Call for submissions
Norient Academic Online Journal
The Future(s) of Music? – Notions of Prospective Musics in Utopian Movies and Literature

The famous Cantina Band scene from George Lucas’ Star Wars, featuring an alien ensemble performing a foxtrot-like John Williams composition, is just one of many examples: While film scores often have provided an experimental ground for musical innovators – just think of the trendsetting sound creations Oskar Sala and Bernard Herrmann contributed to the late films by Alfred Hitchcock – diegetic depictions of musical performances, i.e. those scenes in films where the production or consumption of music is part of the story, often draw on known musical idioms when the dramatic setting is explicitly utopian. The paradox here is that there seems to be a decisive difference between composing innovative film scores on the one hand and imagining, picturing and sounding-out “the music of the future” on the other. Or, is it futures? Continue reading →

Call for submissions
Nostalgias: A special issue of Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies
Edited by Hugh Dauncey (Newcastle University) & Christopher Tinker (Heriot-Watt University)

Volume!, the French peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of popular music, seeks contributions for a special issue on nostalgia and popular music in a variety of national, international and transnational contexts. Continue reading →

Call for chapters
Death and the Rock Star
Deadline for proposals: 15 July 2012

The recent untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, and the resurrection of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival, have focused the media spotlight, yet again, on the relationship between rock, popular music and death. The ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ lifestyle has left many casualties in its wake. Over time, however, as the ranks of dead musicians have grown, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as the artists who were at the forefront of the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ’27 Club’), no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have. Continue reading →