Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference

Deadline for proposals: 12 December 2014
Conference dates: 4-7 August 2015
Conference website: http://congregationalmusic.org
Venue: Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. Congregational song can unify communities of faith across geographical and cultural boundaries; however, it can also be used to mark divisions between Christians of different denominations, cultural backgrounds, and social classes, and to negotiate or articulate difference in relation to religious outsiders. We therefore cannot understand the meanings, uses, and influences of congregational music within Christianity without exploring both its local contexts and its translocal, transnational, and global circulation.

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Current Trends in Italian Popular Music Studies

Research Networking Colloquium
March 18-19 2015, University of Hull (UK)

Italian Popular Music Studies in the UK and USA has seen increased interest over recent years, with themed issues of prominent journals Modern Italy and Popular Musicin 2008, PhD projects recently completed and ongoing, and colloquia and workshops organised in 2012 and 2014 by Indiana University. This colloquium aims to bring together colleagues from the UK, Italy, the USA, and beyond, to continue the discussions around the place and prominence of popular music studies within the broader discipline of Italian Studies.

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Special Issue of Popular Music on ‘Music and Alcohol’

Popular Music invites contributions to a Special Issue on Music and Alcohol 

Popular music is littered with songs about alcohol, some condemning it, some celebrating it – ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)’, ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, ‘One Mint Julep’, ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, ‘What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)’, ‘I Drink’ and so on.  Each genre has its own repertoire of such songs, and its own take on the pleasures and pain of alcohol. Songs about drinking have featured across time and throughout the world – from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome to medieval troubadours and broadside ballad peddlers in Europe and across folk traditions in the Americas. But alcohol features in many other guises in popular music. In the UK there was even a genre directly associated with it: Pub rock; and in an earlier era in the US, prohibition and the speakeasy contributed to music’s social history. The drinks industry is a major sponsor of venues and festival, as well as of tours and artists. The laws on alcohol licensing are intimately tied to the regulation and zoning of live music. Meanwhile, those who warn of the dangers of alcohol have campaigned for an end to sponsorship and endorsement by the music industry and its stars. Psychologists have experimented with the relationship between the consumption of booze and music, while artists and others have made claims for the creative powers of drink. And finally, musicians have not just taken inspiration from the bottle, they have become implicated in its manufacture (Elbow are responsible for a beer called Charge and Status Quo for one called Piledriver; Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs struck a profit share deal with Ciroc Vodka that involves him in developing the brand; a premium Jack Daniels is named in honour of Frank Sinatra; and Sting produces his own wine in Tuscany).

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RMA Study Day: Authorship in Music

Friday 6 March 2015
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

The question of authorship has been a central concern in poetics and literary theory for a long time and there is a large literature on this topic representing various critical perspectives. However, this sustained and systematic treatment of authorship has yet to be reflected in musicological discourse concerned with the particular conditions of musical practices.

Including an invited paper (‘I tell you what to do: autonomy, control and play in game compositions’) by Professor James Saunders (Head of Centre for Musical Research, Bath Spa University) and musical performances, this study day seeks to address and explore issues surrounding the notion of ‘authorship’ in relation to different kinds of engagement with music across cultures and genres and from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives including musicology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, ethnomusicology, and anthropology,

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This is My City: Popular Music in Australasian Cities

Co-Editors: Shelley Brunt and Geoff Stahl

“Well I’m back in the land of second chances, And rock’n’roll shows where nobody dances
Back in the land of chicken and chips, Mars bars and roadside tips
And if you don’t like it, Then that’s too bad, Cos it’s the only city that we’ve ever had
This is my city…This is your city…This is our city now”
(“This is My City” Skyhooks – Melbourne, 1976)

Cities are indelibly connected with the production and consumption of popular music. This can take many forms: bands draw inspiration from living, working, and playing in urban centres; songs give emotional shape to cities via sonic and lyrical signifiers; fans and audiences sustain local scenes; rehearsal spaces offer contexts for musical collaboration and performance; large-scale festivals impart a sense of spectacle to cities; and gigs at small venues provide opportunities for moments of shared intimacy. In these and other important respects, popular music gives unique shape to the sociomusical experience of urban life.

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Frames of Listening: Popular Music and Visual Culture

IASPM-Canada 32^nd Annual Conference
University of Ottawa – Carleton University, May 27/28 – 30, 2015

“Frames of Listening: Popular Music and Visual Culture” aims at exploring the intersections of sound and images across a range of popular music genres and cultural forms. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, musical-visual culture in a variety of forms has become readily accessible to millions worldwide. Even before the digital revolution, musical artists collaborated with visual artists to develop iconic images that had the power to shape identities, to communicate social messages, to strengthen genre affiliations, and to sell records. How do we receive and interpret the intersections of music and moving images in popular music? How do these multi-sensorial artistic expressions do cultural work and shape the world?

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Get Ur Freak On: Music, Weirdness, and Transgression

2015 EMP Pop Conference
April 16-19, 2015, EMP Museum, Seattle, Washington

Exploding conventions has long put the bomp in pop: the uncontainable desire of those deemed sexually unnatural, racial impostors, gender outlaws, obsessed fans, willful bohemians, or just plain weird. “We feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in “The Imp of the Perverse.” Music often sanctions transgression, challenges or corrupts the status quo depending on your perspective, gives us Prince in one era (called Imp of the Perverse by a biographer), Miley Cyrus in another, an Iggy Pop then and an Iggy Azalea now.

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Special Issue of Rock Music Studies: The Velvet Underground

Guest-edited by Alex DiBlasi and Steven Hamelman

“[T]he first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years…. [T]hat record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”—Brian Eno, 1982

With the recent passing of Lou Reed and the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of their groundbreaking debut, the Velvet Underground remain one of the most influential recording acts in rock. Each of their four studio albums with Lou Reed at the helm—The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), White Light/White Heat (1968), The Velvet Underground (1969), and Loaded (1970)—inspired entire genres, setting the precedent for alternative, indie, goth, punk, noise, post-punk, and experimental music in the decades to come. This special issue of Rock Music Studies seeks to examine the Velvet Underground’s lasting impact on popular music while also reappraising their own influences, works, and other realms of their career.

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Jazz and Modernity

Call for papers #1 : Jazz and Modernity [full version here]
Coordination: Thomas Horeau, Édouard Hubert, Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

Since its birth, jazz has often been perceived as a musical paradigm for the modern age, a technological and rhythmical age characterized by an unprecedented “acceleration”, considered as a danger by some philosophers. The idea of modernity, which has been progressively legitimized and used within the field of aesthetics, is generally defined as a distance taken from the tradition and/or an orientation toward the future. The argument of modernity and positioning in relation to tradition is at the core of controversies relating to jazz legitimacy, from Berendt and Adorno, Panassié and Vian, to the recent controversy about the nomination of Olivier Benoît as director of the French Orchestre National de Jazz. Then, can and/or must one consider jazz a “modern” music, considering it is often constituted by a tension between rupture and continuity.

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Over and Over: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music

Over and Over: Exploring repetition in popular music aims at identifying and studying the recent aesthetic and analytical developments of musical repetition. From the 32-bar forms of Tin Pan Alley, through the cyclic forms of modal jazz, to the more recent accumulation of digital layers, beats, and breaks in Electronic Dance Music (EDM), repetition as both an aesthetic disposition or formal musicological property stimulated a diversity of genres and techniques. After decades of riffs, loops, vamps, reiterated rhythmic patterns, as well as pervasive harmonic formulae and recurring structural units in standardized song forms, the time has come to give these notions the place they deserve in the study of popular music.

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