Punk Scholars Network Annual Conference

12th – 19th December

A virtual, online, global conference spanning eight days is being brought together by the Punk Scholars Network – be a part of it.
Punk is a truly global phenomenon that manifests in myriad ways in different scenes, political regimes, cultural contexts and individual experiences. Punk is many things to many people and seldom remains static over a lifetime. Increased globalisation, changes in connectivity and technology, and shifts in both capitalism and populism have impacted punk for better and worse. International and intranational punk scenes and connections are growing and finding commonality and conflict through music, education, mutual aid, performance, political activism and human behaviours. The global Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the differences people face accessing resources and how governments respond. How have, and how will, various local punk scenes respond to this crisis, and what does their response tell us about punk as a global phenomenon?

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Tracing Disgust: Cultural Approaches to the Visceral

Article Proposals for an edited collection edited by Max Ryynänen, Susanne Ylönen & Heidi Kosonen.

We often recoil at the thought of mold gathering at the dishes used for eating, of bad breath on a person we do not specifically like, or of a spider walking across our body. Disgust, exemplified in these classic illustrations, is probably the most visceral of the basic human emotions. Some argue that it engages in particular the so called lower senses — taste, smell and touch —with a function for an organism’s preservation. It is also one of the recognized ”moral emotions,” functioning symbolically on social and cultural scales and serving, for example, as an instrument of political discourses. This can be traced in different examples, such as the discrimination of sexual minorities or the populist rhetorics of racist and fascist movements.

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Edited Collection on “New York City in Song”

New York City has one of the richest musical histories in all of the US, and has been the subject of an astonishing number of songs – something that has so far not been comprehensively addressed in academic works.

Thus, the proposed volume under the working title “New York City in Song” wants to analyze songs written about New York City, and engage with the depiction of the city within them, but also use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to, and was instrumental in developing. These include the vaudeville and musical theater scene on Broadway and beyond, but also hip hop, disco, punk, folk, jazz, swing, rock or pop music. It will therefore contribute to both the fields of urban studies and popular music studies, which have become well-developed areas of study over the recent years, but are still lacking specialized literature – especially such that considers their intersections.

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Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing

The Role of Music during COVID-19: Short-term Challenges through Technology, Wellbeing, Industry, & Education.

Note: Many thanks to those who have already submitted: we currently have a prospective collection of around 20 accepted articles (subject to peer-review). We are now looking to improve the span of the studies across 4 distinct areas (see below). An up-to-date list of our forthcoming related project outputs can be accessed via the ‘New Research’ Tab, at: www.musichealthandwellbeing.co.uk/new-research

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“Melodies and Maladies: Musical Responses to Plagues and Pandemics”

Call for Chapters
Editors Dr. Brent Keogh and Prof. Phil Hayward

Equinox Publishing

Chapter proposals are invited for a collected edition on the theme of musical responses to plagues and pandemics. This book will chart a historical trajectory of musical responses to plagues and pandemics, providing a critical historical perspective on the lived experiences in the present. By focusing on major plagues, outbreaks, and pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish flu, SARS, and Zika virus, we aim to historically contextualise musical responses to such disasters. In addition to charting historical contexts, this collection will address ways in which musicians have harnessed digital technologies to create forms of patronage, connect with fans, rehearse with band members, and network with peers and industry. The volume will also discuss musical responses in terms of the intersections of class and race, where social distancing is virtually impossible for some classes of people due to their specific living conditions, or where the prevailing Government policy is to “let it rip”, to allow a virus to sweep through the population for reasons of “herd immunity”, economic stability, or an under-resourced medical system. This edition will provide a timely work that not only accounts for the exceptional times we are living in, but sheds light on this time by thinking historically through musical responses to plagues and pandemics and suggesting manners in which future ones may be navigated by cultural producers and audiences.

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The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education  

Call for Book Chapter Proposals
Editor: Daniel Walzer, Ph.D.

Creative arts professions remain in a period of flux. As the music industry and related fields adapt to changing business models, student interest in training for a career in the entertainment sector continues to rise. Though the expansion of global degree offerings in the creative industries expands each year, a “state of the field” on educational and pedagogical issues in the music business and the creative industries has yet to be created.

University educators serve a crucial purpose in preparing future graduates for a highly competitive path in the gig economy. The Editor invites proposals from a broad range of scholars and industry professionals working in the creative arts for the compendium, tentatively scheduled for release in early 2022. Discussions are underway with a publisher with details to be completed this summer. Topics might include:

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“Climates of Popular Music”, 21st Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

The most pressing issue for humanity in the 21st century is global climate, and thus IASPM’s 21st Conference turns its attention towards this subject. Whereas our 20th anniversary conference considered where we have been, we now ask where we are now, what we are doing as a species, and what impact it has on our communities and our world. On a planet increasingly interconnected by a dizzying array of media channels, such a discussion has to be broadly framed. Our planet’s climate is impacted by numerous forms of human activity, including those that are individual, personal, local, communal, institutional, commercial, corporate, cultural, political, and international. This conference invites presentations that ask how popular music relates to our climate, where climate relates to any part of the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development. By “climate,” we intend to include a range of definitions, including ecological climate, political climates, socio-political climates, and contextual and individuated climates. We ask presenters to consider the impacts of activities related to popular music and its cultures on variously defined climates, and the impacts of changing or changed climates on different popular music and its contexts.

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Music, Sound and Silence in Videogames

Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT)
Issue editor: Lidia López Gómez

Number: 3 (December 2020)
Deadline for full articles: 1^st October 2020
Issue date: 22^nd December 2020

The scientific publication the Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT) grew out of the research group of the same name (SSIT), which is linked to the TecnoCampus university centres, affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The journal seeks to bring together academic debate and scientific research on the relationship between sound as a broad concept and an audiovisual context.

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IASPM UK&I London Calling Conference

IMPORTANT INFO FOR THOSE PLANNING TO ATTEND THE ONLINE CONFERENCE:

1. If you haven’t registered on Eventbrite by 5pm UK time on Monday 18th May (Click Here To Register) we can’t guarantee we can process you in time for the first keynote on Tuesday with Mykaell Riley – although you will still be able to watch it on the website – just not participate in the discussion. You can continue to register after that and we will process people as quickly as we can.
2. On Tuesday morning we will email everyone who has registered with the conference login details. People who register later will be emailed separately.
3. We can only let 100 people into the keynote Zoom sessions but you can also watch the session live on the website and use the comments section to ask questions. (There are nearly 200 people registered at the moment and still rising). Details of the ‘door policy’ for the Zoom session will be announced in the login email on Tuesday morning.
4. Every week there will be some streamed performances after the keynote and, for the most part, they are musicians without other income so please support them by contributing something through the PayPal.Me links under the YouTube Live screens on the website.

The website for the event is here: https://london-calling-iaspm2020.com

Born to Be Alive: Live Music as a Crucial Dimension of 21st Century Popular Music

Ethnomusicology Review Special Issue (more info here)

Savage (2019) paints a devastating portrait of the music industry’s current state. In the United States, record sales have dropped about 80% in the last decade: from 450 to 89 million, and its plight continues. From 2017 to 2018, worldwide record sales percentage plummeted an additional 23%. At the latest Grammy Awards, two of the nominees for best album never had a physical release. The situation becomes more acute when analyzing 2018’s top selling records: the vast majority relates to film soundtracks. How can the music industry react? We must first consider that this is a very recent reality and that the actors’ adaptability cannot keep up with the constant technological progress in music digitalization and that, these days, anyone with a computer or smartphone is able to download hundreds of albums and stockpile thousands of songs. We sometimes forget that those processes only started back in 1998 with the evolution of the MP3 player. At the time, the MP3 format allowed a revolutionary audio compression. It was a clear example of an action’s non-intended consequences: a tool which was supposed to help the music industry ended up harming it in the long run. As we know, after MP3 came sharing websites like Napster, KaZaa with peer-to-peer downloads of free music. If, on the one hand, the number of downloads was ever-growing, the music industry’s reaction was to potentially sue any and all people who illegally downloaded a file (Morris, 2015). The most recent example of this phenomenon in everyone’s mind may be Metallica’s quixotic struggle.

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