IASPM-Canada 31st Annual Conference

Université Laval
May 23-25, 2014

The deadline for abstracts has been extended to Monday January 20.

This year’s conference will take place at Université Laval in Quebec City. Founded in 1663, Laval is the oldest francophone university in North America and one of Canada’s leading research institutions. The university provides easy access to Quebec City with its stimulating combination of historic architecture and a vibrant and diverse cultural life.

We welcome proposals on any topic relating to popular music for this open un-themed conference. Proposals for single papers, workshops, performances or other forms of presentation may be submitted. Abstracts for individual papers, roundtables, and workshops should be no longer than 300 words; proposals for panels should include an abstract for the panel as a whole (300 words max.) as well as an individual abstract for each paper proposed for the panel (300 words max.). It is possible that the program committee may accept a panel but reject an individual paper on that panel.

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IASPM UK and Ireland Biennial Conference: Worlds of Popular Music

University College, Cork, 11-14 September 2014

Keynote Speaker: Professor David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds)

Keynote title: ‘Music and the Affective Turn’

Popular music creates worlds around its listeners, temporary, often intimate, and feelingful environments within which the act of listening occurs. It meanwhile plays significant roles in the global flows of capitalism, politics, tourism and migration, and inflects the virtual spaces opened up online by digital technology. New research work, of all approaches, is welcome; those proposing papers should make clear how their presentation will shed new light on the relationships that emerge between types or instances of popular music and their most salient surrounding contexts, for instance, along the lines of one of the following questions:

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2014 IASPM-US Annual Conference: ‘Music Flows’

Music flows. Evocative metaphorically while directing our attention to the global circulation of songs, the theme for the 2014 IASPM-US Annual Conference takes its inspiration from the UNC campus-wide Water initiative.

Water in its many forms is a ubiquitous subject of pop songs. Whether as metaphor or literal reference, water imagery as a theme in popular music has been used to celebrate identity, express emotions, address environmental issues, convey pleasure, pay homage to spiritual beings, and shape communities of resistance. Here we take up notions of fluidity and flow to address not only what many deem our most important natural resource, but to consider the ways in which water’s qualities may yield productive insights into the present and future of popular music.

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IASPM UK and Ireland Postgraduate Conference 2013: The Cultural Value of Popular Music

5th and 6th September, University of Glasgow

The 2013 IASPM UK and Ireland postgraduate conference, to be held at the University of Glasgow, invites papers exploring the cultural value of popular music.  In light of the AHRC’s recently launched two-year Cultural Value Project (www.ahrc.ac.uk/funded-research/funded-themes-and-programmes/cultural-value-project), the conference will focus on both the experience of popular music and the economic and social benefits such an experience provides.

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Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Challenging Orthodoxies

IASPM 17th Biennial Conference
24-28 June 2013
Universidad de Oviedo
Place: Gijón, Spain

The popular music studies field in all its inter-disciplinarity has been characterised by encounter, dialogue and exchange, and also by tension. Our title ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ takes the triple metaphor of bridge, inferring meetings and communication; trouble, indicating stresses and power struggles; and water, indicating flow and travel, as fertile themes for debate at the 17th Biennial IASPM Conference. We propose five streams (TRACKS) dealing with popular music and history, marginality, copyright, collectivities, and space. Extending across all streams is the topic of technology.

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Biennial IASPM-UK/Ireland conference: Imagining Communities Musically: Putting Popular Music in its Place

Biennial IASPM-UK/Ireland conference
September 5-7, 2012
Media City UK, Salford Quays, Manchester

Albion … Chocolate City … Highway 61 … Route 66 … Wonderland … Strawberry Fields … the Crossroads … Beale Street … Haight Ashbury … Music City U.S.A.

Popular music has always been affiliated with physical places, both literal and imaginary. It is one of the ways that the inhabitants of those locations define both their residence and themselves. To borrow the components of the title of Benedict Anderson’s widely read book, one of the most telling ways communities imagine themselves is acoustically. An indissoluble connection exists between musical expression and geography, both the landscape of actual locale and that conjured up by the mind. The persistent academic interest in the notion of scenes reflects this set of circumstances. So too does the research that examines how the state defines itself sonically and, in some cases, pursues its objectives with the assistance of acoustic apparatus, as in the torture of prisoners by a barrage of undesired sound. In addition, there are those composers, performers, compositions and performance practices that are thought to be quintessential expressions of states, peoples or defined populations.

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IASPM postgrad conference programme and registration form

Here are two documents for download that will prove useful for those intending to take part in the IASPM postgrad conference June 9-10, 2011:

IASPM postgrad conference registration form

IASPM postgrad conference programme

Inaugural IASPM postgraduate conference

The inaugural IASPM postgraduate conference at the University of Liverpool invites papers on the stories we tell about popular music. We are interested particularly in illuminating how the intersection of story with study produces a contested space filled with a multitude of views. It is precisely this multitude we find fruitful for investigation.

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IASPM Benelux conference

Music Theory and Practice in the Lowlands, Haarlem, 15 April 2011

For the first time in ten years, the Benelux Branch of IASPM is proud to announce a conference to be held on Friday April 15th 2011, possibly the conference will be extended with an extra day on Thursday April 14th 2011. The conference will take place at the Inholland University of Applied Sciences, Haarlem and will be organised in collaboration with International Music Management students. We want to invite students, academics, as well as musicians, music journalists and other music practitioners to submit a paper proposal and participate in the conference. All papers will be in English.

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IASPM Australia-New Zealand Annual Conference

Instruments of Change
24-26 November 2010
Monash Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies / School of Music
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Conference Theme

Popular music is a dynamic cultural force. The acts of listening, playing, dancing, composing and recording are undertaken in a constant state of flux, further complicated by flows of space and time. This conference invites papers that consider popular music as a powerful social agent. This may include analysis of current or past uses of music instruments as the sound-producing objects of change, or particular uses of technologies and human voices of change. The conference also welcomes investigations of the institutions and discourses within which the sound, the event and the experience are created, and their relationships to social change.

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