New Approaches to Music and Sound
Guest Editors: David Suisman and Rebecca Tinio McKenna

If new book series and journal special issues are any indication, over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in the musical and sonic worlds of the past. Scholars of music, sound studies, disability studies, transnational and postcolonial studies, cultural history, history of the senses, and others have been expanding our historical understanding of soundscapes, music cultures, aurality, acoustics, and other aspects of the work sound does in the world. New scholarship is connecting music and sound with politics and social movements, capitalism and commerce, the formation of racial, gender, and class identity and difference, the history of technology and of natural environments, and more.

Call for contributions to a Journal of Scandinavian Cinema In Focus section highlighting Musical Biopics and Musical Documentaries from the Scandinavian countries 

This is a call for short subject contributions (2000-3000 words) focusing on how Scandinavian film and television have presented musicians, singers, bands and orchestras in biopics and documentaries. We welcome submissions that – after a quick theoretical introduction and concise contextual background – offer discussions of topics such as: 

• the film’s role within cultural memory – usually restricted to a single national market and often catering to a certain age group’s intragenerational memories 
• the handling of generic conventions; from narration and characterization to the selection of music, casting choices and staging of performances  
• the function of music in specific films and film genres 
• marketing and authentification discourses, including media coverage of stars and their work with particular roles and performances, as well as screenwriters’ and directors’ use of biographies, interviews, original footage and recordings 
• national and international reception of such films  

Editors: Beate Peter (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) and Michael Rauhut (University of Agder, Norway)

Submissions are invited for a special edition of Popular Music History that aims to assess the sources, approaches and methods with which East German popular music is written.

Background

Histories of German popular music generally focus on examples of West German music which were commercially successful and/or are considered to be aesthetically and musically ground-breaking. Bands such as Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! or the Scorpions are the subject of many academic as well as non-academic publications, and they are considered as canonical as genres such as Krautrock or Neue Deutsche Welle. East German musicians or movements, on the other hand, tend to be overlooked, as do specific artistic forms of expression which were developed in response to authoritarian leadership in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). The examination of a relationship between the GDR and the arts is almost altogether absent from a pan-German popular music history.