The 14^th International Music Business Research Days 2023 

Towards Sustainability in Music Business?  

Balancing new business models, changing labor conditions and new competences. 

November 1-3, University of Agder, Department of Popular Music, Kristiansand, Norway 

Call For Papers 

Music business, and the frameworks and dynamics of the music industries, continue to develop and change, with new digital innovations, new formats, new business models and new content being created. It is nothing new that music business operates within changing economic- and technological framework conditions – these are perhaps more to be considered inherent features rather than substantial shifts. Nonetheless, these changes need to be continually addressed and critically discussed.  

Barbarian Pipes and Strings Reconsidered — Negotiating Authenticity in the Musics of China: Transcultural Perspectives

25th International CHIME Conference, Heidelberg CATS, October 1-4, 2023

Exactly 25 years after the last International Chime Conference in Heidelberg that focused on “Barbarian Pipes and Strings,” we return to the city by the Neckar and the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) that now houses the CHIME Collection to reconsider musical practices in China from a transcultural perspective.

Diversity in Popular Music Spheres 

IASPM-Australia/New Zealand 

University of Auckland and Wintec | Te Pūkenga 

Tāmaki-Makaurau (Auckland) and Kirkiriroa (Hamilton), Aotearoa 

5-8 December 2023 

Popular music has long existed as a space for the sharing and fostering of marginalised voices and stories, despite its equal position as a hegemonic economic and cultural tool of capitalism and Western imperialism. This conference invites papers on popular music and popular music studies that consider or celebrate aspects of non-mainstream politics, identities, creatives and practices; as well as interrogating the power structures related to our field that emerge from patriarchal white, cisgender, heterosexual and ableist ideologies and values. We especially look for work around indigenous studies, gender and queer studies, disability studies and colonialism or any other intersectional perspectives, in relation to any aspect of popular music consumption, production and people. 

Call for Papers

Pop after Communism. The Transformation of Popular Culture after 1989/90

Place: Berlin

From-To: 15 – 17 Nov. 2023

Deadline: 31 May 2023

The social changes that went along with the political upheaval of 1989/90 in the countries of state socialism were not limited to the political system, economic structures or social conditions. The late phase and the end of state socialism were marked by a far-reaching transformation of popular culture, with global cultural changes becoming an important driver of the post-communist transformation. Up to now, there have been some individual studies on the history of pop in the 1990s and early 2000s with a particular view to the united Germany, the countries of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe and the states that emerged with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but no comprehensive overview of the globally entangled transformation processes in pop culture. The conference hence aims to bring together researchers in the broader field of “pop history” to examine the overarching tendencies of this fundamental socio-cultural change and the protagonists and institutions that determined it from a comparative perspective. The focus of the conference is on pop music and the entire range of pop cultural forms of expression (e.g. film, fashion, literature).

While both pop music, especially with its subcultural scenes, and youth culture, which became highly differentiated in state socialist societies in the 1980s, are now relatively well researched, only a few studies follow their development through the social transformations that began after the political upheaval of 1989/90. Thus, relatively little is known about how state cultural institutions were dissolved or transformed in order to adapt to the new conditions and which paths their former representatives took after the political upheaval. Significant differences between the individual countries, e.g. with regard to gradual liberalisation tendencies or repressive policies that continued until the end of state socialism, must therefore be taken into account just as the distinctive preconditions for the developments beginning after 1989/90.

Call for Papers
Music, Migration, Belonging/s in 21st-Century Europe
Conference at the mdw–University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria

November 24–25, 2023Music and Minorities Research Center

The question of belonging is important to everyone. Yet, this question becomes particularly significant to the experience of migration, with people leaving or being forced to leave familiar structures of belonging, finding themselves in new, alien contexts and environments. While music studies scholars have debated issues of identity in depth, the notion of belonging or belongings – as well as the counterpart non-belonging – has yet to be more widely theorized.

Sound, Meaning, Education: CONVERSATIONS & improvisations
University of Guelph/IICSI, October 20-22, 2023
Proposal Deadline: May 15, 2023
SME | CFP (Call for Proposals)

Sound, Meaning Education (SME) invites researchers, artists, and/or teachers to submit
proposals for an in-person conference to be held at the University of Guelph, October 20-22,
2023. The conference will gather all manner of curricular innovators to share
research/scholarship, pedagogical strategies, narratives/stories, performances, and imaginings for the purpose of building infrastructures that support sound and meaning explorations within teaching and learning contexts.

Popular Music Theory & Analysis Summer School (IPM-IPM-SMA)
Tuesday 29th – Thursday 31st August 2023, University of Liverpool

The Institutes of Popular Music of both Rochester and Liverpool, together with the Society for Music Analysis, are pleased to announce their second Summer School dedicated to popular music theory and analysis. Teaching will be led by Lori Burns (Ottawa), Mark Spicer (Hunter College / CUNY), David Temperley (Eastman), and plenaries will be given by John Covach (Rochester), Freya Jarman (Liverpool), and Catherine Tackley (Liverpool).

This is a free course, although travel, accommodation and subsidence must be covered by delegates. Ideal for graduate students or early career researchers.

The deadline for applications is May 15th 2023.

Call for Papers: Popular Brass Music in the 21st Century

— Conference, University of Innsbruck (Austria), Department of Music

— October 20–21, 2023

— Haus der Musik, Universitätsstrasse 1, 6020 Innsbruck

This conference takes the increasing popularity of brass music in German-speaking regions as a departure point to explore the contemporary aesthetic, stylistic, sociocultural, economic, and political facets of music that gravitates around brass instruments. Hereby, the conference aims to initiate the conceptualization of a newly emerging and adapting musical field from an international perspective. 

Call for Abstracts:

*How Does “Your” Music Sound? Belonging, Communities, and Identities in Popular Music across Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe*

International conference, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 9-10, 2023

Over the past three decades, case studies from Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe have enriched the fields of popular music studies, sonic studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, offering insights into the complex entanglements between music practices, industries, and audiences on the one hand, and different aspects of belonging, identification, and community-formation on the other. Analyses of modern local and regional popular-music manifestations such as (turbofolk, Austropop, chalga, manele, tallava, Serbian trapfolk, Bulgarian trap, Slovenian folk pop etc.) provide an invaluable insight into the multitude of music- and soundscapes in the region. They also present a springboard for further inquiry into the mechanisms, impact, and architectures of belonging, identification, and communities in this diverse space, historically marked by a vibrant dynamic of glitches, ruptures, and connections.

This conference takes its cue from Connell and Gibson’s (2002: 9) perceptively dialectical observation that while “music is simultaneously a commodity and cultural expression, it is also quite uniquely both the most fluid of cultural forms /…/ and a vibrant expression of cultures and traditions, at times held onto vehemently in the face of change.” Music connects people, enabling constellations of listeners, performers, and industry actors that are not always easy to predict, as well as consolidating extant communities based around various notions, such as shared memory, generation, class, gender, or nation. Indeed, recent scholarship has focussed extensively on popular music’s entanglements with space in place in terms of its cultural geographies, transnational and transcultural flows, diasporic significance, scenes, and various kinds of belonging. Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Győri’s (2018) inspiring edited volume demonstrates the conceptual significance of a transnational approach to studying popular music in Eastern Europe, while Steinbrecher (2020), Kovačič (2022), Archer (2011), Hofman (2010), Dumnić Vilotijević (2020), Stanković (2021), Kaluža (2021), Špirić Beard and Rasmussen (eds., 2021) and Bobnič et al. (2022) point to the need to further broaden the context of discussion, re-examining territorialization processes from a post-transitional European perspective, characterized by a high degree of connectivity, and by shared sensibilities, aesthetics, as well as rhetorical and political strategies. In this space, characterized by mobility and flux, as well as by the proliferation of populist rhetorical strategies that call for exclusionist identification, the Eastern, Central, and South-Eastern European spaces need to be thought alongside one another.

CUMIN is the Contemporary Urban Music for Inclusion Network https://cuminetwork.wordpress.com/. CUMIN is an AHRC-funded network designed to bring together researchers, practitioners and a range of stake-holders in educational and social projects that utilise ‘contemporary urban music’ (by which we mean Hip Hop, grime, house, EDM, techno and so forth), fostering dialogue and production of new knowledge.

On Friday 30th June from 9.30am to 5.30pm CUMIN will hold a conference at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance https://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/