Issues of Diversity and Inclusion in Jazz Festivals

A Special Issue of the Jazz Research Journal

Guest Editors: Emily Jones (Cheltenham Jazz Festival) and Sarah Raine (Birmingham City University, UK)

With campaigns such as Keychange (PRS Foundation, UK) bringing issues of diversity and inclusion to the fore in the music industry, professionals and researchers alike are increasingly aware of a lack of diversity in relation to jazz audiences, artists and festival staff. However, the efforts to tackle these issues lack a strong foundation of research, from either industry bodies or scholarship. Emerging out of an industry partnership project, this special issue therefore aims to provide a space for current research that engages with issues of diversity and inclusion in jazz festivals. We particularly encourage submissions that take an intersectional approach, emerge out of collaborative projects between institutions and industry, or go beyond the geographies and narratives that have come to dominate definitions of jazz.

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56th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association

We are pleased to announce that the 56th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association will take place from 8th-10th September 2020 at Goldsmiths, University of London. The conference will present a programme involving both leading figures and emerging scholars and practitioners within the discipline, and seeks to explore and celebrate the quality and diversity of current scholarship in music, understood in its broadest sense and represented by its many branches and global aspects. The annual conference will also feature the Edward Dent Medal award lecture, that will be delivered by the 2019 award winner Dr Gundula Kreuzer, and the Peter Le Huray lecture that will be delivered by Dr Marie Thompson.

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Third Working in Music Conference: Working in Music – Now and Then

University of Turku, Finland, 15-17 April 2020

The Working in Music Network (WIM) is pleased to announce its third Working in Music Conference, to be hosted by the University of Turku, Finland, in April 2020. The Conference follows the staging of previous WIM conferences in Glasgow (2016) and Lausanne (2018) and the establishment of the Network (https://wim.hypotheses.org/). WIM was launched in Lausanne in 2018 and has been established by scholars interested in the historical and contemporary nature of working in music. It has adopted the following Statement of Purpose:

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Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future

IABA World Turku 2020
9–12 June 2020
Turku, Finland

Popular music papers welcome!

SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory warmly welcomes proposals to the 12th IABA World Conference, which will be held at the University of Turku (Finland), June 9-12, 2020. Through the theme of Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future, IABA World 2020 will explore the multiple temporalities shaping the dimensions of life storying and life writing research. Temporality impacts the writing and shaping of life narratives, as well as the ways in which we analyze life narrative documents. The temporal is at the core of how we understand the centuries-long histories of how the self is written about and the genealogy of life writing research. Temporality, however, does not mean only gazing to the past, but also understanding how the present moment and orientation to the future are visible in life writing and/or how history makes its presence known in different moments and spaces. The temporal approach also invites us to explore how the future is imagined in life narratives and to discuss our visions for the future of life writing studies.

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MUSIC ID Digital Research Fellowship

Music ID is pleased to announce its second annual Digital Research Fellowship in popular music studies.

Music ID is an academic platform that compiles current and historical music industry data into a single, easy-to-use source. Incorporating 5,452 different charts spanning 74 countries, Music ID provides access to chart information from Billboard and the Official Charts Company dating back to the 1950s, as well as contemporary, day-to-day statistics on iTunes downloads, Spotify and Apple Music streams, and Shazam searches. It also includes built-in visualization tools which allow users to create and export customizable tables and graphs.

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French Historical Studies: Music and French History/La musique et l’histoire française

The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue on music in the Francophone world to appear in 2022.

The history of the music of France has traditionally been studied as a separate category without the same robust interest as other cultural artifacts such as film and literature. More recent scholarship illuminates the place of music in French society and suggests that more work should be done to sketch out the particular place of music in all its forms in French history.

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Call for chapters: The Present and Future of Music Law

Following the Present and Future of Music Law Conference held at the University of Central Lancashire last July, we are looking for additional chapters to include in a book proposal on the topic of the conference, with a particular focus on the current legal and business challenges posed by a morphing, transnational, mid-digital marketplace.

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ZINES – An international journal on amateur and DIY media

Launch : Issue #1 – April 2020

– ZINES is an international peer journal dedicated to studies of amateur and do-it-yourself media of any kind, from fanzines to webzines, perzines to science zines, artzines to poezines, etc.

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The Residents: Visionaries, Satirists, and Mythmakers

A themed issue of the journal Rock Music Studies.

The Residents are one of the most important bands in avant-garde / alternative music. With their first albums in the 1970s, they quickly established themselves as fierce critics of popular culture and as visionaries of new technologies and multimedia aesthetics. Since the 1970s, they have been committed to deconstructing the canon of popular music (with Meet the Residents, The Third Reich’n’Roll, Not Available, The Warner Bros. Album) and reconstructing American popular music (The King and Eye, God in Three Persons, Stars and Hank Forever). Reinventing the music of the avant-garde (Eskimo, Fingerprince, The Commercial Album) over the decades of their artistic career, the Residents also redefined the idea of the concept album (Mark of the Mole, Demons Dance Alone, The Voice of Midnight, The Ghost of Hope) and the genre of music videos (Freak Show, Gingerbread Man, One Minute Movies, Bad Day on the Midway). During their career they have also deconstructed the mythologies of popular culture, reinterpreting the music of the Beatles, Elvis, George Gershwin, James Brown, Hank Williams, Iron Butterfly, and the Rolling Stones–to name only a few. Consequently, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the Residents had extended the concept of the avant-garde and alternative music.

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Call for Participation: APME @ Edinburgh Napier University

July 26-29, 2020
Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland
Deadline for Applications/proposals: 15th of November 2019

The Association for Popular Music Education is pleased to announce a call for participation in its first-ever European conference, Breaking Down Barriers, which will be held at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. This conference will take place the week before the International Society for Music Education’s (ISME) biennial conference in Helsinki, Finland. Edinburgh is a great stopping point on the way to Helsinki, and this conference provides the opportunity for Popular Music Education researchers to come together in a specialised environment.

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