Special Issue of Rock Music Studies

After All This Time: Legacy Acts, Fandom, and Collective Identity

Guest-edited by Andy Bennett and Devpriya Chakravarty (Griffith University, Australia)

Submissions are invited for a special issue of Rock Music Studies on the topic of Legacy Acts, Fandom, and Collective Identity. Popular music is now increasingly acknowledged as a key aspect of contemporary history and heritage. The marketing of popular music as a form of youth-based leisure and consumption from the mid-1950s onward has had significant implications for its cultural meaning as a collective soundtrack and a means through which successive generations of youth have sought to distinguish themselves from the parent culture. This aspect of the relationship between popular music and youth became more pointed during the 1960s and into the 1970s with a new political sensibility among youth, and was also reflected in much of the popular music of the time, which gave rise to a global counter-cultural movement. This sensibility continued to reverberate in subsequent musical genres such as punk, post-punk and new wave.

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Gender and Jazz: Histories and Scenes

Special Issue of Popular Music History (2023)

From the latter half of the twentieth century there has been increasing interest and work in gender and jazz, with several collections examining the roles of women and gay and lesbian musicians in the jazz world, both historically and contemporarily. Nichole Rustin-Paschel and Sherrie Tucker’s 2008 collection Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies has now become an eminent text in the area, and more recently, the Jazzinstitut, Darmstadt held its 14th Jazzforum on the topic of gender and identity in jazz (resulting in a published collection by the same name in 2016). These, and other collections and articles, have delved into gender and its roles in the jazz world, however there are still many more aspects to explore.  Gender, and gender binaries, have shaped the jazz world since the 1920s. Now in the 2020s, the centennial of the Jazz Age gives us an opportunity to explore the many ways that perceptions of gender have been defined and evolved over the last 100 years. There is a need to examine where we are at in the 2020s, and to give thought to the work ahead as creative practitioners, researchers and historians. This themed issue seeks to explore both the known and unknown about gender in the jazz world. Asides from issues around femininity and masculinity (and men and women) in jazz, we seek articles that explore musicians, bands, and scenes who have been ignored or shunned because their performance of gender and/or sexual orientation did not comfortably fit into the perceptions held by critics and audiences. We also seek explorations around power dynamics and gender on and off the bandstand, #MeToo, and collectives such as We Have Voice and Keychange.

Please submit a short abstract (no more than 200 words) to guest editor, Aleisha Ward: [email protected] Abstracts deadline: 1 June 2022

Western Popular Music and the Making of Indian Modernity 

Special Issue of South Asian History and Culture

From the colonial period onwards a variety of Western musical forms and practices have traveled to the sub-continent interacting with domestic sound cultures and contributing to making of Indian modernity. While other influences from the west – in science and technology, political governance, and market mechanisms – have received considerable academic attention, the impact of western popular music in the Indian context is a relatively ignored area of inquiry. This special issue of South Asian History and Culture is based on the premise that our understanding of Indian modernity is enhanced by a deeper exploration of the ways in which western music – beginning with colonial army bands to MTV and beyond – has contributed to the formation of modern sensibilities in India. The issue focuses exclusively on the western pop music (as opposed to western influences on indigenous music-making) that reached Indian audiences as well as local production of English-language pop and seeks to ask a set of questions surrounding these musical encounters to refine and develop our understanding of how popular cultural flows are constitutive of local modernities. What was/is the nature of the audience for western music in India? Was the reception of this music tied to elite-formation? Can one speak of a sub-culture around western pop? Was there any clearly formed state policy regarding What part did this music play in creating an urban youth culture in postcolonial India? Was the Indian recording industry able to nourish homegrown western pop artists? What the was the role of Indian radio and television in creating an enclave of western pop that was distinct from vernacular popular culture?

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Intellect Handbook of Global Music Industries

Edited by Chris Anderton, Martin James, Daniel Nordgård and Sergio Pisfil

Social, technological and political developments and disruptions continue to impact the music industries, fostering new revenue streams and opportunities, and allowing music from around the world to gain a global audience. Audio streaming, video apps and social entertainment services have rapidly become key areas of growth, and there has been a rise in academic work focusing on the global music industries in terms of their issues, challenges, and opportunities. Much of this work describes developments in the global north, and while this book will explore and expand upon this field, it also seeks to explore the industries from a global perspective. We therefore encourage proposals that stress global overviews, tackling issues to do with global capitalism, trans-national companies, geo-politics and so on, but also proposals that focus on significant local/regional contexts that cast light on global differences and what may be learned from them.

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Talking Heads – Academic Book Collection

Talking Heads – Academic Book Collection Call for Papers

Talking Heads have proved to be one of the most influential of any of the groups associated with the punk and new wave scene that flourished in New York in the mid-1970s. They released a number of epoch-defining albums (Talking Heads 77, Fear of Music, Remain in Light, Little Creatures); they spawned influential and successful offshoots- David Byrne’s collaboration with Brian Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Tom Tom Club (Tina Weymouth’s and Chris Frantz’s side project); and their forays into other media (music video; the concert film Stop Making Sense; and the feature film True Stories) were, for the most part, both critically and commercially successful. After the band’s dissolution, the band members, David Byrne in particular, have continued to produce music and to work in a variety of different cultural areas.

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Call for Presentations, Popular Music Books in Process Series, April 2022

Since early in the COVID-19 crisis, Popular Music Books in Process has curated online events, usually weekly, for music writers and scholars to showcase new and recent books or works in progress for an engaged and interactive audience. The series is a collaboration between the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Pop Conference, and IASPM-US. There have been 65 events so far, all preserved on YouTube.

Though the pandemic context has shifted, we believe this series still has a role to play, providing an accessible ongoing exchange inside music-writing communities and beyond. However, we are moving from a weekly to an every-second-week format, plus breathers to recharge between “seasons.” We’ll continue to feature single, paired, or grouped speakers. Unfortunately, with fewer events, our selection process will be tighter. But we hope this new format—along with our newly expanded organizing team—will help keep the series sustainable into the future.

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Music as a profession: status, careers and organizations (18th-20th centuries)

Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (CAN – Colégio Almada Negreiros
30 June. 1 July 2022

Organization:
PROFMUS project – To be a musician in Portugal: the social and professional condition of musicians in Lisbon (1750-1985)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Élodie Oriol (École Française de Rome, Italia)
Martin Cloonan (Director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), University of Turku, Finland)

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Aging, Time, and Popular Music

Special Issue Editors:
Abigail Gardner, Richard Elliott, Line Grenier

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.

This themed issue of IASPM Journal seeks to explore what aging might be/mean for popular music studies. Aging has not been addressed much across popular music studies, although significant contributions have emerged in relation to aging audiences (Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; Bennett 2013), nostalgia and revival (Driessen 2019), memory and music (Grenier and Valois-Nadeau 2020; Cohen, Grenier and Jennings 2022), the aging and ‘late’ voice (Elliott 2015, 2019), heritage culture (Roberts and Cohen 2014), and feminist interventions on representation across popular music (Gardner and Jennings 2020; Gardner 2020). We encourage contributions that speak to aging fans and fandoms, representation, performance and production from popular music studies, musicology, sociology, cultural studies, queer theory and, of course, from aging studies.

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Opening Up: Reconnecting, Remixing, Remastering 

IASPM-ANZ 2022 Conference: Call for Papers

Conference Dates: Wednesday 7th – Friday 9^th December 2022  

Venue: RMIT University City Campus, Latrobe St Melbourne and online

Organising Committee: Catherine Strong, Shelley Brunt, Ian Rogers, Tami Gadir, Sebastian Diaz-Gasca, Olivia Guntarik 

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the 2022 IASPM-ANZ conference, to be held at the City Campus of RMIT University.

There will also be options for online presentations for members who cannot attend in person.

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Opening Up: Reconnecting, Remixing, Remastering’. The last two years have seen a complete upheaval to the music world that we study, and to our own lives as educators in this field. As we restart, we invite papers that consider any aspects of how popular music and popular music studies have responded to a changed world, including examinations of what might not have changed. Questions that might be considered include: 

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Voices in and out of Place: Misplaced, Displaced, Replaced and Interlaced Voices

6-7 September 2022

EXTENDED Submissions Deadline: 13 May 2022

The International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University (ICMuS) is hosting the second biennial on-line Vicarious Vocalities, Simulated Songs conference in collaboration with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, now celebrating its tenth year. The theme of this year’s conference is “Voices in and out of Place: Misplaced, Displaced, Replaced and Interlaced Voices”, and is intended to cover both new and longstanding questions around the location or place of the voice with regard to the body AND equally perennial debates around the voice in relation to geographical and temporal place and space.

We are seeking contributions from scholars and creative practitioners engaging with the following questions: Read the rest of this entry »