Music, Musicology and Academic Responsibilities in the 21st Century 

International Conference, University College Dublin, 1-3 July 2024 

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2005 Harold Pinter said: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false … I believe that these assertions still make sense … [in] art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”

This dichotomy between the duties of artists (as well as humanities scholars) and of private citizens indicates why the arts and humanities find themselves at a crossroads today. The moral turn of the last decade, the increased focus on sustainability, equity, diversity and inclusion as underpinning all academic work regardless of the discipline, the increasing polarisation of our society, the relativisation of truth as represented by the post-truth mentality, and neoliberal pressures leave the arts and humanities between a rock and a hard place. Thus, we all must continuously explore realignments of our duties as academics and citizens. Like every generation before us, we have to find new ways to understand and answer the challenge posed by Karl Marx’s (slightly adjusted) eleventh Feuerbach thesis, that our work should not merely describe and interpreted the musical world in various ways but also help change it.

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Human and More-than-Human Entanglements:  Popular Music Performance, Education, and Technologies

Location: Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University, Thailand
Dates: 25-27 July 2024
Organisers: International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Southeast Asia and Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group

Currently, there is a wealth of research on how humans engage with each other in popular music. However, less has been explored in popular music studies regarding interactions with non-human or more-than-human entities. The more-than-human is understood as one that is both internally and externally experienced, with an emphasis on positionality within and beyond the human body. In music studies, explorations of the more-than-human can be observed in the growing interdisciplinary fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, ecomusicology and multispecies ethnography (Allen, 2013; Titon, 2013; Allen & Dawe, 2016) – especially that of indigenous sonic worlds, traditional music, and current discourses on virtual world(s). As such, this call poses the following query: How does Southeast Asian popular music directly deal with more-than-human relationships as a fundamental part of being in the world alongside producing and performing strategies of place-making and musicking?

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Eurovision in Times of War: Military Conflict, Post-conflict Memory & Culture Wars

University of Nottingham, U.K., 9-10 November 2023
Organised by the University of Nottingham Centre for Memory Studies and Post-Conflict Cultures, in partnership with the Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv

The spectacular interval act of the Eurovision Song Contest final in Stockholm, 2016, ‘Love Love Peace Peace’, simultaneously parodied and celebrated the long-standing centrality to the Eurovision brand of the themes of international harmony and reconciliation. Ever since its inception in 1956, the officially apolitical Eurovision Contest ‘has reflected and become intertwined with the history of postwar Europe from a political perspective’ (D. Vuletic, 2018), as a stage whereupon popular music artists, and their vast global audiences, have engaged with the tensions and terrors of the continent’s ‘Cold War’, the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, conflicting memories of collective trauma, and diverse struggles for democratisation and human rights.

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Nostalgia and Song: Production, Text, Reception and the Quest for Home

Call for Chapters

This book will explore a neglected aspect of scholarship surrounding the study of song—its relationship with nostalgia and notions of ‘home’.  All of the chapters will examine these factors from the perspective of ‘production’, ‘text’ and/or ‘reception, as alluded to by scholars such as Longhurst (1995) and Nattiez (1990). Potential contributors are encouraged to explore these themes either individually or dialogically.

Examples of the Production theme include questions such as:

• What are the relationships between nostalgia and creativity in songs about home?
• How are nostalgic production techniques used in song construction?
• How is nostalgia used as a form of commercialism in songs about home?
• How are post Marxist ideas used to ‘haunt’ songs about home?
• How has covid influenced the construction of nostalgic songs about home?

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Punk and Temporality

Punk Scholars Network 10th Annual Conference & Postgraduate Symposium
15th & 16th December 2023 Buckinghamshire New University, High Wycombe, United Kingdom

At this year’s Punk Scholars Network conference and postgraduate symposium, the primary theme will be ‘punk and temporality.’ Temporality is concerned less with the objective measurable notion of time, and instead places more emphasis on how we experience history and events physically and socially. In Temporalities (2012), Russell West-Pavlov provides this reflection on temporality:

“Time is self-evident, it needs no explanation. Its passing is indexed all around us […] yet [it is] deeply problematic for us. The nature of the past is incessantly debated. Death and ageing are taboo topics in our youth-obsessed society. The future is represented for us in a plethora of consumer images, of things we can have or ways we can be as soon as we buy this or that product. But simultaneously it is a source of anxiety.”

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The UoW Annual Black Music Symposium at the British Library

20th  October 2023

The black music research unit (BMRU) and its research methods are designed to provide greater access and ownership toblack British-born individuals of their history within the academic ‘ivory tower’. In the academic literature these individuals have become subject to erasure and invisibility for successive generations. Examples include histories of popular music where they are largely overlooked in analyses of punk and its successor genres. This is despite punk and reggae’s co-existing, and were subject to considerable music collaboration and overlap in the 1970s. Many of this first generation, whilst now elderly, have important stories to tell, and objects and recordings to share. These stories should inform second and third generation black British-born individuals. All three generations are central to the research programme and ongoing discourse, and will feature in a new exhibition at the British Library in 2024.

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