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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Brilliant Corners: Approaches to Jazz and Comics

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship invites authors and artists to submit contributions for a special collection on the general topic of Jazz and Comics.

This will be an open access scholarly collection co-edited by Dr Nicolas Pillai (Birmingham City University) and Dr Ernesto Priego (City University London).

We welcome submissions from researchers, artists, graduate students, scholars, teachers, curators, publishers and librarians from any academic, disciplinary or creative background interested in the multidisciplinarystudy and/or practice of comics and jazz.

The popular forms of jazz and comics have shared similar historical and cultural tendencies. As expressions of modernism, they have been subject to the demands of the marketplace and consumed by wide and varied audiences. Yet the liberatory qualities of comics and jazz have provoked concern in moral guardians, particularly in relation to the subcultures they have generated. Recalling Bourdieu, we might note that, within these subcultures, very divergent and often incompatible judgements are fiercely defended (1983: 24). In the 21st century, both jazz and comics are accepted as art forms. However, this elevated cultural position has arguably come at a price, contributing to the restriction of some forms of jazz and comics to specialised spaces of purchase and consumption.

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Punk NOW!!

29^th – 30^th October 2015
Birmingham City University

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 31^st JULY 2015

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Dr Alistair Gordon (De Montfort University)
Dr Pete Dale (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Following the dynamic emergence of punk in the UK, USA and Europe in the 1970s, the subculture spread widely. As punk and new wave gained commercial and critical success, together with an attractive notoriety, it soon began an ongoing journey around the globe – both as a product and as an ideology. Punk, then, despite its omnipresence in contemporary underground and popular cultures, is clearly more than legacy music. More than forty years after the proto-punk progenitors of Detroit and New York unconsciously launched an underground revolution, to continue what some of the 60’s and 70’s anarchic counter culture propagated, and after untold premature obituaries, it appears that punk – in terms of music, philosophy, and identity – remains in rude health.

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PopScriptum 12 on Sound, Sexuality, and Sexism

It seems obvious, and not only from an academic perspective, that popular music is highly intertwined with sexuality and gender. The current discussion on this subject is reflected on the one hand in publications that ascribe subversion, androgyny, or queerness to popular music and its protagonists (see Doris Leibetseder, Sheila Whiteley/Jennifer Rycenga) and on the other in an explicit critique of sexist and sexualizing representations of women in the popular music context (see Nicola Dibben, Simon Frith/Angea McRobbie).

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Ethnomusicology and Policy

British Forum for Ethnomusicology One-day Conference 2015
International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS), Newcastle University.
Saturday 31st October 2015

Ethnomusicology holds an extended and substantial history of engagement with, and contribution to, public policy. This conference acknowledges that history, and points to the growing role ethnomusicology plays in influencing how public policies are considered, constructed and revised. It emphasises the potentials and challenges in applied ethnomusicology, and encourages further dialogue around how ethnomusicology contributes to the public good.

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Musical and media connectivities: practices, circulation, interactions

Edited by Hélène Laurin & Andréane Morin-Simard

Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures . The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.

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