DISCO! An Interdisciplinary Conference

University of Sussex
21-23 June 2018

From its origins as a New York City subculture amongst gay, black and Latino/Latina practitioners, and its transition into the mainstream, to its subsequent lives across international scenes, disco poses pivotal questions about the entanglements of art, industry, identity, and community. Disco is the site of many significant and lasting debates in popular culture, including those surrounding the figures of the DJ and the diva, the status and significance of dancing bodies, the tension between what is authentic and what is synthetic, and the historic maligning of society’s others.

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Applied Ethno/Musicology and the Applicability of Music Studies

The 22nd annual symposium, University of Helsinki, March 7 to 9, 2018.

We are now accepting proposals for individual papers and themed panels in English, Finnish and Swedish. Themed panels (90 min) can consist of individual papers or a panel discussion. Please submit your proposal by Januray 15, 2018.

Applied ethnomusicology has for decades sought to develop ways of extending the influence of music studies also beyond academic contexts: for example, in relation to the sustainability of various music cultures and through music’s potential roles in tackling social and political problems. However, currently widespread discussions about the ”impact” of research and the significance of cross-disciplinarity urge music scholars in any area of study to critically reflect on the scholarly and potentially broader social implications of their work.

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OK Computer, twenty years on. Radiohead’s musical, cultural, and political legacies

Following a symposium held at Rennes 2 University last may, further contributions (in English or French) are now sought in order to publish a wide-ranging, peer-reviewed collection of articles appraising OK Computer’s musical, cultural and political legacy twenty years after its release. The aim of this publication is to bring together contributions from scholars who wish to confront Radiohead’s work with their own disciplinary methodologies, including (but not limited to) musicology, sociology, art history, political science, literature, cultural studies or even economics.

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Editing, Performing And Re-Composing The Musical Past –The Emergence Of French Neoclassicism (1870–)

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, 5–7 September 2018

The French Music Research Hub at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University, is very pleased to announce this international conference, to take place in the Recital Hall of the new Conservatoire across 5–7 September 2018. The conference forms part of the culminating phase of the major AHRC-funded project: ‘Accenting the Classics: Durand’s Édition classique (c. 1915–25) as a French Prism on the Musical Past’.

We are delighted to confirm there will be an international keynote address delivered by Professor Steven Huebner (James McGill Professor, McGill University, Montreal), together with a public piano recital presented by senior Conservatoire performers. The languages of the conference will be English and French. We welcome a full range of scholarly approaches: musicological, editorial, analytical, critical and performance-based. Read the rest of this entry »

Music as a social phenomenon – theoretical concepts and empirical inquiries

While music has never been a major focus of social sciences, the reflection on its significance in social life has always been present. Music was analyzed, among others, in the context of the social construction of genius (E.Elias, T.DeNora), social movements (R.Eyerman), socio-cultural changes (T.W.Adorno), power and political influence (J.Attali, G.Born) or social stratification (P.Bourdieu, R.A. Petterson, M.Savage). Regardless chosen subjects and perspectives, the researchers are consent that music plays an important role in social relations. As Tia DeNora points out: „(…) music serves as a medium in, through and against which feeling, perception, attention, consciousness, action and embodied processes are produced. At times, actors may engage in this appropriation process with deliberation, knowing how certain music works on them from past experience. But at other times, music may take actors unaware.” (DeNora 2009: 161-162).

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Transposition Issue 8 (2019): Music: Intangible Heritage?

http://transposition.revues.org/1143

Coordination: Elsa Broclain, Benoît Haug & Pénélope Patrix

In 2017, almost a third of the files submitted to UNESCO for inscription on the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) lists include a significant musical component. Greek Rebetiko could) thereby join more than seventy listed forms of “music” – often associated with celebrations, dances, poetry and know-how – such as the Tango of Rio de la Plata, Shashmaqam of Central Asia, Brazilian Samba de Roda, and Tar craftsmanship and performance in Azerbaidjan. Applications have poured in since the 2006 entry into force of the International Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH, which established a new heritage paradigm based on practices and communities rather than monuments and artefacts[1], according to the perspective of “new heritages” and their aim to cultivate more open and participatory practices[2]. Outside the realm of the United Nations, this new category of “intangible heritage” has infused into the vocabulary and approaches taken by national registers, and into local cultural policy, heritage-related and museum activities, and the general discourse, generating a variety of modes of appropriation and contention. Considering the far-reaching implications, this issue of Transposition aims to explore the specific case of music in the domain of “intangible cultural heritage”, both within and beyond the framework used by UNESCO.

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Songwriting

The editors of the Journal of Popular Music Education invite papers for a special issue on songwriting, guest edited by Andrew West.

Songwriting has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, commensurate with growth of programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and expansion of songwriting provision in schools. Songwriting practices have evolved to encompass domains formerly the preserve of producers, engineers, composers, and arrangers. Songwriting can be found at the heart of work in music therapy, community projects, and big business. The realm of the genius, the muse, the pop culture icon, and the person on the street, songwriting to many people is at the core of what it means to be human.

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Ambient@40

Deadline: 17.00 (GMT), Friday 5^th January 2018.

In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference is to re-appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.

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Queerness, Voice, Embodiment

2nd Symposium of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
https://lgbtqmusicsg.wordpress.com
20th-21st April 2018
Maynooth University (near Dublin)

Deadline: December 11, 2017

Elizabeth Woods’s essay ‘Sapphonics’ (1994) set in motion new discourses on the voice in music studies. With an example of the unique expressive qualities of lesbian difference and desire, Sapphonics questions the universally assumed traits of physical vocal mechanisms to emphasise the particular embodied circumstances of production and performance. Grappling with similar questions of difference and agency, Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) articulated the predicament of Subaltern voices addressing issues of(post) coloniality and patriarchy. Neither essay delimits the possibilities of what voicing entails, rather both cut across disciplinary boundaries in search of voices that intersect various dimensions of identity, including gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, to name a few.

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Maximising student compositional and performance creativity within Higher Popular Music Education (HPME) courses.

Michael Tippett Centre, Bath Spa University, 24th February, 2018.

CFP: deadline for submissions 15 December, 2017

Keynote Speakers: Cliff Jones (BIMM, Gay Dad, Radiophonic Workshop); Dr Louise Jackson (Trinity Laban), Drew Morgan (BIMM, Halo 4, Davidge, Modulus iii)

Overview:

‘As a relatively new HE discipline, and the (largely) orally transmitted nature of the music, the teaching is still, I feel, being explored and developed.’ (Respondent cited in Cloonan and Hulstedt, 2012)

Since the amalgamation of new universities in 1992 the development of Higher Popular Music Education courses has increasingly expanded, with there now being 47 institutes or universities that have undergraduate popular music courses (Cloonan and Hulstedt, 2012). There has been research centered around creative pedagogies within Higher Popular Music Education (Burnard,2012; Haddon et al, 2016; Parkinson and Smith, 2015) and this is an opportunity to collate and collect practices that have influenced the development of student musicians within Universities and Institutes which teach popular music. With the rise in student fees and constant changes to the current popular music industry, it now seems more vital than ever to look at pedagogical practices and philosophies, to see if student creativity is being maximised. Are the Universities and Institutes that deliver HPME helping to develop popular musicians who will make a creative impact on the current popular music industry?

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