IASPM-US and Pop Conference

Posted on by

Sounds of the City
IASPM-US Annual Conference
Jointly held with 2012 EMP Pop Conference presented by NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music
New York City, March 22-25, 2012

Charlie Gillett’s pioneering The Sound of the City declared, with its title, that the electrified roots music of Elvis and Little Richard was an urban synthesis: “In rock and roll, the strident, repetitive sounds of city life were, in effect, reproduced as melody and rhythm.” But the metropolitan modernities of popular music take many different forms: Nuyorican salsa, Ralph Ellison “living with jazz” in his apartment building, San Francisco open-air psychedelia, double dutch and breakdancing, Amadou & Mariam’s “fast food Dakar,” and beyond. So for this year’s joint International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US branch gathering and EMP Museum Pop Conference, presented by New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, we copyedit Gillett slightly and ask that presenters explore sounds of the city—the reverberations of people gathered en masse. Following are some suggested but not required subthemes. All styles and eras of pop music are welcome. Continue reading →

Charles Hamm – memorial service‏

Posted on by

A memorial service for Charles Hamm (1925-1911) will be held on Saturday, 3 December 2011, 3-5 p.m., Norwich Inn, Norwich, Vermont.

Please RSVP if you expect to attend, to Chris Hamm at jcsong@u.washington.edu.

If you cannot attend, but would like to enter words into the memorial register, please send them to Chris (jcsong@u.washington.edu) or mail them to him at:  Chris Hamm/13530 16th Ave NE/Seattle, WA 98125.

Faculty Positions: Clinical, Assistant and Associate Professors of Music

Posted on by

New York University
Abu Dhabi campus

NYU Abu Dhabi currently seeks a number of dynamic and creative music scholars and scholar-practitioners to teach within and across the disciplines of musicology/ethnomusicology, theory/composition, performance, and music technology/new media.  The successful candidate(s) will have a record of significant achievement in one or more of the above areas, an adventurous program of research and/or performance, and experience teaching at the undergraduate level. Candidates with experience in academic leadership and/or curricular development are particularly encouraged to apply. Continue reading →

Brian Eno edited collection‏

Posted on by

Call for contributions

On the back of his published diary (A Year with Swollen Appendices, Faber 1996) Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer- user, an interviewee, and a ‘drifting clarifier’. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airports); a trusted producer (for Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and a host of other artists); the maker of large scale video and installation artworks; a maker of apps and interactive software; and so on, and so on. All in all, he is one of the most feted and most influential musical figures of the past forty years (even though he himself has consistently downplayed his musical abilities, describing himself as an anti-musician on more than one occasion). Continue reading →

Charles Hamm (1925-2011)

Posted on by

A personal tribute by Philip Tagg

Charles Hamm, founder member of IASPM and distinguished music scholar, died on 16 October 2011. He will be sorely missed.

I was delighted when, in 1981, Charles agreed to deliver a paper at the first IASPM international conference in Amsterdam. And what a paper it was! If only we’d paid more attention to what was really popular on TV — The Osmonds and Sousa marches rather than to what was #1 in the charts (Kim Carnes) or particularly cool among rockologists— we “could easily have predicted the outcome of last fall’s presidential election”, he argued, “and anticipated other recent events in the United States signalling a massive swing to the right, politically and socially” (Hamm, 1982: 13). Continue reading →

Perspectives on Musical Improvisation

Posted on by

Call for papers
10th-13th September 2012
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

Conference theme
Improvisation is arguably the most widely distributed form of musical practice – and yet remains the least studied or understood. Indeed, even the boundaries of what is or is not regarded as improvisation remain unclear. This conference will address the many faces of improvisation from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives – historical, psychological, ethnomusicological, analytical, technological, sociological, organological, and pedagogical. Over the course of four days, the conference will include papers, practical sessions, and poster presentations.

The conference is affiliated to the AHRC-funded Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) and enjoys the support of SEMPRE, IMR, BFE, and SMA. Continue reading →

University of Maryland Ethnomusicology Position‏

Posted on by

University of Maryland School of Music
Faculty vacancy in ethnomusicology: beginning August 2012
Position: Ethnomusicologist

Rank and salary: Assistant Professor, tenure track; salary commensurate with experience.

Qualifications: Ph.D. in ethnomusicology or related field; strong background in both cultural anthropology and historical musicology; fieldwork experience; evidence or promise of excellence in research, undergraduate and graduate teaching, and advising at the graduate level. Continue reading →

The Future of Arts Research Conference‏

Posted on by

A one-day postgraduate conference to be held at the British Library, Friday 18th November 2011, 9.30-5.00 sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, in partnership with the British Library.

Keynote speakers: Professor Martin McQuillan, Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis, Kingston University; David Cross, freelance artist and Reader in Art and Design at the University of the Arts London

The Future of Arts Research is an interdisciplinary conference in which all papers apart from the initial keynotes will be given by research students from across the UK. Papers will seek to define what current research students see as the true value of their academic activity within the cultural and creative sphere referred to as ‘the arts’. This is an interdisciplinary event and papers will range across the fields of Classics, Drama, English, Languages, Media and Film Studies, Music, Visual Arts, and related disciplines. Continue reading →

Living Stereo: History, Culture, Multichannel Sound

Posted on by

Call for papers
A Symposium organized by the Sound Studies Group, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture
Carleton University, Ottawa March 9 – 11, 2012
Keynote speakers: Dr. Jonathan Sterne (McGill University), Dr. Tim J. Anderson (Old Dominion University)

This conference is about the history and significance of stereo sound reproduction in aural culture. Stereo is everywhere: the whole culture and industry of music and sound became organized around the principle of stereo during the mid twentieth century. But nothing about this – not the invention or acceptance or ubiquity of stereo – was inevitable. Nor did the aesthetic conventions, technological objects, and listening practices required to make sense of stereo emerge fully formed, out of the blue. Continue reading →