From State Control to Free Market: Transition of Eastern European Music Industries after the Fall of Communism

Expressions of interest invited to contribute to an edited volume:

Central and Eastern Europe during the last 28 years has been a place of radical political, economic and social transformation, and these changes have affected the cultural industries of these areas. Political and economic transformations coincided with the advent of digitalisation and the Internet, which intensified the changes. It can be argued that during the last three decades the music industries in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were subject to two shocks: the first related to the fall of state-controlled economies, while the second was caused by the advent of the Internet. This posed a challenge both to record labels and artists, who after adjusting to the rules of the free market economy were faced with the falling sales of records caused by the advent of new communication technologies. This makes the Central and Eastern European music markets an interesting topic which requires further study. Despite the depth of transformation and the size of the region, there are not many publications in English which could analyse these processes. Consequently, this volume aims at filling this gap by concentrating on the transition from state-controlled music industries to free-market ones in selected Central and Eastern European countries.

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New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media

Bloomsbury’s New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media is a series of research monographs dedicated to changing our understandings of sound, image, and their relations across media. Today’s media are shaped by digital technologies, new modes of production and consumption, varied platforms, genre blendings, and globalized economic networks. These media demand new theoretical and aesthetic responses. This series seeks surprising, interdisciplinary work that explores the intersections between popular, mainstream, avant-garde, classical and post-classical forms of audiovisual media. Approaches from the disciplines of dance, neuroscience, and philosophy, to name but a few, are welcome. Underexamined historical topics and non-western socioeconomic and technological contexts may help us understand our present moment, and we encourage these proposals as well.

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British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference 2018

12–15 April 2018, Newcastle University

As with all BFE Annual Conferences, we welcome papers and panels on any aspect of current ethnomusicological research. The 2018 theme will be Europe and post-Brexit Ethnomusicologies.

Amidst the most profound European (and American) socio-political ruptures since 1945, the position and roles of ethnomusicology has never been more important both for the plural and changing constituencies of identity (‘British’, ‘European’, ‘Global’) and for those in one part of the world who research and perform musics from another part. In some senses, displacements and musical changes are consequences of globalization, and from the growing inequalities that continue to emerge from polarized global wealth and consumption. We wish to focus attention on the position and approaches to ethnomusicology within Britain and Europe both before and after the emerging new European settlements for the academy, European communities, refugee and migrant communities, students and their Others. By extension, we are also interested in exploring these same, and parallel, issues beyond Europe.

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‘Punk’: Impacting Culture? Influencing change?

The Fourth Punk Scholars Network Conference and Symposium
The University of Bolton School of the Arts and the Punk Scholars Network
12th and 13th of December 2017

Papers and presentations are invited for the fourth Punk Scholars Network conference and postgraduate symposium to be held at The University of Bolton School of the Arts.

According to some, Punk crashed into popular culture in the United Kingdom in year zero, 1976 and crashed out at Wonderland in San Francisco in January 1978. Read the rest of this entry »

Popular Music and the Moving Image in Eastern Europe

Special issue of Studies in Eastern European Cinema guest-edited by Zsolt Győri

A special issue of SEEC calls for contributions (not exceeding 6000 words) on the uses of popular music in the moving image in Eastern Europe – including musicals, other types of fiction film, music videos, documentary and experimental films – from the postwar period to contemporary times. The focus includes but also reaches beyond poetic considerations of film music, and articles about the social, cultural, and production contexts of music in screen culture are especially welcome.

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Inside, Outside, and in Between: Institutionalization in Music History

Fifth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History
June 6–8, 2018, Music Centre Helsinki, Finland

Deadline for proposals: September 30, 2017

Conference website: https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/inst2018/home

The Fourth Symposium took cosmopolitanism as its theme in order to contribute to and clarify the cosmopolitan turn in the arts and humanities, to explore its meaning in terms of musical practice and theory, and develop new perspectives on music history. In the final plenary session, delegates debated a range of topics that might be given further consideration in the next symposium, speaking of pedagogy, cosmopolitanism as teaching tool, and destabilizing conservative frameworks in music history teaching. The discussion ranged widely over topics such as networks, connections, mobilities and immobilities, geographical transactions, border crossings, mythologies, utopias and heterotopias, tourism and travel, and humanism and post-humanism. The most productive discussion, however, was around institutionalization.

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Techniques of Listening

A Conference Organized by the Music and Sound Studies Interdisciplinary Student Group
University of Minnesota
October 13–14, 2017 • Minneapolis, MN

Keynote Speakers: Charles Hirschkind (UC Berkeley) and Emily Dolan (Harvard)

As a way of knowing and interacting with the world, techniques of listening constitute a wide range of socially and historically circumscribed practices that shape our subjective positions and collective identities. Techniques of listening orient the ear and represent sound in distinct and often contradictory ways.

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Symposium for Digital Musicology

1^st September 2017
Senate House W1CE 7HU London UK
http://digitalmusicology.com

Symposium for Digital Musicology is a one day event that aims to bring together scholars from various musicological fields and computer scientists in order to generate a discussion about digital musicology – an interdisciplinary field in which new technologies are applied to musicological research. Digital techniques have been used more often within humanities in fields outside of musicology, for example in palaeography, history, art history, and many others. The field of digital musicology remains an active field with research done by computer scientists and programmers who have built a broad range of tools that could be used by musicologists and ethnomusicologists, but these tools do not usually meet their potential on this side of the research spectrum. These digital tools could both be timesaving and provide opportunities to new methodologies (e.g. big data, timbral analysis, automated transcription, etc.).

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ISSTA 2017 International Festival and Conference on Sound in the Arts, Science and Technology

Sept 7^th-8^th 2017
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland

Website: http://issta.ie/call-for-submission-2017/

Keynotes

Peter Kirn (Editor–in–Chief, CDM: Create Digital Music) http://cdm.link/

Dr Theresa Dillon (Artist–Researcher, Professor of City Futures at Watershed and University of the West of England, Bristol) http://www.polarproduce.org

Deadline for submissions

Submissions are due Monday 17th April. Notifications will be sent by Friday 9^th June.

ISSTA 2017: Sound–Makers: technologies, practices and cultures

Creative audio and visual practices are increasingly moving from the digital sphere into the ‘real’ world––moving from bits to atoms (Ishii and Ullmer, 1997)––as physical computing technologies continue to become more widely affordable and accessible. Custom–made and repurposed controllers, gestural interfaces and intentionally hackable or reconfigurable instruments now support the creation and control of music and audio-visual media outside the mouse and keyboard paradigm and beyond normative models based on previously–established practices.

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Bob Marley Special Issue

Rock Music Studies
Special Issue: Bob Marley

Edited by Mike Alleyne

Submissions are invited for a special edition of Rock Music Studies that examines the art and legacies of reggae’s best known figure in the particular context of the 40^th anniversaries of his Rastaman Vibration and Exodus albums. The latter was cited by Time magazine in 1999 as the Album of the Century.

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