MUSIC ID Digital Research Fellowship

http://www.academicrightspress.com/entertainment/music/fellowship-prize

Music ID is sponsoring a new Digital Research Fellowship in popular music studies.

Music ID is a platform aimed at academics 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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IASPM@Journal

Editor: Koos Zwaan
Deadline: 31st August 2018

IASPM@Journal invites all IASPM members to submit papers for issue 2/2018 on any topic of research related to Popular Music Studies.

IASPM@Journal is the journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), an organization established to promote inquiry, scholarship and analysis in the area of popular music. We publish articles and book reviews on popular music of any genre, time period or geographic location. As part of an international network the journal aims to disseminate IASPM members’ research work that is local, transnational, global and/or international. English is the official language but articles may also be submitted in the official language of any of its branches (adding an English abstract). Studies may use a range of research methodologies and critical approaches, including practice as research. As our open access readership is diverse and interdisciplinary, we ask contributors to present ideas in forms accessible to sociologists, musicologists, music critics and practitioners.

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Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music

The editorial team of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music and guest editor Simon Jones (author of Scientists of Sound: Portraits of a UK Reggae Sound) invite 300-word proposals for the Volume 2 Issue 2 of Riffs from ECRs, PhD, MA and BA students, and anyone else with an interest in experimental writing on popular music.

“Playing music, for me right, it gets some heads together…. get a little tribal thing going on, you know. Get the frequency up…. Everybody’s on that frequency. It’s always been about that…and exciting people and changing their frequency.” – Robbo Dread, Birmingham 2017

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2018 Annual Meeting of the New Zealand Musicological Society: ‘Into the Unknown’

30 November to 2 December, 2018

University of Canterbury School of Music, UC Arts at the Arts Centre, 3 Hereford Street, Christchurch.

A journey into the unknown is often a key component of the musicologist’s research process. It may involve the discovery and analysis of unexplored repertoire, probing of music’s role in distant cultures, or experimentation with new pedagogical techniques. It may include the use of new analytical or theoretical methods or interdisciplinary perspectives to shed new light on musical cultures and practices and musical works. Furthermore, the role of music itself can be pivotal in communities facing uncertainty and change. This conference examines the different ways in which music research can involve exploration of the unknown, and investigates the role of musical practices in communities and societies facing the unknown.

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Measures, Steps, Spaces: the places of music

14th International Meeting of Music and Media, Sao Paulo, 10-12 September, 2018

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me…” The instigating quotation from Pascal’s Thoughts refers to the new order of the universe in the seventeenth century as geocentrism is abandoned to adopt heliocentrism. The thought dividing the world into two parts: “from the heavens” (upper) and “from the earth” (lower, corruptible) was broken. The beliefs instituted by the Church were shaken. From then on, the closed celestial world, which was ending, becoming giant, infinite … As it is well known, from then on the world began to be perceived and felt in other contours. For centuries we have seen that both concepts and perceptions of time and space expand their boundaries, arousing curiosity and giving rise to important concerns in the field of science and art. Thinking in the very particular case of the forms of creation, appreciation and musical performance, we verified that these dimensions space-time passed, through the centuries, by different forms of conception. Concerning to musical composition, space has gradually become a parameter, giving rise to other categories (environment, sound landscapes, etc.). Gradually, aesthetic appreciation was also conditioned by the various technical means that emerged (devices, listening places, sound territories) and their possibilities of use. These same conditions would imply changes in performance (a drama to three, Zumthor would say) irreversibly. In another aspect, space unfolds its physical dimension into symbolic, scrutinizing itself in places and territories. Songs, practices and repertoires are limited to their propagation capacity and to the groups that produce them, configuring acoustic communities. According to the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, space allows the construction of territories: practiced, lived, disputed. Their constructions of meaning are guided by the uses and appropriations that groups and subjects make, in a complex elaborated between fixed and flows.

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Arts and Power – Policies in and by The Arts

Working Group Sociology of the Arts of the Cultural Sociology Section in the DGS (German Sociological Association)

Conference at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, November 22 and 23, 2018

Concepts of power and domination are central for sociology since its beginnings. Classical theorists such as Marx, Weber, Gramsci, Adorno, Foucault, Bourdieu etc. developed these concepts as fundamental sociological terms; there is almost no (macro-)sociological discourse that does not draw from these notions.

In general sociology, more abstract and theoretical concepts of power and domination are discussed, divesting from empirical explorations. Dispositifs, constraints and violence are relational concepts that are defined by the enforcement of volition against resistance (Weber). We are convinced that this „enforcement of volition“ is also well suited for the explanation of structures and processes in the arts, in their production, imagination, communication, distribution, critique, and consumption. In addition, the arts are means for enforcing power and domination (see among others Adorno’s notion of cultural industry more than 70 years ago, or Bourdieu’s theory of distinction).

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The Present and Future of Electronic Music

University of Central Lancashire, 14 November  2018

Electronic music was once seen as the future of music. Is this still the case? Is the very term ‘electronic music’ useful in industrial and academic context? And if so, what differentiates today’s electronic music from non-electronic music and are these differences between these two types of musics likely to remain in future?

The Present and Future of Electronic Music seeks to answer some of these questions or at least help to clarify their meanings. We hope to bring together insights and ideas from a range of disciplines in music studies, including musicology, composition, performance, cultural theory, computing and  philosophy, as well as industry, to examine the evolving field of electronic music.

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Punk and Marginalised Identities

This is a call for submissions for a special edition of the Punk and Post Punk Journal on Punk and Marginalised Identities

Punk is subversive, providing a platform for the disenfranchised to ‘shout back’. Throughout its history – and in the present – the punk scene has been shaped by its DIY ethos and spirit of self-invention and empowerment. Punk has helped many from marginalised groups to discover and enact revolutionary politics.

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The Spotification of Popular Communication

Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture
Editors: Patrick Burkart and Miyase Christensen
Guest editors: Cecilia Ferm Almqvist, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden and Patrick Burkart, Texas A&M University, USA

This special issue considers the various meanings of the “Spotification” of music and other media. We are especially interested in Spotification in reference to the changes in media cultures and industries accompanying the transition to streaming media and media services. Streaming media services have become part of daily life all over the world, with Spotify, in particular, inheriting and reconfiguring characteristics of older ways of publishing, distributing, and consuming media.

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Turns and Revolutions in Popular Music Studies

XX Biennial IASPM Conference
School of Music, The Australian National University
Canberra, Australia, 24–28 June 2019

As certain songsters and songstresses have noted, seasons turn, turn, turn, even if you are talking about a revolution. While global warming alters seasonal cycles with the aid of neoliberal and (pseudo)socialist forms of capitalism, and waves of societal turmoil follow each other with varying degrees of authoritarianism in different parts of the world, popular music studies remains committed to critical enquiry of music of the masses, the everyday, a variety of subcultures, the megastars, all with their revolutionary potential. Faced with the increasing worldwide austerity in the humanities and social sciences, caused by short-sighted research funding policies that purportedly aim at revolutionary technological and business innovations, popular music studies also struggles with its future directions. Whither popular music studies and where to turn?

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