Sustainable Sounds: Interrogating The Materials of Music Making Technologies

Date: Saturday 11 May 2019
Venue: St. Cecilia’s Hall Concert Room and Music Museum, University of Edinburgh

The business of musical instrument manufacturing has grown over the last two centuries from a largely home-based craft industry to a globalized mass production industry. The range of materials used to make instruments has also increased: from renewable woods to precious metals, and from plastic to the data and energy consumption of virtual instruments. How has the changing materiality of instruments affected musical culture – economically, aesthetically, and ethically? We invite proposals for a one day conference on musical instruments, sound technologies, materiality, and sustainability. We welcome proposals for individual presentations on any aspects of musical instruments (and other music- and sound-making technologies) relating (but not limited) to the following topics: Read the rest of this entry »

Home of Metal Symposium and Workshop: Music Heritage, People and Place

Friday 13-14th September 2019
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
Birmingham City University

1. Call for Papers

PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM

Friday 13th September 2019

This public symposium seeks to bring together researchers, policy makers, heritage and creative workers and musicians.

We welcome contributions from fans and heritage consumers in response to their experience of the Home of Metal exhibitions and events.

Home of Metal (HoM) is a heritage project created and led by the Capsule organization. Launched in 2011, supported by volunteers, building a crowd-sourced archive and curating a range of popular public events in Birmingham and the Black Country, HoM seeks to highlight and celebrate the value of Heavy Metal music and culture and the role in it of founding artists from the English midlands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Judas Priest. In 2017 the project went international in its reach, exploring metal culture around the world with a particular focus on Black Sabbath. As a result, in 2019 a range of exhibitions and events will take place in ‘celebration of an artform created in Birmingham that maintains significant global reach and influence.’ The value of this approach is indicated by the Wall Street Journal that has described the genre as the real ‘World Music’, that ‘Heavy Metal has become the unlikely soundtrack of globalisation’ (2016).

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Music and Democracy: beyond Metaphors and Idealization

21 June 2019
University of Huddersfield
https://musicdemocracystudydays.wordpress.com

Convened by Igor Contreras Zubillaga (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Huddersfield) and Robert Adlington (University of Huddersfield)
Keynote speaker: Esteban Buch (CRAL/EHESS, Paris)

Democracy has been an ideal for musicians throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Musicians working in fields including modern composition, jazz, improvisation, orchestral social inclusion projects, and online networked performance have been drawn to democracy as a metaphor and ideal for legitimising their practice. How are we to understand such appeals to the concept of democracy, in the musical field? Although the concept of democracy tends spontaneously to arouse approval and adherence, consideration should be given to the great diversity of uses that have been made of it (and continue to be made nowadays), the multiplicity of forms of democracy, and the historicity of democratic systems. These complex facets of democracy became especially apparent in the political context of transition to democracy after an authoritarian regime, leading to a struggle between different ‘ideas’ of democracy. Therefore, a careful scrutiny of what ‘democratic’ means and a close analysis of the relations being produced, for whom, and why, seem necessary in each particular case.

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Music and Social Movements: A one-day symposium at Northumbria University

30 November 2018

This symposium, funded by the US Embassy and Northumbria University, will bring together academic historians, graduate students, and teachers to examine the role that music played in various oppositional social movements that were active in the post-World War II period in the United States.

Participants will think through how we teach and write about the ways that popular music relates to minority group understanding, political protest, religious identity, and more. Topics for discussion will include Live Aid, feminism, oral history, protest, civil rights, and Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America.’ The event will include an interactive workshop at which participants will discuss how we interrogate and use documents related to music.

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Hip-Hop in the Golden Age

In honor of black history month, and in celebration of the 30^th anniversary of De La Soul’s groundbreaking album 3 Feet High and Rising, Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music presents the interdisciplinary conference “Hip-Hop in the Golden Age.” Our keynote speaker will be Prince Paul (Paul Huston) of De La Soul.

Hip-hop’s golden age (ca. 1988–95) was a time of unprecedented creativity. Having crossed over into mainstream culture but not yet bound by the restrictions of major labels, rappers and producers explored seemingly limitless avenues of beat production, flow, and lyrical topics. This conference will explore any and all aspects of the golden age of hip-hop, including the historical circumstances that gave rise to it, and its impact on later artists: thus, paper presentations need not deal explicitly with hip-hop produced during that time. We envision this as an interdisciplinary conference, and welcome proposals from scholars in a variety of different disciplines, including those outside music.

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Popkongress 2019: Popular Articulations – Articulations of the Popular

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Rhyme and Rhyming in Verbal Art and Song

Helsinki, Finland, 22nd – 24th May 2019

During Medieval times, end rhyme became a key device for demarcating poetic lines in European and Arabic cultures. Besides characterizing a longstanding literary tradition, end rhyme and rhyme patterns became central structural and sonic elements in oral and oral-literary traditions worldwide. In oral performance, rhyme stands for aesthetics, creativity and memory: memorization as well as the exploitation of working memory in lyrical improvisation. In verbal art and song, rhymed registers continue to deploy the poetic potential of language for situated communication and meaning over changes in fashion and the coming of new musical styles.

This conference is intended to promote cross-disciplinary analysis and understanding of the role and aesthetics of rhyme in the poetics of sound and meaning. Our focus is especially upon the history and universality of rhyme as well as its particularities in various performed oral and popular registers.

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The Fifth Biennial Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference

Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom
30 July-2 August 2019

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. The goal of the Christian Congregational Music conference is to expand the avenues of scholarly inquiry into congregational music-making by bringing together world-class scholars and practitioners to explore the varying cultural, social, and spiritual roles music plays in the life of various Christian communities around the world. We are  pleased to invite proposals for the fifth biennial conference at Ripon College in Cuddesdon, near Oxford, United Kingdom between Tuesday, July 30 and Friday, August 2, 2019. The conference will feature guest speakers, roundtables and workshops that reflect the ever-broadening scope of research and practice in Christian congregational music-making around the world.

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Locating Heavy Metal Music and Culture

International Society For Metal Music Studies

4^th ISMMS biennial international Conference, 17-20 June 2019, Nantes (France)
www.francemetalstudies.org

Presentation

Five years have passed since the inception of the ISMMS (International Society for Metal Music Studies), an international association that has been triggering a new dynamic of collective research on hard rock, heavy metal and metal within the humanities and social sciences. It was officially launched during the first conference on “Heavy Metal and Popular Culture” at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, USA) in April 2013. This founding event which was followed in 2015 by the “Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Culture” at the University of Helsinki’s (Finland) International Institute for Popular Culture, and in 2017 by the “Boundaries and Ties: the Place of Music Communities” Conference one at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada).

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Setting the Record Straight: Hidden Histories of Popular Music

Editors:

Chris Anderton (Solent University, Southampton, UK) [email protected]
Martin James (Solent University, Southampton, UK) [email protected]

Proposals are sought for chapter contributions to an edited collection with strong publisher interest.

The historical significance of music-makers, music scenes and music genres has been mediated through numerous academic and popular press publications (including magazines, films and television documentaries), as well through officially released music industry products and the informal productivity of artist and genre enthusiasts. This book will examine these various publications and will question how and why they are constructed. For instance, the formal mediations of the music industry and popular press typically present linear narratives that are based on simplifications, exaggerations and omissions. The histories they construct often place an undue emphasis on key moments of birth and death, or on particular personalities that are deemed to drive those moments. This approach tends to lead to totalising ‘popular’ histories that reduce otherwise messy narratives to one-dimensional interpretations of a heroic and celebratory nature. Ideological positioning, personal biases and sometimes untrustworthy narrators lead to historical perspectives that become naturalised and accepted as being true, and serve to narrow our understanding of the development of popular music. They also contribute to the creation and maintenance of myths that reinforce the contemporary industry of music nostalgia, and are further communicated through the user-generated content of social media and the Internet. Artists, genres and events may be removed from these simplified and mythologised media narratives or their significance downplayed in processes of distortion and selection. The informal mediations of fans and enthusiasts may reinforce such mythologies or actively challenge them by presenting alternative narratives. For example, bloggers and non-commercial bootleggers uncover ‘lost’ recordings, make live concerts available to trade, or publish their own interviews and stories that extend beyond the official canon.

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