Special Issue of Rock Music Studies – Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry
Guest-edited by Tom McCourt – Fordham University

“Chuck Berry is the greatest of the rock and rollers . . . his songs are still claimed as encores by everyone from folkies to heavy-metal kids. But Chuck Berry isn’t merely the greatest of the rock and rollers, or rather, there’s nothing mere about it. Say rather that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust, we might as well trash it altogether.” – Robert Christgau, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.

Read the rest of this entry »

PUNK NOW! Registration now open!

The 2nd Punk Scholars Network Annual Conference and Post-Graduate Symposium
29^th-30^th October 2015
Free registration via https://punk-now-2015.eventbrite.co.uk

Registration closes at 1700 on Wednesday 28 October 2015

Presented by Punk Scholars Network in conjunction with  Birmingham City University, Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, London College of Communication.

Thursday 29 October (0900-1730) and Friday 30 October (0900-1700)

The Shell
Birmingham City University
Parkside Building
Cardigan Street
Birmingham
B4 7BD

Map and directions

5 minutes walk from Moor Street Station, 10 minutes walk from New Street Station, 15 minutes walk from Snow Hill Station. Parking and accommodation are available nearby.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pet Shop Boys: Symposium

24/25 March 2016, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

To mark the 30^th anniversary of the release of their debut album Please, the University of Edinburgh is pleased to announce that it will host a two-day symposium on the history and work of the Pet Shop Boys. Despite their prolific contributions to popular culture over the last thirty years – including music, theatre, cinema, books, and film soundtracks – very little scholarly work has been produced on the band. This symposium aims to begin to rectify this omission: the organisers hope to produce an edited collection of essays based on the talks at the symposium.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fringes, outsides and undergrounds: The aesthetics and politics of unpopular music

One-day conference to be held at Goldsmiths on 7 May 2016 

Musical forms such as noise, extreme metal, performance art, experimental techno, free improv and more take inspiration from both popular and art traditions without being fully identifiable with either.

These forms exist either on the fringes of, or outside, these commercial and cultural mainstreams, both in conventional musical centres such as London and Berlin and further afield, in South America, Japan and China.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hear The Music, Play The Game: Music And Game Design: Interplays And Perspectives

GAME – Games as Art, Media, Entertainment
www.gamejournal.it
Call for Papers – n. 6/2016

Hear The Music, Play The Game: Music And Game Design: Interplays And Perspectives
Edited by Hillegonda C. Rietveld and Marco Benoît Carbone

http://www.gamejournal.it/n-62016-hear-the-music-play-the-game-music-and-game-design-interplays-and-perspectives/#.VbCbv4cn91M

Music composition and sound design in video games are important dimensions in the experience of play, gaining increased acknowledgement and attention within the game industry. The growing relevance and success of several kinds of music-based games, and their codification in novel genres and sub-genres, illustrates one tendency in this shift of focus towards the aural in relation to the usually visual dominance of the medium. This calls for an attempt to reconsider the often-overlooked impact of music and its role in defining games. Arguably, a distinction can be made between games in which music functions in the background, and games in which music is an integral part of the game mechanics. For example, attention to game music demands a reconsideration of the importance of sonic content in past productions, and to look at practices like the revival of chip music, associated with early arcade, console, and home computer games. Meanwhile, the music industry has recognized the importance of game music, as demonstrated by the growing amount of releases of game sound tracks as well as occasional in-game music sales in and across new and different markets. Composers and sound designers have too often been regarded as contributors to the final phases of game development, despite the central affective power of music production in game design and the experience of play.

Read the rest of this entry »

From a Whisper to a Scream: The Voice in Music

2016 EMP Pop Conference
April 14-17, 2016, Seattle, Washington

The voice in music goes beyond singing: “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs,” Roland Barthes wrote. Voices insert the self into music, Billie Holiday stopping poet Frank O’Hara’s breath with choices of tempo and timbre, Neil Young transfixing rock fans with his “Old Black” Gibson electric guitar tone, the sentimiento expressed in the sung bolero resonating across the Americas. Finding their voice, performers – on stage and camera, recording in studios – make us identify, naturalize change. But voices embody community too, as in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “Black National Anthem” written by (pioneering popular music scholar) James Weldon Johnson, and they are the foundation of protest, the megaphone for social change. A switch in voice, from croon to rasp to rap to Auto-Tune, alters meaning and social statement.

Read the rest of this entry »

Conference on ‘Island Music and Dance’

ISIC 12 , June 17-20 2016 Naha (Okinawa)

The 12th International Small Island Cultures conference will be held in Naha (Okinawa) from June 17th-20^th 2016 at the Okinawa Prefectural University of the Arts. The main conference theme will be ‘Island Music and Dance’ and paper proposals will be invited on any aspect of this topic (traditional or modern).

Read the rest of this entry »

Fourth Performance Studies Network International Conference

Bath Spa University, 14–17 July 2016

The international Performance Studies Network comprises professional and amateur musicians, scholars working in a range of musicological disciplines (including music history, analysis, psychology, pedagogy, ethnomusicology and composition), and colleagues from the creative industries. The fourth international conference of the Performance Studies Network will be held at Bath Spa University, Newton Park campus, from 14 to 17 July 2016. The aim 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

No Business like Show Business! Popular Song around the World during the First World War

Call for chapters in English for a new book project
No Business like Show Business!  Popular Song around the World during the First World War
Initiator : John Mullen, Université de Rouen, France, research team ERIAC

Key words : Cultural history, Popular song, performance, First World War

A considerable bibliography exists on nineteenth century popular song, and somewhat less on song from the first two decades of the twentieth century. The years of the First World War have been little studied, though in some countries this work has begun[1]. This book will go further towards filling this gap, working on the assumption that popular song of the time, often presented on the variety theatre stage and distributed by the sale of sheet music, expressed the joys, fears and fantasies of millions, and constituted a significant part of their history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Second International Conference of The Progect Network for the study of progressive rock

After the success of the first initiative in Dijon (2014), The Progect is organizing its second international conference on the 25th, 26th and 27th May 2016 in Edinburgh, UK. This will be another opportunity to cover different aspects of progressive rock and promote awareness of current research around the world.

Read the rest of this entry »