Bey Day: A One Day Conference on Beyoncé

30th of June, 2016 – Cardiff University School of Music

Beyoncé has become one of the most iconic performers of the twenty-first century; she has always been at the cutting edge of music, fashion and audio-visual media, often asserting her personal politics along the way. Beyoncé has provided us with a plethora of cultural landmark moments from the Single-Ladies dance, to her Glastonbury headline set to her performance of ‘I Was Here’ in front of the United Nations. It is for these amongst many more reasons we celebrate the work of Mrs Carter at this unique conference on the day her Formation tour comes to Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.

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And beyond… Popular Music and Transgression(s)

2nd IASPM-D-A-CH-Conference
20-23.10.2016 – Karl-Franzens-University of Graz

Organized in cooperation with the Institute of Musicology at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz/A the second IASPM-DACH conference will take place from October 20th to 23rd 2016 – at the same time as the 11th edition of the elevate Festival, which connects a critical-political discourse and advanced electronic music, literature and art. That also roughly outlines our conference topic: Popular Music and Transgression(s). Seemingly independent from specific cultural and historical contexts, moments of transgression seem to be a characteristic feature of popular music styles, their practices, media and theories.
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IASPM UK & Ireland Biennial Conference – Brighton, UK

The Clarendon Centre, Brighton
8-10 September 2016

UPDATE: You can now view the IASPM Conference Schedule.

The University of Sussex and the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (Brighton) are hosting the 2016 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, UK & Ireland branch. The theme of the conference is ‘Popular Music: Creativity, Practice and Praxis’.

Keynote: Professor Chris Rojek City University London

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The Power of Hip Hop

Call for Submissions
A one-day seminar on the role of hip hop in affecting positive social change
Papers from academics, practitioners and postgraduate students encouraged

Type: Seminar
Date: Friday 8^th July 2016-04-14
Location: Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, London, UK
Subject Fields: Contemporary History, Humanities, Politics, African American History, International Development, Contemporary & Popular Music
Organisation Website: www.inplaceofwar.net
Programme Website: www.inplaceofwar.wix.com/london2016

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Songs & Singers of Social Protest (MUSICultures)

MUSICultures solicits articles for publication in a special issue on Songs and Singers of Social Protest, guest edited by Dr. Martin Power and Dr. Aileen Dillane, both of the University of Limerick, Ireland. We also continue to solicit articles on any topic related to our mandate.

The editors of this special issue invite papers that deal with protest songs, singers/songwriters and live and recorded performances (contemporary and/or historical) that draw inspiration from folk and vernacular music traditions in particular.
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XIV SIBE Conference: Itineraries, Places and Contexts

20th – 22nd October 2016, Madrid

University Complutense of Madrid is pleased to announce the fourteenth Conference of the Iberian Society for Ethnomusicology Studies (SIBE), which will be held from the 20th to the 22nd of October in Madrid, Spain. Researchers are welcome to present abstracts, proposals, and posters to be part of this exciting conference that will focus around the concepts of place, itineraries and cultural contexts.

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Raymond Williams, Popular Music and Subculture

A day conference organised by The Subcultures Network and the Performance and Contemporary Arts Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University, Friday 10th June 2016, Friends’ Meeting House, Mount St, Manchester 9am – 5pm.

Recently, there has been a significant revival of interest in the diverse legacy of Raymond Williams. So far, however, the connections between Williams and the study of subcultures, popular music and social change have been little explored. How have Williams’s early work, his later cultural materialist approach, and the work of those influenced by him, shaped the field? And how might this tradition be developed to address some of the most pressing issues and problems in contemporary popular musical and subcultural studies?

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Fourth Performance Studies Network International Conference

14-17 July 2016
Bath Spa University
Newton Park, Bath, UK, BA2 9BN

To register, please use the online sales system here.

Early bird rates apply until 1 April 2016.

The aim of the conference is to debate theories, methodologies and practices of performance, and to engage with increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary developments in the field in order to encourage a more global perspective on performance studies.

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Epistrophy, a jazz journal – no 2: Playing (at) jazz

Coordinated by: Basile Bayoux, Joana Desplat-Roger, Thomas Horeau, Édouard Hubert, Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

We “play music”: the English language uses this notion to characterize musical practice. Pure chance? As Johan Huizinga underlines it in Homo ludens, the semantic concordance of play and music is no English exception: German uses spielen, French uses jouer (whereas other romance languages don’t: Italian uses suonare, Spanish, tocar), and this reference can also be found in Arabic, as well as a few Slavonic languages. According to Huizinga, this fact appears as the “deep-rooted psychological reason for so remarkable a symbol of the affinity between play and music”[1]. We could add a more specific, historical concordance between jazz and play: born in the 20^th century, jazz is contemporary of a particular attention given to play within art worlds.[2]

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Popular Music Studies Today: 19th Biennial IASPM Conference

26 June – 30 June 2017
University of Kassel
Germany

Popular Music Studies are today a key field of enquiry. Exploring the parameters of research on popular music in contemporary times lies at the centre of the 19th Biennial IASPM Conference. The Executive Committee therefore invites researchers and practitioners to submit proposals for presentations which engage with a variety of methodologies and perspectives on popular music studies, whether from an academic, professional, practice-based or educational angle. We encourage proposals dealing with one of the following streams:
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