Music cities edited collection

Call for chapter proposals

From the physical spaces in which music activity takes place, to the mythologizing of city-specific music scenes, the city has long played a vital role in the development and sustaining of music scenes. In recent years there has been a concerted effort to cultivate and nurture musical activity as a key driver for urban economic development and for city-specific tourism. Cities around the world are now looking to cultivate and support music activity in a bid to activate new forms of cultural and creative identity. This has occurred off the back of similar creative and cultural cities movements, and works to move beyond the mythologizing of particular cities music scenes in order to legitimise music as a place-specific cultural output which contributes significantly to local identities as well as to local economies. To this end, music is positioned as making a vital contribution to the cultural and economic fabric of a city, and is viewed as a critical way through which both locals and tourists can gauge, and engage with, a city’s cultural and creative identities. In order to foster this, an array of heritage and planning accords, live music regulation, tourism initiatives and even tax exemptions have been put in place, and an array of industry and government developed place-specific reports and activation ‘how-to’ manuals have been developed in order to understand the scope of place-specific music activity and the ways in which it can be cultivated and supported.

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C21 Music Practices: Study Day on Teaching & Creativity in Popular Music

A one-day study day to be hosted at the University of Surrey, Saturday 10 June 2017, as part of the London and South-East England 21st Century Music Practice Research Network.

The brave new world of the Teaching Excellence Framework, national league tables, and escalating tuition fees has yielded an unprecedented accountability regarding the quality of higher education teaching and the associated student experience. Its implications are doubly important to the teaching of popular music, given the proliferation of university courses witnessed in the last 10–15 years as well as the relative newness of the discipline as a serious academic pursuit.
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Westminster-Goldsmiths Symposium for Student Pop Research

Presented by the University of Westminster Centre for Commercial Music and Goldsmiths Popular Music Research Unit

Friday 26 May 2017, 9am-6pm
University of Westminster, Harrow Campus
https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-locations/maps-and-directions/harrow

This annual symposium brings together student researchers in popular music – production, business, songwriting, performance, sociology and musicology – from across Britain and, potentially, beyond. It is an opportunity for students to present their developing research to friendly, interested and expert listeners, and to meet and network with future colleagues.
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The 12th Art of Record Production Conference – Mono: Stereo: Multi

December 1 – 3, 2017
Hosted by the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden

Why Mono: Stereo: Multi?
Drawing on the both literal and metaphorical connections with the history of audio formats, the 2017 Art of Record Production conference explores a range of ways in which singularity, dichotomy and multiplicity can be contrasted. Whether it is the mono-cultural versus the multi-cultural, the mono-media versus the multi-media, a mono-disciplinary versus a multi-disciplinary approach or the mono-phonic versus the multi-phonic, we are seeking proposals for long and short format paper presentations, poster presentations and recorded music playback presentations that present these ideas in the following contexts:

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Interacting in and with music: sound, gesture, devices in contemporary electronic and electroacoustic music

11-12 October 2017 – Université Rennes 2, France

Keynote Speakers
Mark J. Butler, Professor of Music theory and Cognition at Bienen School of Music, Northwestern, University, Chicago.
Julia Kursell, Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam

Organizing Committee
Bruno Bossis (Université Rennes 2), Emmanuel Parent (Université Rennes 2)
Kévin Gohon (Université Rennes 2), Baptiste Bacot (Ircam/EHESS)

More information: http://volume.revues.org/5145

WESTERN MUSIC has considerably evolved and developed in many different forms, both in its popular or more classical expressions. The boundaries between visual arts, music, dance, theater and cinema tend to fade away as the artists create multidisciplinary works in which sounds, bodies, voices and still or moving images are involved in a common project. This is due to the audiences’ increasingly transversal artistic and cultural practices, which develop new ways of using emerging technologies, including new body-instrument relationships. By irradiating and nurturing most forms of art from improvisation to composition, from entertainment to classical forms, from performing arts to cinema or videogames, the art of sounds stands as an independent activity as well as a point in which a multitude of interactions work together. This conference intends to question this point in its practical and conceptual aspects.

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Mixing Pop and Politics: Subversion, Resistance and Reconciliation in Popular Music

IASPM-ANZ 2017 Conference
December 4-6, 2017
Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Forty years ago, the story goes, punk broke. Not for the first time, and not the last. History provides us with ample examples of the power of popular music to speak to, through, and against various political moments. The contemporary situation also offers countless opportunities to explore how popular music revisits, reconstitutes, rewrites and reconciles itself to this past. At the same time, it also points to new directions informed by the complicated position popular music occupies in relation to the shifting paradigms of power in which we currently find ourselves. This IASPM-ANZ conference aims to explore the complex politics of resistance, subversion, containment and reconciliation from now and then, as well as points in-between.

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New Perspectives on Elvis: A One-Day International Conference

Memphis Public Library,  21 August 2017, start: 10.15am

16 August 2017 will be the fortieth anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, one of the most popular and controversial music makers of the twentieth century. ‘New Perspectives on Elvis’ is a day-long international event held at the Memphis Public Library. The aim is to offer fresh perspectives on the Memphis icon, not only grounding him in the context of his place and time, but also interpreting him in relation to developments both inside and outside the academy. Paper proposals are invited on a range of topics. As well as class, race and gender, these could include but are not limited to:

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Symposium on 21st Century Music Practice: Sound and Vision

Date: 20 April 2017
Place: Edric Hall, 103 Borough Road, London South Bank University

This call seeks 150-word abstract submissions (by 21 March) for a one-day symposium, on the connection between sound and vision in twenty first century music practices in the context of 21st century music practice. We are inviting musicians, researchers, thinkers and talkers to take part in debate on the multiple dynamics of sound and the visual in a range of twenty-first century music practices, from performance and sound tracking to interactive music technologies. Hereby, we wish to investigate not only the dynamics between music and spectacle, in terms of characterisation and narrative development, but also in terms of creation and interaction, bringing new questions regarding the relationships between sound and vision in music practices.

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Creating music across cultures in the 21st Century

Istanbul Technical University, 25-27 May 2017

In the context of one of the world’s most organic melting pots, Istanbul, The Centre for Advanced Studies in Music, Istanbul Technical University, will host an international conference, in partnership with the European Research Council funded project “Beyond East and West,” May 25-27, 2017.

No music is an island.  Since time immemorial, cultures have traded and mixed musics across their domains, yet only in the 21^st century have people around the world gained instant and virtually free access to musics beyond those of their neighbors.  The history of these mixings has been marked by a plethora of descriptors, some benign and others acerbic.  Depending on one’s perspective, the “other” musics span the gamut of primitive (“first”), Oriental, classical, art, learned, popular, etc.  Their mixtures have been termed synthetic, syncretic, trans-traditional, trans-cultural, intercultural, cross-cultural, borrowed, or globalized.  The oral and the literate have been contrasted, while the exotic has been vilified.  Quests for musical beauty and knowledge have been shaped by political, economic and social, hegemonic forces.  We are now at a point where, for the first time in history, the playing field has reached a new level of equity, with widespread access to a majority of the world’s traditions, on a scale radically different from a mere generation ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The Future Sound of Pop Music

Symposium, 30 November – 3 December 2017, Bern, University of the Arts, Ostermundigenstr. 103

Lectures, discussions and side programme

New technologies, new interfaces and controllers have significantly altered the sound world of pop music in recent years. In current pop songs, electronic sounds and effects are dominant. The sound aesthetic of pop music has also undergone a major shift from the 1960s to the present day. Initially, pop music invested in a few distinctive distinguishing features such as distortion, but today it features complex electronic constructions based on samples, virtual instruments and effects.

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