event and papers will range across the fields of Classics, Drama, English, Languages, Media and Film Studies, Music, Visual Arts, and related disciplines. Continue reading →

Living Stereo: History, Culture, Multichannel Sound

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Call for papers
A Symposium organized by the Sound Studies Group, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture
Carleton University, Ottawa March 9 – 11, 2012
Keynote speakers: Dr. Jonathan Sterne (McGill University), Dr. Tim J. Anderson (Old Dominion University)

This conference is about the history and significance of stereo sound reproduction in aural culture. Stereo is everywhere: the whole culture and industry of music and sound became organized around the principle of stereo during the mid twentieth century. But nothing about this – not the invention or acceptance or ubiquity of stereo – was inevitable. Nor did the aesthetic conventions, technological objects, and listening practices required to make sense of stereo emerge fully formed, out of the blue. Continue reading →

The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Musical Migration and Tourism

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Call for contributions

Edited by Simone Krüger (Liverpool John Moores University) and Ruxandra Trandafoiu (Edge Hill University)

We are soliciting chapter proposals for an edited collection entitled The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Musical Migration and Tourism to be published by Routledge in 2013 in its Research in Ethnomusicology Series. (Please note that the book is contractually agreed.) The book studies musical transformations as they occur across time and space, exploring contemporary concerns about the impact of globalization on musics and peoples as they transit across the globe. The book’s focus is on two main themes: musical tourism and travel; musical migration and diaspora. Continue reading →

IASPM-Canada 2012 Annual Conference‏

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Call for papers
Sounding the Nation? Diaspora, Indigeneity, and Multiculturalism
IASPM-Canada Annual Conference
Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia
June 14 – 17, 2012

What does a critical examination of diaspora offer to our understanding of popular music in the multicultural settler nation of Canada? Over the past twenty years, the term diaspora has proliferated as a way of making sense of how groups of people, defined through ethnicity, culture, religion, and homeland, have circulated and settled in a postcolonial and increasingly globalized world. Although the history of diaspora is shaped by violence and inequality, the concept has also permitted scholars to move beyond a static sense of a “homeland” or a “multicultural mosaic” and examine the complicated interstices, hybridities, and networks that link populations through travel, communication, memory—and music. Continue reading →

Routledge Popular Music in the Nordic Region‏

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Call for contributions
Popular Music in the Nordic Countries: Music, Identity, and Social Change in the Early 21st Century

Editors: Fabian Holt (University of Roskilde, fabianh@ruc.dk) and Antti-Ville Kärjä (University of Turku, avkarj@utu.fi)

For the Routledge series World Popular Music, we are hereby making a call for chapter proposals for a volume with the title above. The volume will examine the role of popular music in the Nordic countries in the context of contemporary social change. The focus of volume will be to situate popular music in both local and cross-national contexts of the region and to apply and develop new interdisciplinary research perspectives. This call is therefore not only targeted at music studies but also at scholars working on music within anthropology, cultural studies, history, sociology, and media studies. The volume is part of a larger pan-Nordic collaboration and forms the basis for the production of radio and television series as well as museum exhibitions. Continue reading →

Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures

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Call for contributions

In recent years, the internet in general and social media in particular has fundamentally changed our media culture. The relationship between producers and consumers has shifted, creating new power relationships. Media culture has become more and more about participation, while technological developments such as ‘Facebook liking’ have further blurred the traditional distinction between fans and audiences. Fans represent the vanguard of these new developments. Insights from early fan studies on active audiences have spread to other notions of the audience. These developments call for a critical rethinking of the role and significance of fans in contemporary culture. Continue reading →