ReSounding Loss: Music, Grief, and Culture

Call for Chapter Proposals

Grief is an emotional response that arises in the wake of a significant loss. While it is often thought of as an individual experience, it can be collectively experienced as well. Grief is closely associated with the death of a person, but it can result from any significant loss, including, for example, the loss of a relationship, a homeland, or a dream for the future. In light of the many losses and potential losses currently facing humanity – from war to climate change, and from extremist politics to mass casualties – a discussion of grief feels both timely and urgent.

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RESONANCE: The Creative Thrust of «Deep Zouk»

2nd INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM ON ZOUK
23-25 October 2024, Lamentin, Martinique, FWI

Caribbean music is a haven of resonance. Martinique and Guadeloupe, the two «nations of Zouk», are also the countries where Deep Zouk was born and from which its aesthetics began to spread. They are, therefore, places of resonance. This concept of «resonance» addressed by the writer Patrick Chamoiseau in Le Vent du Nord in Les Fougères Glacées, is closely linked to the notion of the self-taught episteme. This notion involves learning by oneself and not having a master. It also echoes the Hobbesian Instasis: «Read in yourself». In this perspective, we may believe that the Caribbean self-taught artist, commonly called «Mizisyen lari,» frees himself from all constraints or all rules and that a kind of total freedom of creation governs him, as that of an adventurer marooned on a wasteland, exploring an implex universe of creation. In the case of Zouk, one should note that many singers, singers, and musicians do not come from formal schools or classical music backgrounds. Many of them were formed on the job, participating, here and there, in vocal group or choir experiences.The same goes for the audience-receiver of the dancefloors. Over time, new body movement poetics developed and adapted their relationship to dance rhythm in resonance with the time and sensations of the artist. The aesthetic codes and molds released over the period from 1979 to 1995 (or even today with groups such as Kassav, Zouk Machine, Expérience 7, Taxi Kréol, Kwak, Rubicolor) demonstrate the use of a wide range of sounds, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic, a great diversity of Zouk used by composers. The common point with these large groups is that they follow (in)consciously the call of the drum, the call of the sound of the country hills, the culture of bèlè/bélya communities, the fieldwork songs of plantations, the resonance of ancestral tales, the African trace, the cosmic energy funneled by its profound and multiple vibrations, the sing-drum dynamics, until the emergence of a language suitable to the creation essence of Zouk. Hence, the metalanguage, the codes, and sub-codes of Deep Zouk, which is a reborn, hybrid structure in motion, an ontic agenda allowing unforeseen results, mentioned by Patrick Chamoiseau: «The drum had traveled in the body of these uprooted, its charge of power and sacred had fallen dark in our mixed blood»,.

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4th Conference of the International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ)

International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ)
Communities of Practice
October 3-5, 2024
JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music
Vienna, Austria

The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ) was founded in 2019 in reaction to the increasing relevance of artistic perspectives in the academic discourses in jazz research. INARJ organizes regular symposia as a platform for knowledge exchange and connection between artistic jazz researchers worldwide. The specific focus for the fourth conference is artistic research and communities of practice ranging from geographic communities and the role of place-making and curatorship, networks inside and outside of jazz, communities of pedagogy and education, social communities and marginalized groups, and economic and business communities, to discuss status, strategies, and transformation.

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The Hip-Hop South

Guest Editor: Corey J. Miles (Tulane University)

Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, The Hip-Hop South, to be published Summer 2025. We will accept submissions for this issue through August 19, 2024.

The hip-hop South waits for no one

André “3000” Benjamin didn’t wait for acceptance when he declared “the South got something to say,” and for the thirty years since this pivotal moment the region has spoken. Benjamin’s declaration was a rallying cry and an interruption of the status quo. It was a redirection of the South’s erasure from hip-hop and contemporary conversations about Blackness in the United States, directly countering the invisibility politics of a country that isn’t honest about itself.

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Symposium on Music, Sound, and Antisemitism

This symposium, co-sponsored by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum and The Barry S. Brook Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, invites proposals that consider the historical and contemporary intersections between music, sound, and antisemitism. It is now more important than ever to understand what antisemitism is and how it works, especially in a medium – music – that does not seem to inherently convey hatred. We invite interdisciplinary, global, and wide-ranging papers that explore the variety of ways in which sound and music—art music, popular music, and traditional music, as well as works that synthesize different styles and genres—has been used to inscribe, compose and perform, symbolize, describe and editorialize antisemitism from the Middle Ages to the present. Our objective is to build upon and break open the Eurocentrism that has governed the past twenty years of scholarship on this subject area, while creating new pathways for the future of this field of study.

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