“Playing Along”: Music, Participation, and Everyday Life

IASPM-ANZ 2018 Conference December 3-5, 2018
Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec)
Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Music exists in all aspects of our lives. It provides us with company; it is a part of rituals and celebrations; it creates dialogues with visual images through films and games; indeed, other media turn to music to stimulate sensations, affects, even tastes and smells. People participate in music, they play along, they accompany, they are accompanied, and thereby they may gain skills, knowledge, pleasure, companionship and so on. Music provides the means for performing and creating identities, which could relate to gender, culture or other identifiers. And through playing along, when we respond to rhythms and sounds with gestures, we might say we are also creating the music itself.

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Music and Musicology in the Age of Post-Truth

 7-8 September 2018
University College Dublin

In recent months alternative facts, fake news and similar terms have become more and more commonplace among politicians, media and other public influencers alike in what is now often called the age of post-truth. Expertise appears to be discredited, gut feeling at least as important as facts, and facts themselves no longer valid and reliable. Often postmodernism and poststructuralism are blamed for the rise of a relativism that lies at the heart of post-truth attitudes. But is this really the case? And how should an academic subject such as musicology react to this development? Given the impact that postmodernism and post-structuralism have had on our disciplinary development, do we as academics in general and musicologists in particular have a special responsibility to engage productively with this challenge – as researchers, educators and last but not least as citizens? Are there potential music-specific reactions to the post-truther’s mindset? How can / should we adjust our teaching in this environment? And what role does music / do musicians play in the new “culture war” that we now find ourselves in? How is music utilised by either side? Are there differences in the responses from within popular, traditional and art music (and their respective musicologies)? Is our task as academics to neutrally analyse and describe developments, or rather to try and actively influence them through research, teaching and as public intellectuals – and if so, how?

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Pop – Power – Positions: Global Relations and Popular Music

IASPM D-A-CH-Conference
Bern (Switzerland), 18–20 October 2018

University of Bern, Institute for Musicology
Bern University of the Arts, Research Area Interpretation
Partner: Norient – Network for Local and Global Sounds and Media

In Nigeria, the high pressure to follow the copyright rules of the globalized pop music market restrains the use of samples in hip hop culture. In Egypt, young musicians have no credit cards, leaving them without access to the online music market. In Europe, second and third generation migrants discuss their non-European backgrounds and European identities in songs and tracks. And U.S.-produced Korean pop music (K-Pop) increasingly rivals Korean-produced K-Pop in its concern for authentic presentation.

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In the Beginning, Duke: The Three-Day Ellington Summit

25–27 May 2018

The 25th International Duke Ellington Study Group Conference, organized by the Duke Ellington Society UK, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the Birmingham City University School of Media.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Duke Ellington was canonized as one of the key figures in 20th century American music. However, his influence reaches beyond jazz into almost every significant form of artistic expression. This conference invites speakers to reappraise the aesthetic, social and political impact of Ellington, his orchestra, his compositions and collaborators. Through consideration of Ellington as a global phenomenon, we seek to interrogate the narratives that have shaped the written history of jazz and the frameworks through which popular music has been viewed. The conference aims to forge a new beginning for Ellington studies, which collides traditional academic research with performance-based analysis and methodologies drawn from across the humanities.
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MUSICAL FREESPACE: Towards a radical politics of musical spaces and musical citizenship

Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 September 2018 in Venice, Italy.

FOLLOW-ON EVENTS: Venice and Chioggia – Friday 14 September, Saturday 15 and
Sunday 16 September 2018

The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale has the concept of “Freespace” as its principal theme.

We invite musicologists, architects, urbanists and migration activists to join us in Venice for a “fringe” conference running alongside the Biennale. Our intention is to add to the “Freespace” agenda important questions of musical citizenship, and a radical politics of musical spaces, in relation to music, song and dance. We feel that the matter is pressing at a time when, all across the world, music, song and dance are increasingly constrained by the interests of power and commerce.

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(E)valuating Transnational Music Practices: Space, Diversity, and Exchange

Music extends and goes beyond enclosed spaces both physically and metaphorically. As complex phenomena, music practices are hardly to be confined by borders of any kind. At the same time, there is little doubt that music is strongly connected to notions of origin or ancestry, ideas of the sacred, to certain places, political claims, aesthetic norms, or economic exchange. In contexts like these, music practices are rendered and thus (e)valuated and categorized. We suggest building on these opposing tensions within music practices in general and discussing in particular the valuation and evaluation of diversity, space and exchange in transnational music practices. While scholarly research in the fields of transnational culture (Glick Schiller & Meinhof 2011) and (e)valuation studies (Lamont 2012; Kjellberg 2013) have received growing attention in recent years, their overlapping in academic research on music still promises interesting insights.

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The Future of Live Music

University of Central Lancashire,  Thursday 7^th June 2018

The development and mass manufacture of audio technology in the 20^th century accelerated the commodification of music that had developed in the 19^th century through the growing market for sheet music. From the post-world war 2 period to the end of the century the term ‘music industry’ could almost be taken as being synonymous with the recording industry.  However, more recently, in the wake of digital technologies, the value of the recording has arguably plummeted, both in terms of the financial reward it offers to artists and in the cultural capital it offers consumers.

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Popular Music & Society: Special Issue on Regional and Rural Popular Music Scenes

Guest-edited by Andy Bennett, David Cashman, and Natalie Lewandowski

Popular Music and Society invites article proposals for a special issue on Regional and Rural Popular Music Scenes.  There is now an established body of literature on popular music scenes (see, for example, Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music”; Shank, Dissonant Identities; Bennett and Peterson, Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual).  Significantly, however, this literature is heavily centered on the urban metropolitan experience of music scenes or “music cities.”  While such work is clearly important in understanding the cultural and economic importance of music, the dominance of this metro-centric approach also serves to further detract attention from regional and rural spaces and places, the latter also providing important settings for the production, performance, and consumption of popular music (Waitt and Gibson, “The Spiral Gallery: Non-Market Creativity and Belonging in an Australian Country Town”).  This special issue will bring together a series of papers that will offer new insights regarding both the distinctive contributions made by regional and rural music scenes in the contemporary world and their connections to national and transnational networks of popular music production, performance, and consumption.

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Progressive Methods in Popular Music Education Symposium

Inaugural Symposium: Canadian Popular Music Education Network

The Progressive Methods in Popular Music Education Symposium seeks to bring together researchers, practitioners and others concerned with viewing popular music education through a progressive lens.

Presentation proposals and workshops on any aspect of popular music progressive methodology are welcome. The conference will be organized under the three strands below:

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To Each Their Own Pop: Music, Cinema and Television in Europe in the Period of the Youth Movements (1960-1979)

Call for Essays: Cinéma&Cie, no. 31 – Special issue edited by Massimo Locatelli, Alessandro Bratus and Miguel Mera

The scope of this issue is to gather papers related to a decisive period in the development of audiovisual media in contemporary Europe: the 60’s and 70’s are linked with different patterns of economic growth and consumption across different countries, but nevertheless related to the diffusion of television and the new technologies in the record industry, from both the point of view of production and reproduction. Such changes determined the emergence of new forms of expression, media aggregation and consumption behaviors with respect to the past.

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