Rock for Change book launch

Fund raising rock concerts have been a major feature of the music scene since the first recognized event, the Concert for Bangladesh, was organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar in 1971. Since then, they have come in many guises, from small-scale local affairs to mega international extravaganzas with the causes they support including national and international disaster relief as well as more political objectives.

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Performance Studies Network International Conference

July 15–18 2027, University of Leeds

The Eighth Performance Studies International Conference will be hosted by the School of Music, University of Leeds, on 15–18 July 2027 (both in person and online). The conference will address a wide range of musics, methodologies, questions, and practices relating to Performance Studies.

We invite contributions that reflect this diversity, including (but not limited to) early music, contemporary and experimental music, global musics, acoustic, popular, electronic and multimedia performance. We encourage a broad range of approaches including musical instrument studies, performance practices including historically informed approaches and analytical approaches to performance and recordings, contemporary and ‘extended’ instruments and techniques, psychological approaches to performance and audience research, and pedagogic research in music performance. However, any topic in the field of music performance studies will be considered.

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The Elephant in the Room: Celebration, Commemoration and Cultural Contradiction

11th and 12th December 2026
Middlesex University, London.

If the 100 Club Punk Special, the first Sex Pistols single or the now infamous Bill Grundy interview can be taken as ‘year zero’, punk is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. Yet anniversaries often tend to present linear narratives, stories of origin, and canonical histories. However, punk’s histories are multiple and contested, not least in notions of definition, timescale, musical and subcultural style. This conference therefore raises questions over the elephant in the room: what does it mean to celebrate 50 years of punk? What does it mean to celebrate a movement grounded in refusal, immediacy and a suspicion of both tradition and futurity?

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