Call for papers
IASPM UK and Ireland Biennial Conference
Worlds of Popular Music
University College, Cork
Popular music creates worlds around its listeners, temporary, often intimate, and feelingful environments within which the act of listening occurs. It meanwhile plays significant roles in the global flows of capitalism, politics, tourism and migration, and inflects the virtual spaces opened up online by digital technology. Continue reading
Call for papers
35th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
Empire
19-23 March 2014
Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel
The ICFA welcomes papers on any aspect of the fantastic – broadly defined as including fantasy, science fiction, weird fiction, horror, gothic, and fairy tales – in Literature, Drama, Film, Music, Video Games and Comics. The Visual & Performing Arts and Audiences (VPAA) Division accepts papers on:
– visual arts such as comic books, paintings, architecture, sculpture, photographs and illustrations;
– the performing arts, including (film, TV, game, pop/rock) music, dance and theater;
– games, including fanfic, fan artwork and cosplay;
– transformative texts, both fan and professional, including mashups and viral marketing;
– and audience/reception studies concerning audiences for any medium or genre of the fantastic. Continue reading
Sixth International Doctoral Workshop in Ethnomusicology
25–29 June 2014
Hildesheim/Hanover
The Center for World Music at the University of Hildesheim and the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media are pleased to announce the sixth annual workshop for PhD candidates in ethnomusicology. Through paper presentations, discussions and working groups, the workshop offers a unique environment for 16 doctoral students to engage in international dialogue and exchange, and expand critical debate on recent ethnomusicological research. The workshop will be directed by Prof. Dr. Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago/Hanover), Prof. Dr. Raimund Vogels (Hildesheim/Hanover), and Dr. Thomas R. Hilder (Hildesheim). Continue reading
Call for papers
GO! MUSIC AND MOBILITY
EMP Pop Conference
24-27 April 2014, Seattle, Washington
We turn to music to put the world in motion. Music on mobile phones, music over the airways, communication by talking drums: these sounds have accompanied the voluntary and involuntary movement of people, alleviated work and pulsated leisure, animated borderlands and virtual spaces with patterns that root and are made material. As rites of charivari and Pink Floyd songs demonstrate, when music stops conveying mobility we bang on pots and walls. Continue reading
Call for papers
Real Country? Geographic, Cultural and Stylistic Challenges to the Country Music Genre
International Symposium
13-14 November 2013
Strasbourg, France
In 2006, an article in the Observer Music Monthly stated, “Country is often seen as the whitest, most segregated of all styles: the redneck soundtrack of the racist South”. First marketed as “old time,” then as “hillbilly music” by northeastern music executives in the 1920s and 1930s country music has been branded with the same stereotypes as its region of origin. Perceived as conventional, vulgar and conservative, it has been charged with wallowing in easy patriotism and mawkish sentimentality, based on a homesickness for a lost agrarian past which at times slips into an unquestioning fondness for pre-Civil War Dixie. Continue reading
Call for papers
Pop-Life: The Value of Popular Music in the Twenty First Century
University of Northampton
6-7 June 2014
It has increasingly become a truism to suggest that contemporary popular music practice is in a state of flux. Established patterns of consumption, distribution and production have at the very least been revolutionised by the opportunities afforded by digitalisation and the internet. While subcultural identities may have become increasingly adopted by mainstream media, the proliferation of media outlets has contributed to an increasingly varied and cosmopolitan listening experience both in terms of stylistic breadth but also in terms of historical depth. While some commentators have sounded the death-knell of the music industry, others see an opening-up of opportunity for musicians and audiences around the world that may be far more liberating than at any time since the dawn of recorded music. Continue reading
Call for papers
“Straight from the Heart”: A Conference on Love and Rock Music
Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3 (France)
16-17 April 2014
A joint production between University of Chester (United Kingdom) and Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3 (France)
Music historians have often associated archetypal rock music with rebellion and social unrest – political protest, generational conflict, individualism, narcissism and sexual liberation. Likewise, the press, public authorities, medical and religious institutions have routinely considered rock music as a more or less overt, dangerous form of opposition to established order, crystallizing teenage revolt. Rock has been construed as a language of resistance and grammar of protest, embodying the spirit as well as the letter of subversion. Rock songs, however, have often taken love as a central theme – love between men and women, brothers and sisters, parents and children, or friends; sometimes for a dog, a car, a bike, or even a pair of shoes; sometimes universal, spiritual love. Continue reading
Call for papers
IASPM UK and Ireland Postgraduate Conference 2013
The Cultural Value of Popular Music
5-6 September, University of Glasgow
The 2013 IASPM UK and Ireland postgraduate conference, to be held at the University of Glasgow, invites papers exploring the cultural value of popular music. In light of the AHRC’s recently launched two-year Cultural Value Project (www.ahrc.ac.uk/funded-research/funded-themes-and-programmes/cultural-value-project), the conference will focus on both the experience of popular music and the economic and social benefits such an experience provides. Continue reading
Call for papers
Mediating Cityscapes
Den Haag/The Hague
25-27 September 2013
If urban space has historically been defined by the relation between static structures and mobile subjects, this dichotomy is fast giving way to hybrid spatialities characterized by dynamic flows which not only dissolve the fixity of traditional modes of spatial enclosure, but problematize the unified presence of the subject traversing their contours. Scott McQuire, The Media City (2008) Continue reading
Call for papers
IASPM-ANZ 2013 Conference
Popular Music Communities, Places and Ecologies
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
24-26 November 2013
We are pleased to announce this call for papers for the 2013 IAPSM-ANZ conference, which will be held at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, in conjunction with the International Music Council’s 5th World Forum for Music (21-24 November). The theme of the IMC World Forum is Sustaining Music, Engaging Communities with a strong emphasis on the interplay between music, musicians and their various environments of activity (natural, built, social and cultural, etc.). Drawing on this, the theme of the 2013 IASPM-ANZ conference, Popular Music Communities, Places and Ecologies seeks to foster scholarly engagement with the various ways in which music, people and place are connected. While notions of ‘community’ and ‘place’ are well-established constructs in popular music studies, we introduce here the notion of ‘ecology’ as a further consideration in the relationship between popular music and place. This term may be understood literally, in reference to the natural or physical environment, or figuratively, as a metaphor for the numerous other possible environments of popular music production and consumption. Continue reading