U:Pop – The First International Popular Music Studies Undergraduate Conference

The University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Saturday 30^th May 2015

As the academic study of popular music has developed over the last thirty years, reaching both across disciplines and across the globe, our understanding of the economic, social, political and cultural significance of this most ubiquitous of forms has only become ever more sophisticated and dynamic. Whilst the discipline(s) has developed both scholars of international repute and a thriving postgraduate research body, the work produced by undergraduate students studying relevant courses has had little opportunity to be recognized outside their own institutions.

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education

Special issue on Technology and Performance in Popular Music Education

Guest editors: Gareth Dylan Smith and Bryan Powell

Performance in popular music education is an increasingly technologised space. As guitars, drums and microphones are gaining greater acceptance in school music curricula around the world through performance-based pedagogical models, such as the Modern Band curriculum of Little Kids Rock, and Musical Futures’ informal learning approach. Turntablism, music production and rapping have a growing presence in programmes from primary school to graduate level. Songwriting courses, rock camps and international collaborative pop projects sprout up globally in physical spaces and on line, while children and young people write, produce and release multi-media popular music artefacts from their bedrooms and basements. Popular music has always relied on, grown through, and pushed innovation in technology. With students embracing change faster than many teachers can imagine relevant pedagogical approaches, new paradigms of performance are emerging: drummers become musical directors at the helm of a plethora of technologies, bassists play synthesizers as much as guitars, and front-people are masters of Ableton, loop pedals and computerized gloves. As performance and production skill sets thus diversify and converge, so other technologies democratize the music-making landscape.

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Tacet – Sound in the Arts

Sounds of Utopia

Utopia is one of those concepts that haunt the history of ideas as well as the history of artistic practices. This persistence conveys both a contemporary malaise and the need, if not urgency, for the ideas about difference that are shaped in part by the conception and enactment of a utopia, ephemeral and circumstantial though they may be. The history of sound art and experimental music is no exception: in it we find reflections on utopia, understood in terms of space (enclave, island, or heterotopia) or of time (uchronia, heterochrony or projection of a possible future, based on present concerns). But the concept of utopia might present itself firstly as a radical alternative to the dominant musical and artistic forms, or even to the traditional aesthetic categories intended to distinguish among practices according to the media used. This gap is as much a matter of the creative processes used as of the sounds produced, heard, recorded, installed, organized, or improvised, but also of their mediation. In all cases, it seems that utopia comes into play at the heart of the dynamics that nurture experimental sound practices, past and present.

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Edited Anthology on ‘Music in Comedy Television’

Philip Hayward and Liz Giuffre invite expressions of interest in an anthology they are proposing for publication on the theme of Music in Comedy Television.

International scholars interested in genre, television, screen soundtracks, audience studies and/or cross media engagement are invited to pitch potential chapter ideas for the collection.

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Special Issue of Popular Music: The Critical Imperative

This special issue will address what we call the critical imperative: the demand that academic writing on popular music place new primacy on sounds as made and heard, and for that writing to be styled in a way that foregrounds not just its academic rigour, but also imaginative description, creative interpretation and bold evaluation.

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Special issue of Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture on Music and Discovery

Co-Guest-Editors: Tom McCourt (Fordham University) and Nabeel Zuberi (University of Auckland)

The editors of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture invite submissions for a special issue on the topic of Music and Discovery. We are aiming for a multi-disciplinary issue that draws on the many resonances of the word “discovery” in music as popular communication, and we welcome critical approaches in music education; musicology and ethnomusicology; film, television and cultural studies; media and communication studies; sound studies; popular music studies; global media, and other fields. We seek manuscripts that examine the politics and aesthetics of musical discovery, and how the tropes of discovery are invoked in disciplines, research methods and the production of knowledge related to music. How is “discovery” represented in musical production and sounds, in the uses and social meaning of music?

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Court and Spark: An international symposium on the work of Joni Mitchell

July 3rd, 2015, University of Lincoln.

Songs of Social Protest

A two day symposium: Thursday 30th April & Friday 1st May 2015, University of Limerick, Ireland

Following on from successful symposia on The Smiths, Morrissey, Riot Grrrl and David Bowie, the research cluster ‘Popular Music and Popular Culture’, in conjunction with ‘Power, Discourse and Society’ at the University of Limerick, Ireland, now convene a two day symposium to examine songs of social protest from a global perspective. An approach that takes into account the radical contexts of music is central to examining processes of empowerment and disempowerment in the current neoliberal age. Underpinned by a theoretical framework derived from the work of Stuart Hall, Richard Middleton, Ian Peddie, Serge Dennisoff, Philip Tagg, and Johnathan Friedman we take as our starting point that popular culture (in the broadest sense), and music in particular, may reproduce or challenge the cultural / political status quo in contemporary societies across the globe. In this interdisciplinary conference, we therefore particularly welcome papers that address (but are not limited to) the following:

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“What Will Remain of the Eighties?” Popular Music and Jazz in Italy between 1980 and 2000

Parma, “Arrigo Boito” Conservatory, 13-14 February 2015

The 1980s and 1990s have been overlooked for a long time in music history studies, in spite of the big technological, economic, social, political changes that took place in those decades: Reaganism and Thatcherism, the fall of the Soviet bloc, globalization, and the gradual dismantling of the welfare state. In music, the 1980s and 1990s brought the development of samplers and computer-based instruments, the creation and mass marketing of digital formats, satellite broadcasts, MTV, hard disk and laptop recording, ‘world music’, and stylistic innovations in many music genres.

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Dark Sound Symposium 2015

Dark Sound: Destructive Pop 2015, Popular Music Symposium
The Academy of Music and Theatre Arts, Falmouth University, 24^th and 25^th April, 2015

We invite proposals that wish to address and respond to the destructive character of dark sound in popular music.

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