Information Overload? Music Studies in the Age of Abundance

8-10 September 2021, University of Birmingham

Keynote Speakers:

Robin James (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Nick Seaver (Tufts University)
More speakers TBA

For those investigating any musical activity after about 1994, the main sources of research data will not be print archives or discrete media—they will be World Wide Web media. The Internet Archive, the web’s library, today holds over 525 billion archived web pages, while API and post-API archiving initiatives make social web platforms accessible as research databases. At first glance, no other archive is more inclusive in terms of whose voices it represents, and none more comprehensive in terms of the insights it provides into the thoughts, desires and musical tastes of ordinary people. To paraphrase the web historian Ian Milligan, whose recent book provides the title and framing for this conference, we might suggest that in its scale, granularity and plurality, the web represents the music historian’s dream.

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Global Hip-Hop Studies

Special Issue: ‘Breaking and the Olympics’ 

To be considered for this Special Issue, please submit the following via this Google Form by 31 May 2021:

• an abstract of 150–250 words (plus references, if necessary)
• author name(s)
• institutional affiliation(s)
• contact details a brief bio of no more than 150 words (which includes the author’s positionalities in relation to their topic).

Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a peer-reviewed, rigorous and community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates surrounding hip hop music and culture around the world.

The recent announcement of breaking in the 2024 Paris Olympics has stirred a substantial response from within and outside of hip hop culture. This special issue of GHHS is positioned to not only explore contemporary debates about breaking in the Olympics, but also to develop critical discourse that can offer insight to practitioners, cultural organizations and the IOC. We are especially interested in research projects that engage in local, regional and national perspectives and can provide useful resources transnationally for those involved in this milestone cultural moment. To this end, the issue will be published a year in advance of the 2024 Olympics in 2023.

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RGS-IBG Annual Conference

31 August – 3 September 2021
*** This session will be hosted online *** 

RGS-IBG Annual Conference

Session title: A ‘cultural catastrophe’? The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and cultural sectors and possible pathways to recovery

Session organisers:  Andrew Leyshon, Nottingham University and Allan Watson, Loughborough University

We have pleasure in inviting proposals for papers to be presented at the following online session at this year’s RGS-IBG Annual Conference.

Abstracts (max. 250 words), along with the title of the session and author contact details (name, affiliation, email address), should please be sent to Andrew Leyshon ([email protected]) and Allan Watson ([email protected]) by Monday 1^st March. We aim to notify accepted presenters by Monday 8^th March.

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Jazz Re:Search in 21st-Century Academia and Beyond

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Institute for Jazz Research
13th International Jazz Research Conference, Graz (Austria)
18—21 November 2021

Hosted by the Institute for Jazz Research and the International Society for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts GrazFounded in 1971, the Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) is a historic cornerstone of academic jazz research. Along with similar institutions, like the Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies (founded 1966), the Institute helped to pave the way for and profoundly shape the discipline known as “jazz studies”, bearing witness to its transformation from a decidedly musicological to an inter-, even transdisciplinary investigation into what has been understood as jazz in their respective times.

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Technology and Change in Music Cultures

University of Turku & Åbo Akademi University 5–7 May 2020

The Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology and the departments of musicology at Turku University and Åbo Akademi University in collaboration with the research project ‘The impact of digitalization on minority music’ are pleased to invite researchers interested in music to attend to the 24th Annual Symposium for Music Scholars in Finland.

The event will take place on 5-7 May as an Internet symposium due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Musical Creation in the Soundtrack

XIII International Symposium

The Music and Audiovisual Languages Commission of the Spanish Society of Musicology (SEDEM), reminds about the upcoming 13th Symposium “Musical creation in the soundtrack”, on June 25-26, 2021.
All the information and the Call for Papers can be checked on our website:
https://mylasedem.wixsite.com/sedem-myla/xiii-simposio

We look forward to your participation. The thirteenth edition of the symposium will be carried out online due to the unpredictable situation with the corona pandemic.

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Punk Passages: Punk, Ageing and Time

Writers are invited to submit chapter proposals for an edited collection of work exploring ageing, time and temporality in the context of punk.

Initial academic consideration of punk posited it as a youth culture and the positioning of punk in relation to time and historical location is of course commonplace in scholarship. This can be seen outside of academia too, for example the ‘celebration’ of the 40th anniversary of punk and the associated events which took place highlight the way punk is often link with a particular time in our collective memory. Just as punk scholarship has endeavoured to deal with the notion of punk retaining significance in individuals’ lives ‘post-youth’, empirical work has built around how punk is remembered and represented. And yet…tensions, issues and gaps remain unaddressed.

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Ecologies of Sound

The Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association (GSA) invites proposals from scholars for panels at the 45th Annual Conference in Indianapolis, IN, from September 30 – October 3, 2021. We welcome proposals that consider how ecologies of sound have manifested themselves in German-speaking communities or German spaces throughout the world, and the ways in which these relations, patterns or systems have evolved and developed over time. The network supports scholarship from a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and welcomes projects that focus on noise and sound as much as on music. The network also encourages either completed research or more speculative, tentative and preliminary hypotheses. In addition, the network hopes to build on last year’s format by having slightly shorter papers to ensure more time for discussion. Some potential considerations to guide proposal submissions may be: Read the rest of this entry »

European Music Analysis and the Politics of Identity

Special issue of Danish Musicology Online
Editors: Thomas Jul Kirkegaard-Larsen and Mikkel Vad

Since the 1980s, questions of identity markers such as gender, race, and class, have become a central focus of research and academic debates in areas such as musicology, ethnomusicology, musical anthropology and sociology, popular music studies, and many more. In the wake of Philip Ewell’s article on “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” (2020), such longstanding conversations have been amplified while gaining new momentum in the areas of music theory and music analysis.

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Beyond the Avant-Garde? Rethinking the Vanguard in British Music since 1970

1-day online symposium, 25 June 2021, hosted by Goldsmiths and the University of Manchester
Convenors: Dr Stephen Graham (Goldsmiths) and Dr Roddy Hawkins (University of Manchester)

‘The centre of gravity of exploratory music making in the West shifted to a significant degree in the 1970s and 1980s. Included in but not contained by postmodern rubble revelling and high/low jockeying, this shift saw the classic modernist drive towards radical expression jump lanes. Or, rather, spread across a number of lanes. Noise musicians in Tokyo, ‘free’ players in Berlin and London, and industrial post-punk provocateurs in Sheffield, L.A. or Rome could now legitimately claim to be amongst the vanguard of radical music. Quasi-‘popular’ cultural practices such as these became routes into the new and the strange, as valid as any other’ (Graham 2019).

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