Building the Scenes? Fan/zines in Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe before and after the Fall of Berlin Wall

22 – 23 February 2019 in Prague, Czech Republic.

We invite researchers to share their papers related to the conference theme, including but not limited to such topics as:

• transfer of zine practises among different subcultures
• cross border and transregional transfer of zines and practises
• modes of zine distribution
• modes of zine production
• relation of zines to subcultures and social movements
• theoretical and conceptual approaches to zines
• zine archiving and preservation
• case studies of zines

Deadline for abstracts is 18 November 2018. Read the rest of this entry »

Silencing: Experiences, Materiality, Powers International conference

Marseille, 4-7 June 2019, EHESS – Vieille Charité
Submission deadline: 20 December 2018

Presentation

The Silencing. Experiences, materiality and powers international conference aims at considering silence in its practical dimension, as an object, a conduct, an aesthetic or political hold. In welcoming and confronting viewpoints from several academic fields – acoustics, anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, museology, musicology, sociology – and artistic practices – notably music, poetry, cinema– this conference will study how the existence of a creation of silence manifests, through the material, symbolic and political modalities of silence. Read the rest of this entry »

Journal of Popular Music Education Special Issue

Learning, Teaching and Making Popular Music Online

There is much to learn regarding the skills people use to learn, teach and make popular music in global online contexts. Furthermore, research and pedagogy should address how popular musicians’ practices online might be translated to learning institutions. Research has examined pedagogical approaches to popular music learning, lived experiences of contemporary musicians, and interactions in modern musical communities. Online music making has popularized terms including “virtual ensemble”, while affordability and accessibly of do-it-yourself recording studios have proliferated user-generated musical content on the internet. Musicians use diverse social media platforms to develop new techniques, brand their personae, and hone producing skills in virtual places which act as spaces for music learning, teaching and making.

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Music and the Moving Image Conference XIV

Conference at NYU Steinhardt: Friday May 31st – Sunday June 2nd, 2019

The annual conference Music and the Moving Image encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between the entire universe of moving images (film, television, video games, iPhone, computer, and live performances) and that of music and sound through paper presentations. We encourage submissions from multidisciplinary teams that have been pooling their knowledge to solve problems or come up with a new perspective regarding music and moving images. The Keynote Speaker is TBA.

Abstracts or synopses of papers (250 words) should be submitted by no later than December 15, 2018. You can submit via Qualtrics by clicking this link:

https://nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0vVlwYSbMDt3Pzn

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Legacies and Prospects: The Pasts and Futures of Popular Music

IASPM-Canada Annual Conference
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
May 24-26, 2019

For those interested in the study of popular music, the year 2019 provides a juncture to consider both the future and the past. We are on the threshold of the third decade of the twenty-first century, and can expect new and ongoing shifts in the technology, artistry, business, politics, and mediation of music and popular culture. Historically, this year marks several milestones:

• 20 years since peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing disrupted long-established business models for the distribution and sale of music commodities
• 40 years since the first commercially-released hip hop recording (Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight”), a revolutionary new style that continues to define popular music’s present
• 50 years since the Woodstock and Altamont festivals, seen by many as watershed events in the post-war history of popular music.

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Music & Empowerment

For the fourth yearbook of the German Association for Music Business and Music Culture Research (GMM),published in 2020, edited by Prof. Dr. Michael Ahlers, Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla M.A., Dr. Anita Jóri, Dr. Holger Schwetter.

The German Association for Music Business and Music Culture Research publishes a yearbook which, in addition to its main topic, provides information on the actual state of research on music business and music culture. Music business and music culture research is not conceived as disciplinary research, but rather as a field of research that reacts to problems and new questions in a situational and transdisciplinary manner and at the same time raises them. The focus is on actual problems and questions, as in this case the question of the possibilities and limits of empowerment in popular music.

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Journal of Popular Music History special issue

Popular music curation: material, virtual, professional, amateur, public, private

The Journal of Popular Music History invites contributions to a special issue on popular music curation. Where it was once the almost-exclusive domain of museum and gallery work, the notion of ‘curation’ has become increasingly popularised: from curated Spotify playlists to curated music festivals and curated club nights, to curated box sets and curated fashion collections, this terminological appropriation of what was once a ‘high art’ practice into more mainstream popular music and culture raises a number of interesting questions this special edition aims to examine.

As Atton (2014: 414) writes, ‘A conventional definition of the work of a curator in a museum or art gallery would once have emphasised the fixed contexts within which collections and exhibitions were presented to the public, where meaning was preserved alongside the artefact.’ Yet the deliberate employment of the term ‘curation’ within a more progressively quotidian vernacular obliges of us further critical exploration of what, specifically, is required of and intended by its use. The mediation, manipulation and presentation of a collection of music and/or music-related items as ‘curated’ has evident implications: for instance, a curated collection may be seen as one organised by ‘experts’; it might suggest a more localised, hand-crafted, artisanal, personalised experience (Campbell 2005); or it could imply a more critical, ‘hidden’ or ‘alternative’ popular music narrative, previously untold or overshadowed within more dominant historical or cultural contexts (Leonard 2007). In this sense, exploration of what, how and by whom curation occurs, directly informs understanding of the curated objects and collections themselves.

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MUSICultures: Queer Musicking

MUSICultures solicits articles for publication in a special issue on Queer Musicking, guest edited by Dr. Charity Marsh (University of Regina), Dr. Line Grenier (Université de Montréal), and Dr. Craig Jennex (University of Regina). We also continue to solicit articles on any topic related to our mandate.

In his book Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening, Christopher Small proposes that we perceive music as a verb rather than a noun—an activity rather than a thing—to recognize the necessarily social nature of music performance and participation.

For this special issue, we invite critical scholarship on queer musicking practices in contemporary and historical contexts around the globe. Musicking refers to an encounter, a way that individuals connect with others and become part of a larger collective. Such an act is particularly important for queer individuals, communities, and politics. In a society structured by heteronormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and neoliberalism—ideals that usher all of us into normative and limiting modes of relations—does musicking afford collective queer potential?

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2nd Meeting of the European HipHop Studies Network

ELEMENTS BRISTOL, 06-08 June 2019
University of Bristol, UK

Emceeing. DJing. Breaking. Graffiti. Hip-hop is commonly understood to consist of these four elements. The idea of four elements is one of hip-hop culture’s core narrative and most pervasive founding myth since its beginnings in the Bronx in the 1970s. Yet, the idea of four core elements has been highly contested since the beginning of the culture as there is no unified definition of how many elements exist, who defined them, and how they came together. For instance, hip-hop founding father Kool Herc believes that “that there are far more than those [four elements]: the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you look, the way you communicate.” (Chang xi) Likewise, on his album Kristyles, KRS ONE introduces his theory of nine elements which include beatboxing, fashion, knowledge, and entrepreneurialism (“Nine Elements”). On the other hand, researchers such as criminologist Jeffrey Ross also emphasize that “graffiti […] was established long before hip-hop music emerged in the South Bronx, and many of its practitioners do not identify with the music or its subculture at all” (139). While their number is contested, hip-hop’s elements are crucial in understanding the logics, conventions, and values of this fascinating culture in the US and in Europe. They reveal its creative tensions as well as larger notions of authority, authorship, boundary formation, community as well as inclusion and exclusion.

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Island Festivals and Music Tourism

15th International Small Island Cultures Conference (ISIC 15)
July 9 – 13, 2019 – The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative and the Sydney Institute of Music (SICRI) and Sound Research, welcome proposals for paper and/or panel presentations from any disciplinary field, as well as from managers and practitioners who are interested in island issues, to the 15th International Small Island Cultures Conference (ISIC 15) – on the theme of “Island Festivals and Music Tourism”.

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