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/

Call for Papers

Mediations of music and power in online music cultures

21–22 September 2023, Division of Gender Studies, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Sweden

Music cultures in the twenty-first century are strongly shaped by online media. Music streaming, social media, video sharing sites as well as internet-based music production software, radio stations, and music magazines have variously affected the formatting, curation, and consumption of music. Largely centralized around a small number of privatized companies, where human and automated processes intersect, online music cultures are sites of mediations of power.

Call For Papers: Practice Research in 21st Century Music

The 21st Century Music Practice Research Network’s 2023 One Day Conference on Saturday 20th May 2023 at the University of West London, St. Mary’s Road, Ealing, London W5 5RF

The C21MP network is relaunching its ‘in-person’ events with a one day conference looking for common themes in pedagogy and practice research in performance, composition, record production, music technology, music business and arts administration.

Call for Papers: Music and the Internet conference, University of Chicago and virtual, 9-10 June 2023

Music and the Internet (musicandtheinternet.co) is a hybrid, multi-day interdisciplinary conference that will take place virtually and at the University of Chicago June 9-10 2023.

From autoplaying videos to social media echo chambers, the 21st-century internet is a noisy place. The internet and online platforms have become increasingly entwined in both the music industry and in everyday musical activity, with music as both a shaped and shaping medium. Online music communities have emerged around net-native genres with distinct aesthetic, communicative, and meme-based conventions. Such developments have varied throughout the history of music on the internet, with reverberating effects in other online creative industries. Accordingly, a range of theoretical, practical, and ethical issues are in open (and often urgent) discussion for those studying these phenomena.