On Collecting: Music, Materiality and Ownership

11-12 July 2014, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
A collaborative conference between the Reid School of Music at the University of Edinburgh and the National Museum of Scotland.

Featuring two roundtables with invited speakers: Collecting, Listening, and Thingness – Kyle Devine (City University), Marion Leonard (University of Liverpool), Frederick Moehn (King’s College London), Jenny Nex (University of Edinburgh), and Laura Tunbridge (University of Manchester); Collectors in Conversation – Gary and Gillian Atkinson (owners of Document Records), Alasdair Roberts (Drag City), and one more contributor (TBC).

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A Riot of Our Own: A Symposium on The Clash

University of Ulster, Belfast Campus, Northern Ireland
June 20-21, 2014

The preliminary conference programme has been released and registration is now open. For full details please visit www.ariotofourown.wordpress.com.

Keynote speakers include:

• Caroline Coon (artist, writer, manager of The Clash from 1978 to 1980. http://www.carolinecoon.com);
• Professor David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds);
• Chris Salewicz (author of Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer);
• Dr Jason Toynbee (Open University).

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Routledge book series for transnational jazz studies

We are delighted to announce the creation of a new monograph series with Routledge entitled ‘Transnational Studies in Jazz’. The series will present interdisciplinary and international perspectives on the relationship between jazz and its social, political, and cultural contexts, as well as providing authors with a platform for rethinking the methodologies and concepts used to analyse jazz’s musical meaning.
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Special Issue on Popular Music Education

Popular music education is a subject that is at present under-explored, despite increasing numbers of popular music courses and other educational provision. More research is needed to map out the area and engage critically with the many new challenges it is presenting. IASPM Journal, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, wishes to encourage further research and debate in this area, with a special issue on popular music education, for publication in 2015.

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Record Production in the Internet Age

December 4-6, 2014, University of Oslo

Our conference panel is pleased to invite proposals for papers dealing with the following broad thematic areas:

A. Recording aesthetics

The short yet intensive history of record production has revealed an indisputable relationship between recording technology and the finished sound recording. Magnetic tape became a harbinger of a technological revolution in the 1950s, while digital technology made its mark on the sound of the 1980s and, in more recent years, digital audio workstation (DAW), which has had a profound effect on the musical output.

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Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures

A volume edited by Graham St John (forthcoming, 2015)

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals have flourished worldwide over the last 25 years. From massive raves sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s to events operated under the control of corporate empires, EDM festivals have developed into cross-genre, multi-city, transnational mega-events. From free party teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s to colossal attractions like Belgium’s Tomorrowland, and from neotribal gatherings like Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle and other “transformational” festivals, to such digital arts and new media showcases as Montreal’s MUTEK and Berlin’s Club Transmediale, EDM festivals are platforms for a variety of arts, lifestyles, industries and policies. Unlicensed paroxysms, sanctioned extravaganzas, aesthetic frontiers, activist mobilisations, colonies of cosmopolitanism, they occasion manifold cultural practices, performed by multitudes to a cornucopia of ends.

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Musical Materialities in the Digital Age

27-28 June 2014, University of Sussex

Keynote Speakers

Will Straw (Professor, Department of Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University; Director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada)

Noel Lobley (Ethnomusicologist and Research Associate, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

Conference outline

Music, while summoning notions of intangibility, transience and loss, is also associated with material objects that serve to ground the musical, make the transient permanent and defer loss. Unearthing music’s association with materiality reveals a fascinating array of artefacts, including instruments, scores, transcribing devices, sound recordings and much more. Such artefacts provide vital reference points for historical research as well as inviting new creative uses, rediscoveries and (re)mediations. They also add to the ever-growing archives of past objects, whether stored in ‘physical’ or digital forms. Music’s material traces serve as vital ways of mediating memory, whether in private collections or public exhibitions. Furthermore, the use of musical ‘ephemera’ such as record sleeves, programmes, flyers and posters as a primary means for putting the popular musical past on display in museums and galleries has highlighted the ways in which such objects are not so ephemeral after all.

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From Death to Democracy: Music and the Politics of Memory in a Transnational Perspective

A special issue of IASPM@Journal edited by Barbara Lebrun (IASPM-bfE, University of Manchester) and Catherine Strong (IASPM-ANZ, Monash University, Melbourne). 

IASPM@Journal is planning a special issue for publication in 2015, focusing on popular musicians hailing from countries with dictatorial or military regimes, whose deaths coincided with moments of dramatic political change and became instrumental in efforts of national reconstruction towards democracy. The visiting editorial team, Barbara Lebrun (University of Manchester, UK and Francophone branches) and Catherine Strong (Monash University, Australia, ANZ branch) are concerned with the historical and cultural processes by which the songs and media images of these artists have become, posthumously, sites of tension for the expression of a new national, sometimes diasporic, identity.

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Napster, 15 years on: Rethinking digital music distribution

Call for papers – First Monday themed special edition

Guest editors: Raphaël Nowak (Griffith University, Australia) and Andrew Whelan (University of Wollongong, Australia)

2014 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the peer-to-peer application Napster. Developed by a student, Shawn Fanning, with the help of his friend Shawn Parker and uncle John Fanning, Napster established music downloading as a mass phenomenon. By 2001, 50 million users had downloaded content with Napster. Many other applications followed – Gnutella, Kazaa, LimeWire, eMule, Soulseek, BitTorrent, among others –further developing and entrenching p2p technology.

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The Languages of Popular Music: Communicating Regional Musics in a Globalized World

29th September – 2nd October 2014, University of Osnabrueck, Germany

Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik e.V. (ASPM) and the University of Osnabrueck are inviting scholars of all disciplines studying popular music to submit proposals for the international conference “The Languages of Popular Music: Communicating Regional Musics in a Globalized World”. The conference will take place at the Institute for Musicology and Music Education, University of Osnabrueck, Germany, from 29th September to 2nd October 2014.

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