When jazz meets dance music and popular songs

Analyzing an evolution in popular music (1920s-1940s)

During the 1930s, prominent critics such as Hugues Panassié, Robert Goffin, and Marshall Stearns advocated definitions of jazz based on concepts of “authenticity” and “otherness” in relation to European music. According to these critics, “real” jazz was regarded as “black” music. Concurrently, the evolution of the distinction between “hot jazz” and “straight jazz” towards a distinction between “jazz music” and “dance music” (in magazines such as De Jazzwereld in the Netherlands, for instance) attests to a process of exclusion (by some specialized critics) of a portion of the repertoires from the field of jazz, and to a musical evolution of a segment of the jazz orchestras.

This approach and these distinctions have had a long-standing influence on the historiography of jazz (particularly of its early decades). Consequently, numerous repertoires which were labeled “jazz” during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s but which did not conform to the purist definitions of jazz have been overshadowed by jazz historiography, despite the fact they were the prevailing soundtrack for most of Europeans and Americans. This special issue of Epistrophy will examine a selection of these “non-purist” jazz repertoires, including those of Jack Hylton, Paul Whiteman, Ray Noble, Vincent Lopez, Claude Thornhill, Ray Ventura, Ambrose and his Orchestra, and František Alois Tichý Ultraphon Jazz Orchestra.

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(What’s the story) Reunion glory?

Assessing Oasis’s legacy as Morning Glory turns 30.
Université Rennes 2 (France), 27 November 2025

Organisation committee: Aurore Caignet, Guillaume Clément, David Haigron

It is estimated that nearly 14 million people tried to get tickets for this year’s Oasis’s UK tour following the announcement of their reunion in 2024. This staggering figure echoes the band’s one-off concert at Knebworth in 1996, when 4% of the British population had applied for tickets. Such statistics confirm Oasis’s special status within British popular culture and the band’s ability to allow people to come together.

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See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me: Tommy, Rock Opera and Twentieth Century Britain

Special Issue, IASPM journal
Edited by Keith Gildart and Benjamin Halligan

With Tommy, British rock group The Who audaciously scoped British social history across the middle decades of the twentieth century in order to engage with themes of youth culture, hedonism and alienation, family dysfunctionality, the horrors of war and its aftermath, stardom and psychic damage, sexual abuse and exclusion, and the permissive society. The rock opera concept of Tommy was one that resulted in multiple iterations: the original album (1969), the London symphony production (1972), Ken Russell’s glam-era film (1975), stage productions at the moment of the “Britpop” renaissance in British culture (in the 1990s, and a 2015 revival), and the music continuing to feature in the live sets of The Who.

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Pedagogy and Practice in Popular Music Education

Association for Popular Music Education European Conference 2025
July 22-24, 2025, Liverpool, UK

The submission deadline has been extended to February 15, 2025, and can be accessed by clicking this link.

The Association of Popular Music Education (APME) European Conference 2025, hosted at Liverpool Institute for Performance Arts in Liverpool, invites scholars, educators, musicians, practitioners, and industry professionals to submit proposals for papers, presentations, and workshops that explore innovative practices, foster critical discussions, and share emerging trends in popular music education. This year’s conference focuses on the intersection of pedagogy and practice in popular music education, highlighting key issues in diversity, social justice, and the evolving role of music education in our communities.

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Changing Mediations of Music, Audio and Sound: New Systems Across the World

Audio streaming, social media and short video platforms are transforming the systems by which sound media are configured internationally. Platformisation, datafication and automated recommendation have been central to such transformations, and now generative AI is bringing about further changes. These developments have generated great controversy, for example concerning effects on musicians, on local music production, and on the way that music is experienced in everyday life. These changes also have significant implications, via the rise of podcasting and other related developments, for the fate of radio, even if radio remains resilient in many territories. Arguably such transformations require a major rethinking of the politics of sound in everyday life.

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Artificial intelligence in the creator economy

Special edition of Global Media and China

Issue Editors
Keith Negus (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and University of Agder, Norway)
Qian Zhang (Communication University of China, Beijing)

Artificial intelligence in the creator economy

Artificial Intelligence (AI), powered by large data sets and advanced algorithms, is having a profound impact upon the global media. It is disrupting approaches to knowledge and information, models of communication and representation, along with creative practices and cultural production. This special edition addresses the impacts and consequences of AI for the study of global media, by focusing specifically on how AI is driving a growing creator economy. The creator economy refers to the way ever more content is made, modified, and monetized, using accessible AI apps, across audio-visual platforms like Douyin/ TikTok, YouTube, Sina Weibo, WeChat, Twitch, Bigo Live, and Boomplay.

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Depression in Popular Music

International Conference, June 26-27, 2025
Sorbonne University, Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (iPLesp), Paris

Conference organizers:
Jessica A. Holmes
Associate Professor of Musicology, University of Copenhagen
4EU+ Visiting Professor, Sorbonne University iPLesp (Spring 2025)

iPLesp Social Epidemiology, Mental Health and Addictions Research Team led by Judith van der Waerden, Senior Research Associate, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM)

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The Past, the Present and the Future of Popular Music Research in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe

IASPM CESE 1^st international conference, 11–12.09.2025

Organized by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (IASPM CESE) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

IASPM’s Central, Eastern and Southeastern European branch invites submissions for its first international conference, focusing on the evolving landscape of popular music research in our region. As popular music continues to shape cultural narratives and social identities, we invite researchers from and of this part of Europe to contribute their (self-)reflections on the region’s historical contexts, contemporary practices, future directions, as well as on the ways in which their own work expands this field.

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Take Two: Expanding the Field of Music Production Research

Building on the success of the inaugural SMPR conference, we now turn our focus to Canada’s west coast, a region where the extraordinary natural environment inspires us to push boundaries and explore new ideas. It’s time for take two!

Using Victoria’s ecological diversity and soaring landscape as a metaphor, we have chosen three themes to map out research directions for Music Production Research (MPR): equity, diversity and inclusion; social responsibility; and innovation. We want to explore these themes both from within the MPR community, and also by turning our collective creativity outwards. At this conference, we aim to test the limits of conventional thought by fostering discussions about how music production and research can, broadly speaking, make a positive social impact.

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Mediterranean Byways. Music Across Borders Between Western Europe and the Maghreb

Transposition no. 14 (2026): “Mediterranean Byways”
Call for papers
Edited by Talia Bachir-Loopuyt and Karim Hammou

Approaches to music, whether in the field of musicology or the social sciences, tend to construct their objects and analyses in accordance with the divisions promoted by nation-states. Such a “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) is not without limitations. It can even result in intractable deadlocks, particularly when examining cultural phenomena that, although constrained by political borders, may also transcend them to varying degrees and in different ways. Paul Gilroy’s proposition (1993) – to construct the Atlantic space as a relevant scale for analysing Afro-diasporic cultural and political practices – and the discussions and research it has inspired have demonstrated the value of considering alternative divisions (Agudelo et al. 2015, Aterianus-Owanga 2024). The term “byways” in the title of this call is borrowed from René Gallissot, a historian specialising in the Maghreb, whose work sought to explore the “transnationalisation at work beneath the model of the nation-state” (Gallissot 2000: 149).

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