Live Music Exchange: Interesting Times for Local Live Music

Venue Bar Meeting Room, Leeds College of Music, Leeds Friday 4^th – Saturday 5^th May 2012

The focus of the event is the problems of local live music promotion in the current global economic crisis.  Our conference runs in conjunction with the Live @ Leeds festival and the Unconference, therefore there is a particular focus on Leeds and surrounding areas.  NB while a Live at Leeds doesn’t get you into the Live Music Exchange, it does get you in to the Unconference, and vice versa.

The event is a space with which to broaden the debate around live music and bring various groups together, and features speakers and delegates from a wide range of backgrounds, including promoters, musicians, academics, and local music historians.  The event will use a number of different formats, including keynote speeches, ‘in conversations with …’, and panel discussions, as well as more ‘traditional’ academic papers.

Read the rest of this entry »

David Sanjek Archive

Dear Family & Friends,

A campus-wide memorial service for Professor David Sanjek will be held on Thursday, February 23 from 11 am to 2 pm at the University of Salford in Salford, England.

David passed away on November 29, 2011 in New York while in route to the annual meeting of the Historic Recording Preservation Board at the US Library of Congress, a board on which he had served for the past ten years.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Special Relationship? Irish Popular Music in Britain

An interdisciplinary conference to be hosted at Northumbria University in conjunction with the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster June 27th-28th 2012.

Ireland and Britain share in large measure a common, if disputed, history. Ireland is, of course, a former colony of Britain, and Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom so that one of the conundrums of the Irish experience is that it is both post-colonial and neo-colonial; national and regional; periphery and centre. Irish popular music, therefore, displays a complex set of sometimes contradictory characteristics, and Irish artists and musicians work within and against such an intricate web of social, economic, political and cultural influences that their art and music raises dizzying questions about national identity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popular Music and Automobile Culture

A One Day Symposium: Friday 22nd June 2012
Binks Building
University of Chester, England

From Cadillacs to tour buses, motor vehicles and popular music have developed in parallel as symbiotic commodities. Their intimate and intertwined relationship evokes issues and feelings that characterize life in modern society. The conference aims to outline and discuss this relationship between these two culturally charged commodities. Motor transport is a dominant feature of the modern world.  Cars, buses, trucks and everything in between have their followers and dissenters.  Vehicles offer the functions of mobility, freedom, speed and comfort, but they are not just physical machines. Contemporary and historic brands offer consumers opportunities to display status, belonging, style and choice. Social and utilitarian elements combine within a motor aesthetic that provides individuals with entry into particular imagined communities. A multiplicity of brands and logos symbolizes the various styles, designs and attitudes that are now a global currency. Advertising and marketing have elevated the social place of particular vehicles to objects of fantasy, desire, status and play. Just as motor vehicles are referenced in popular music, so music is a part of automobile culture and design.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sound Thought 2012

Call for papers
2^nd and 3^rd March 2012, The Arches, Glasgow

A festival of sound and performance and associated research, run by postgraduate students from Glasgow University in partnership with The Arches, welcomes papers from researchers of any discipline.

Sound Thought 2012 considers the idea of music as gift: What value has this?  What is offered and what is returned?  What is at stake in the exchange?  Does giving diminish the giver?  Do gifts require justification or is it the thought that counts?

Read the rest of this entry »

David Sanjek (1952-2011)

This piece on the life and work of David Sanjek was provided to the website by Mark Duffett.

In his lifetime, Professor David Sanjek established himself as a leading international scholar in the burgeoning field of Anglo-American popular music studies. He contributed to the academic discussion of a wide range of topics, including popular music history, copyright law, genre cinema, and popular culture. David’s infectious warmth, compassionate outlook, strategic ability to foster community, scholarly excellence, and experience in the music industry did much to develop the US branch of IASPM. His friend Reebee Garafalo noted that he was the person who “incorporated the US chapter as a tax exempt, non-profit.” On the IASPM-US memorial site, Professor Garafalo added, “Such bureaucratic actions, of course, only begin to scratch the surface of the love and commitment he felt toward IASPM and its members.” David’s final four years, were, however, spent as a global academic based at the University of Salford in England; his untimely passing left a significant legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Journal on the Art of Record Production – Issue #8: Technology, Time and Place

Journal on the Art of Record Production ISSN: 1754-9892

CALL FOR ARTICLES

Issue #8: Technology, Time and Place

The newly reworked Journal on the Art of Record Production invites proposals for Issue #8: Technology, Time and Place. Technologies are central – and essential – to sound and music recording and production processes. Over time, technological change has impacted on roles, working practice[s] and the recording and production workplace. Indeed, notions of time impact on production processes in a multitude of ways. From the macro, e.g. time and economics, time spent in pre-production, time allocated to sessions/ roles, performance time and time signatures, to the micro, e.g. the intricacies of time-based effects processing and the capability of DAWs to manipulate and ‘edit’ time by means including quantization, programming and time-stretching. Over time, the workplace has evolved from a basic, acoustically-treated facility, through church conversions, the ‘Westlake’ studio style and home set-ups, to today’s portable desktop/ laptop-based production centre; the ‘studio’ has undergone immense transformation in little over a century.  Studies of technology and/ or workplace may be chronological, diachronic or synchronic in approach. Research is welcome from sociological, cultural theoretical, scientific, musicological, philosophical and anthropological perspectives.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Going Underground? Gender and Subcultures

Day Symposium at the University of Northumbria
Friday 7^th September 2012

The notion of ‘subcultures’, articulated most prominently by Dick Hebdige in his 1979 seminal work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, has undergone much revision in recent years. However a critical engagement with gender remains absent within the majority of work on ‘subcultures’. Indeed, Angela McRobbie’s (1980) ‘Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique’ provides the cornerstone of our symposium, in terms of interrogating how gender is articulated in ‘underground’ cultural and social environments. The question of whether ‘subculture’ is still a valid term and how far ‘subcultural’ manifestations are reductively incorporated into the mainstream are relevant topics on the academic agenda. However research of girls and women’s subcultural productions and engagements from queer, feminist and transgender scholars (e.g. Jack Halberstam, Doreen Piano, Susan Driver, Elizabeth K Keenan, Mary Celeste Kearney and Kath Browne) carve out a new territory for understanding the ‘subcultural’. Given this reevaluation, it is timely to re-engage with how ‘subcultural’ genders (both femininities and masculinities) are represented in alternative society and discuss how far this can be politically subversive. For instance, the revival, nostalgia and popularity of rockabilly style, burlesque, roller derby, Slutwalks, Ladyfests, fanzine/blogging networks, Suicide Girls, Guerrilla Girls, riot grrrl and the participation of girls in underground music cultures all point to the need for an academic engagement with strategies of cultural resistance to dominant identities and norms.

Read the rest of this entry »