The Velvet Underground (academic book collection)

Editors – Sean Albiez and David Pattie

Though, relatively speaking, The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alternative rock. After the band’s initial demise, in their solo work and live and studio collaborations, ex-band members continued to create music that variously drew from the literary, experimental and pop heritage of the band. In particular Lou Reed, John Cale and Velvet Underground associate Nico produced a number of works that travelled a liminal path between art and pop. However, original members Moe Tucker and Sterling Morrison, and Doug Yule (who joined the band after Cale left in 1968) in their own way sporadically pursued more low key musical activities. In 1993 the original band members of Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker briefly reunited for live appearances. After the reformation petered out, Reed until his death in 2013, Cale, and briefly Tucker, continued to produce music that travelled the idiosyncratic path that began in New York in the mid-1960s.

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Sign o’ the Times: Music and Politics

2017 EMP Pop Conference
April 20-23, 2017
EMP Museum, Seattle WA

“I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote,” the Congressman says in Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.” Music, especially pop music, tends to anticipate politics—young people give a dress rehearsal of what’s to come, building movements or prefiguring new worlds. No less powerfully, music is shaped by politics, from rules of copyright, drinking ages, and noise volumes to crises of war and social injustice, rents in the fabric. Music’s connection to politics goes beyond sloganizing lyrics; it organizes, stirs, performs possibility.

For this year’s EMP Pop Conference, we invite presentations that relate music, of any styles or era, to politics, however that’s defined. Topics might include:

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MPSG 2017 Themed Session: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

To be held at King’s College London, 13-14 July 2017

Session convenor: Stan Erraught (Buckinghamshire New University)

Repetition has been a recurring trope in the history of music; indeed, it seems to be a necessary feature of (almost) all music. Yet as McClary (2004) has noted, in the latter part of the twentieth century, the use of repetition increased dramatically in Western musics, and the nature of many musical repetitions became more extreme. More precisely, whereas many previous musics from the eighteenth century onwards had wedded repetition with the development of musical material, repetition in much music from the later twentieth century became more purely cyclic, involving extensive repetition of often extremely short musical units, without significant variation or development. Such use of repetition is discernible in pieces as diverse as Steve Reich’s Different Trains, Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock’s “It Takes Two,” or Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” amongst innumerable other examples. Further, repetition appears as a feature not simply within works, but also across works; to give an extreme example, the ‘amen break’, a 7- second sample from an obscure soul B-side, effectively gave birth to a whole school of genres and subgenres within and beyond Drum and Bass.

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Special issue of Shima on Island Music and Dance

The April 2017 issue of Shima (v11 n1) will be a theme one on (any aspect of) island music and dance (contemporary or traditional).

Intending authors should familiarise themselves with the instructions for authors at: http://shimajournal.org/instructions.php

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Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night

Call for Chapter Proposals
Editors: Giacomo Bottà and Geoff Stahl

After midnight, we’re gonna let it all hang out
After midnight, we’re gonna chug-a-lug and shout
We’re gonna cause talk and suspicion
Give an exhibition
Find out what it is all about

           – JJ Cale, “After Midnight”

I go out walkin’ after midnight
Out in the starlight, just hoping you may be
Somewhere a-walkin’ after midnight
Searchin’ for me

           – Patsy Cline, “Walking After Midnight”

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Extreme Music: Hearing and Nothingness

December 1-2, 2016, University of Southern Denmark

Call for papers

Please Note! Due to summer vacations around the world, we are giving a vacation-based extension for abstract submission until August 28, 2016.

Call for papers and practical information (hotel, dining, etc.) as a PDF  

The research group The Performances of Everyday Living at SDU Odense is pleased to invite paper submissions for presentation at EXTREME MUSIC – HEARING AND NOTHINGNESS. The research presented should suggest, explore and examine the respects in which music may be transgressive, provocative or alien; are there respects in which some music challenges us to the point that it may even prompt questioning as to the very nature of music? We would like to emphasize that we heartily welcome research presentations dealing with the notion of extreme music in relation to any musical genre to which it may be applicable.This conference is a cross-disciplinary endeavor. We welcome presentations from the perspectives of philosophy, musicology, marketing, media studies, medicine, acoustics, theology, literary studies, music pedagogy, semiotics, sociology, linguistics, religious studies, anthropology, psychology, biology, education studies, music therapy, performance studies and culture studies.

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IASPM Journal 7/2 (2017) Pop Life – The Popular Music Biopic

http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/view/797/864

Popular music biopics are becoming ubiquitous. Marshall and Kongsgaard (2012) list 28 for the years 1980-2010 and recent years have seen films on NWA, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Brian Wilson, Bessie Smith and Whitney Houston. Increasingly common also are films about managers, record company owners and fans, who are not even musical performers. Is the biopic trend-driven by an ageing audience for popular music? Does it represent another attempt by the music industry to cash in on its back catalogue, or is it part of a canonisation process by which yesterday’s popular culture becomes today’s “art”? Is the lack of critical attention paid to the biopic because it falls between film and music, history and fiction, product and art?

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The Art of Punk

University Of Northampton
Friday 25th November 2016

Third Annual PSN Conference and Postgraduate Symposium

With all of the records, books, films, gigs and other material punk stuff out there, we sometimes forget that our movement is a leap of faith. A belief that life matters, so don’t fuck it up, and if someone else is fucking it up, do something about it.

Mark Bayard, ‘Introduction’, in Craig O’Hara. The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise! (2013)

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Media and Creative Industries Symposium

Technology and Transformations in the Creative Industries
Oct. 19th 2016

Do we need new maps?

The Department of Media and Creative Industries at Bucks New University, in association with Fisheye Film Festival and UK Music, invite proposals for papers, panels, performances and other interventions that might address some of the topics in the brief below.

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Perspectives on Music Production – Producing Music

Call for chapters

Deadline for proposals: 3rd October 2016

During the last two decades the field of music production has attracted considerable interest from the academic community, more recently becoming established as an important and flourishing research discipline in its own right. In addition, the academic study of music production within educational institutions has become the norm alongside training in the technical aspects of the practice. Our intention for the proposed second volume of the Routledge Perspectives on Music Production series is both to strengthen and broaden the range of the discipline as it currently stands. In particular we will welcome proposals for chapters in the following areas: Read the rest of this entry »