Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

IASPM Journal: Special Issue on Popular Music Performance

Posted: August 20th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on IASPM Journal: Special Issue on Popular Music Performance

Call for papers
Submission deadline: 1 March 2013

Music performance forms part of ongoing debate amongst IASPM members, leading to innovative research that addresses mediation and embodiment; spectacle and immersion; technology and music.

IASPM Journal, the Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, wishes to provide a platform for these debates with a special issue on popular music performance for publication in 2013.

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The 8th Art of Record Production Conference

Posted: August 4th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on The 8th Art of Record Production Conference

July 12th – 14th 2013
Université Laval, Québec

Rewriting The Rules Of Production

The conference panel invites proposals for papers on the following themes:

Creative Practice In The Recording Studio

This stream is concerned with all aspects of creative practice in the studio: performance (e.g. the differences between the concert hall and the studio, new forms of performance activity), engineering and production (e.g. the creative abuse of technology, editing as creative practice), composing (e.g. issues of multiple authorship, the studio as a composing tool), improvising (e.g. the constraints and opportunities associated with improvisation in a controlled environment, improvising and overdubbing),  and also more hybrid forms of creative practice such as what we might call comprovisation, the way that improvisation becomes part of the compositional practice.

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Rhythm Changes II: Rethinking Jazz Cultures

Posted: June 15th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Rhythm Changes II: Rethinking Jazz Cultures

11-14 April 2013, Media City UK/University of Salford

An international conference hosted by the Rhythm Changes research project at the University of Salford.

Keynote Speakers

E. Taylor Atkins, Northern Illinois University
David Ake, University of Nevada, Reno

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Beatles Conference at Loughborough University

Posted: June 13th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Beatles Conference at Loughborough University

The School of Political, Social and Geographical Sciences at Loughborough University is pleased to announce that it will host a one-day conference on the Beatles on 5 October 2012: the fiftieth anniversary of the release of their first single, Love Me Do.

The conference will bring together established and emerging scholars to showcase current research on the Beatles and their milieu and to assess how they’ve been studied by historians, social scientists, musicologists and literary critics. Confirmed speakers include Mike Brocken, Colin Campbell, Ian Inglis, Olivier Julien, Allan Moore and Sheila Whiteley.

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Sonic Visions: Popular Music on and after Television

Posted: June 6th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Sonic Visions: Popular Music on and after Television

Journal of Popular Music Studies 
Special Issue: Call for Proposals
Matt Delmont & Murray Forman, Guest Editors

The connection of music and television calls to mind iconic performances like Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and the debut of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video on MTV in 1983.  More recently, music videos have seen a resurgence in the “post-televison” era, with videos like Justine Bieber’s “Baby” (ft. Ludacris) and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” (ft. Beyoncé) notching hundreds of millions of views online (671 million and 432 million, respectively, as of December 2011).  At the same time, and often in the shadows of these hugely popular performances, music has been crucial to every era of television and to the development of video websites like YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo, providing profitable content, pioneering new screen technologies, and promoting debates around the visual presentation of race, gender, sexuality, and youth.

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Popular Music & Nostalgia

Posted: May 29th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Popular Music & Nostalgia

A special issue of Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies

Edited by Hugh Dauncey (Newcastle University) & Christopher Tinker (Heriot-Watt University)

Version française ici : http://volume.revues.org/2912

Volume!, the French peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of popular music – seeks contributions for a special issue on nostalgia and popular music in a variety of national, international and transnational contexts.

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Death and the Rock Star

Posted: May 15th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Death and the Rock Star

The recent untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston, and the resurrection of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival, have focused the media spotlight, yet again, on the relationship between rock, popular music and death. The ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ lifestyle has left many casualties in its wake. Over time, however, as the ranks of dead musicians have grown, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as the artists who were at the forefront of the rock‘n’roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ’27 Club’), no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have.

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The Afterlife of the Film Song: A One-Day Symposium

Posted: May 3rd, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on The Afterlife of the Film Song: A One-Day Symposium

The Victoria Rooms, Bristol
December 8th 2012
University of the West of England, Bristol

In association with The Soundtrack and intellect books

Abstracts are invited for twenty-minute papers to be given as part of a one-day symposium on the afterlife of film songs. Possible topics include:

  • film songs that have been re-used in later films, evoking the memory of the original, superimposing new layers of meaning, and/or introducing meanings that conflict with the song’s original associations
  • the licensing of film songs for use in conjunction with other screen media, e.g. computer games, television programmes and adverts
  • user-generated re-contextualisations of film songs, e.g. on YouTube
  • cover versions of film songs
  • film songs and karaoke
  • film-song spoofs
  • film songs and nostalgia
  • film songs and the ‘star text’
  • film songs in literature and music journalism
  • adaptations of film musicals for the stage.

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Popular Music Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Posted: March 8th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Popular Music Studies in the Twenty-First Century

It is thirty years since the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) was founded and the journal Popular Music was launched. Although much is different today in popular music studies, the field still faces a number of challenges, some of which have changed very little during the intervening period.

In a recent paper in IASPM Journal Vol 2, Philip Tagg assesses what issues need to be addressed in the field, and how they could be explored, covering subjects such as interdisciplinarity, interprofessionalism, epistemic inertia and invisible music. He concludes that musicologists working in popular music have failed to make sufficient inroads into conventional musicology to ensure that popular music and art music are now treated equally. He also points out that researchers in popular music studies from non-musical backgrounds still struggle to address the music within popular music studies.

IASPM Journal, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, is now seeking responses that address the issues raised by this paper, which is available at http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/issue/current.

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Doing Fieldwork in Nightlife Scenes and EDMCs

Posted: February 26th, 2012 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Doing Fieldwork in Nightlife Scenes and EDMCs

Special edition of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Guest editor, Luis-Manuel Garcia | http://dj.dancecult.net/

This special edition of Dancecult seeks to address the fact that, although many EDM (Electronic Dance Music) projects have a significant ethnographic component, there are few methodological resources available to ethnographers of EDM scenes/cultures.

There is presently a near-total lack of pedagogical materials on nightlife or EDM-specific fieldwork, and even descriptive or critical writing that takes such fieldwork as a central theme is scant and fragmented. While some EDMC ethnographers describe and discuss their own fieldwork approach in the appendices and introductory chapters of their doctoral dissertations (and, less frequently, their monographs), these ruminations rarely come into critical dialogue with other EDMC ethnographers and thus do not actively engage in the development of a body of ethnographic methods in EDMC studies.

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