How Does “Your” Music Sound? Belonging, Communities, and Identities in Popular Music across Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe

International conference, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 9-10, 2023

Over the past three decades, case studies from Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe have enriched the fields of popular music studies, sonic studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, offering insights into the complex entanglements between music practices, industries, and audiences on the one hand, and different aspects of belonging, identification, and community-formation on the other. Analyses of modern local and regional popular-music manifestations such as (turbofolk, Austropop, chalga, manele, tallava, Serbian trapfolk, Bulgarian trap, Slovenian folk pop etc.) provide an invaluable insight into the multitude of music- and soundscapes in the region. They also present a springboard for further inquiry into the mechanisms, impact, and architectures of belonging, identification, and communities in this diverse space, historically marked by a vibrant dynamic of glitches, ruptures, and connections.

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Diversity of Music Heritage

8–9 June 2023, Folk Art Centre, Kaustinen, Finland

Heritage has become an increasingly attractive area of activity, whether in official cultural policies, tourist destinations or academic inquiries. Concerning music, there are numerous heritage sites around the world, as well as the network of Cities of Music, sanctioned by UNESCO. Music features centrally also in global and national listings of intangible cultural heritage.

In music research, there is a growing body of relevant analyses, notably in the fields of ethnomusicology and popular music studies. Consequently, there is arguably a dual focus either on non-European folk and traditional musics with an interest in human and minority rights, or on popular music as a component in the originality of cities and other localities, as well as in their promotion and branding. In both cases heritagisation of music is intertwined with cultural politics, music tourism and exploitation of immaterial property rights, not to mention developing digital innovations or music in the museum, for instance when considering how institutional holdings and responses to music’s cultural and economic value are managed.

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Popular Music and Wellbeing Conference  

St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London
14 and 15 September 2023

Popular music and wellbeing are both common terms in everyday talk, yet each of them escapes straightforward definition. Popular music culture comprises a wide range of practices, spaces, and discursive and material forms. Wellbeing, meanwhile, has become a buzzword for (post-)pandemic times, capable of generating multiple inflections depending on the settings in which it is deployed. There are differences, for example,  within and between notions of, inter-alia, psychological and emotional wellbeing, social and community wellbeing, and the term also has multiple meanings when it is applied across fields such as therapeutic intervention, charity work, social care and public health. As a result, attempts to describe the interrelationships between popular music and wellbeing are bound to be amorphous and contested.  Nonetheless, we believe that exploring connections between the two terms is a potentially timely and valuable pursuit. After all, popular music culture continually seeks to create states of individual and collective joy, ecstasy, transcendence and belonging, as well as spaces in which subjectivities can be composed, transformed and/or radically (re)imagined. As dance music producer Theo Parrish once remarked, ‘people who say that the dancefloor is about losing yourself, that’s the outsider view, the dancefloor is about solidarity’. Moreover, in the last decade the pairing of pop music with clean living has seen the mainstreaming of ‘sober raving’ and ‘conscious clubbing’. On the other hand, popular music also produces widely circulating discourses about the reverse of wellbeing, such as anxiety, alienation, abuse, isolation, depression and self-harm. This two-day conference seeks to approach these and other issues from a plurality of conceptual and methodological angles of vision. Key themes to explore will include but are not limited to:

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Memory Gaps: Tracks and Cracks

International Conference, 19 and 20 October 2023, University of Strasbourg

Each speaker has 30 minutes of presentation, followed by a 15-minute discussion. The languages of the conference are French and English. The publication of the papers is planned.

Please send your proposal (title, short abstract and biography) at the latest by 1 May 2023 to: Beat Föllmi, University of Strasbourg, [email protected]

We would like to examine the way in which the arts (theatre, cinema, literature, painting, sculpture, music) draw, trace and unfold the canvases and scores of individual, familiar and collective memory, from traces, cracks, flaws, interstices, lapses, oblivion, loss of memory, repression, from “the memory of what is forgotten”, shadowy areas, crypts, confiscated images and words, prevented, manipulated or forced memory, from “wounded memory” (Ricoeur), forgetting processes, silences, denials, blind spots, scattered fragments, superimposed and/or hybridized strata, from the power of memory and the power over memory.

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Sound on Screen II

HYBRID CONFERENCE, OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY
5th-6th JULY 2023

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: FRIDAY 24th MARCH 2023 (23:59)

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, an indication of whether you would prefer to appear in person or online, and a brief biography of no more than 150 words to [email protected] by March 24th 2023.

The second Sound on Screen conference welcomes submissions for 20-minute papers from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between music and/or sound and the screen. We welcome submissions from speakers at any career stage (including postgraduate MA or PhD candidates) and from a wide range of disciplines such as musicology, film and television studies, cultural studies, communications studies and so forth. The first Sound on Screen conference invited participants to take their cue from Chion (1994) and Mera et al. (2017) in drawing together ‘different practices and technologies under the same umbrella without attempting to obfuscate the differences that exist between them’. This resulted in a diverse range of topics and speakers, and allowed us to create interdisciplinary panels that brought different fields and viewpoints into fruitful dialogue with each other. We intend the second Sound on Screen conference to continue this rich discussion and so in addition to inviting any relevant paper proposals, we particularly welcome submissions that engage with the interplay between sound and music on screen, and also considerations of equality, diversity and inclusion in relation to music and sound on screen. This conference will be held in person at our Headington campus in Oxford, but hybrid options will be available to presenters and delegates.

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Spaces of Dancing

Special edition of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Edited by Ben Assiter

http://dj.dancecult.net

With the dance floor at its core, space is of critical importance to electronic music and dance culture (EMDC). The dance floor is a unique social space, produced through sound, bodies, and an array of sensory and spatial technologies. The spaces of EMDC—including nightclubs and informal, repurposed venues—shape its development and historical imaginary as much as the DJs and producers of the music. EMDC is also closely entangled within wider dynamics of urban (and rural) space, in which conflicts over noise, disorder, and cultural value mediate the production of nightlife scenes.

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Rhythm in Music since 1900

22-24 September, 2023
Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Canada

Call for presentations

Submission deadline: 1 May 2023

Keynote speakers:
• Nicole Lizée, composer
• Miles Okazaki, jazz guitarist and composer
• Jason Yust, music theorist

Rhythm in music since 1900 remains a rich and fascinating field of inquiry. The second RiMs1900 conference seeks to bring multiple perspectives to bear on this field. It will address repertoires ranging from jazz and popular music to global musics and art musics, and topics from performance and pedagogy to cognition and theory. The keynote presenters are a composer, guitarist, and music theorist at the leading edges of rhythmic experimentation and conceptualization.

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IASPM Journal Special Issue. Contemporary Post-Soviet Popular Music: Politics and Aesthetics

IASPM Journal is the peer-reviewed open-access e-journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). As part of an international network, the journal aims to publish research and analysis in the field of popular music studies at both global and local levels.

https://iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/announcement/view/75

This themed issue of IASPM Journal seeks to explore how popular music is an important field for political and aesthetic negotiations in post-Soviet space, countries and regions formerly part of the Soviet Union or closely related to it, experiencing war and protests during the past years. Symbolic uses of popular music in post-Soviet space includes the ‘singing revolution’ in Estonia, music for several revolutions and a war in Ukraine and current diaspora of Russian musicians. The issue aims to address how politics and aesthetics are articulated in popular music today in post-Soviet space (Mazierska 2016, Miszczyński & Helbig 2017, Blüml, Kajanova & Ritter 2019, Hansen et al. 2019), without excluding contributions focusing on articulations of power and nationalisms, resistance and revolution or ambivalence. We welcome contributions focusing on different genres and parts of the region; Soviet/Russian rock (Gololobov, Pilkington & Steinholt 2014, Wickström 2014), Ukrainian (Helbig 2014, Sonevytsky 2019) and Belarussian (Survilla 2002) popular music, popular music in Caucasus and Central Asian former Soviet republics (Klenke 2019, Merchant 2015) as well as the post-Soviet diaspora. In times when authoritarian and illiberal governments are expanding or defending power in post-Soviet space popular music enables significant circulation of meanings.

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CUMIN conference

CUMIN is the Contemporary Urban Music for Inclusion Network. CUMIN is an AHRC-funded network designed to bring together researchers, practitioners and a range of stake-holders in educational and social projects that utilise ‘contemporary urban music’ (by which we mean Hip Hop, grime, house, EDM, techno and so forth), fostering dialogue and production of new knowledge.

On Friday 30^th June from 9.30am to 5.30pm CUMIN will hold a conference at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance https://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/

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Soundscapes of the South

Macon, Georgia
September 28-29, 2023

“Precisely how and why the American South has shaped and nurtured so much successful art is something sociologists and anthropologists will still be bickering about a half century from now,” Amanda Petrusich wrote in It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (2008): “All I know is that it is mostly true.” Fifteen years on, her musical travelogue remains a vital exploration of the ways in which place may infl¬uence “the sounds we make.”

Soundscapes of the South welcomes papers on southern music and its diverse contexts, themes, places, and moments for a Symposium taking place at the Museum at Capricorn in Macon, Georgia, on September 28-29, 2023. Aiming to cover a plethora of artists, genres, periods, topics, expressions, and perspectives, we invite presentations that range from the analytical and the re¬active to reminiscence and anecdote, by scholars, critics, journalists, authors, artists and musicians, on the theme of “Southern soundscapes.” Read the rest of this entry »