Tango : Creation, Identification, Circulation

Colloque international – Paris, 27-28 October 2011
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

This international conference held in Paris will gather together researchers from diverse disciplinary orientations (historical, sociological, anthropological, musicological) working on the tango and its various aspects (music, dance, poetry). This interdisciplinary conference, organized by the Center for Research in Arts and Language (CRAL, EHESS-CNRS) and affiliated with the ANR GLOBALMUS research program, takes place after UNESCO’s official recognition of the tango as international Intangible Cultural Heritage.

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Renew, Reuse, Recycle: From Quotation to Remediation in Art and Popular Music

Saturday 19 March 2011
Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

A number of prominent scholars have recently shown a renewed interest in the extraordinary degree and variety of intertextuality and recombination characteristic of contemporary popular musics, particularly in relation to the “remediative” potential of digitally-enabled techniques such as sampling and mash-up. The interest has been both in analysing these techniques as practices, and in assessing their aesthetic potential and effects. But musical borrowings have long been a concern for scholars of hip hop, rap and jazz – in the form of versioning – and of Western art music – in the form of quotation and allusion. Although this conference focusses on late twentieth-century and contemporary popular musics as the key site of the re-emergence of a concern with these processes, consideration of this broader historical context enables us to raise new questions: What are the historical continuities in these practices of recycling musical materials? To what extent have evolving technologies – from notated score, to electronic recording, to digital music media – reshaped or extended these aesthetic practices? How do our developing theoretical frameworks and evolving understandings of different musical epochs and genres affect our conception of and reactions to musical borrowings?

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Oxford Brookes University, Music Department: MA Open Day

4 March 2011, 1.00-4.30pm
Willow Building (room 06), Headington Hill Campus, Oxford Brookes University, OX3 0BT

The MA in Music at Oxford Brookes offers four distinctive and exciting pathways:

• Music and Popular Culture
• Music on Stage and on Screen
• Contemporary Practice in Composition
• Music in 19th-Century Culture

Come to our open day to find out more about our course and about how studying for an MA in Music can enhance your career prospects. It is also an opportunity to talk to teaching staff and former students and to explore our campus and facilities.

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Shifting Ground: A Symposium on Music and Publishing

11th April 2011
Oxford Brookes University

The Oxford Brookes Popular Music Research Unit, in association with The Royal Musical Association and The Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, is holding a one-day symposium exploring links between music and publishing in its broadest sense on April 11th, 2011. This event is intended to bring together academics, journalists and publishers to explore this previously neglected area which offers exciting opportunities to tap into current concerns about the effects of the internet on the dissemination of music, to explore how our experience of music is shaped by publications relating to it, and to explore more broadly the important issue of the relationship between music and commerce, both in a historical context and in the present. The day will feature themed paper sessions, a keynote presentation from the Music Publishing Association, a discussion panel of journalists including Fiona Maddocks and Alyn Shipton focusing on writing about classical, jazz and popular music and will end with a round table discussion featuring Dr Dai Griffiths (Brookes), Dr Lee Marshall (Bristol) and Dr Simon Warner (Leeds) to consider future directions of research in this area.

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Norient academic online journal

With the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) approaching its 30th birthday, norient wants to contribute to this anniversary by dedicating its first issue of the norient academic online journal to popular music ethnographies – with a twist. While IASPM has been a major force in contributing to the study of popular music using a methodologically broad approach these studies have to a large extent been focused on a North American and British/European popular music legacy.

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Audio-visuality

A conference on the experience of audio-visual art, artefacts, and media texts
May 26-28, 2011

Sound is one of the most overwhelming and omnipresent ‘interferences’ in modern life – and at the same time one of the most volatile and transient [human] experiences. Each individual can – with mobile media like the iPod – be accompanied by her own individual soundtrack, and thus ‘score’ the experience of everyday living. Sound as such normally cannot be seen but both heard and felt, which makes it fundamentally multi- or synaesthetical. Our multi-sensuous reality, appealing to all the senses, is being reduced to exactly an audio-visual culture in (and?) what could generally be considered its electronically mediated version. In relation to the massive amount of audio-visuality we can state that research and the broad field of sound discourse are still inadequate when it comes to the qualitative exploration of aesthetic reception, theoretical and epistemological questions, dimensions, and themes. We are still hesitant and insecure in our knowledge on how an audio-visual phenomenon or a work of art may influence us, how we experience it and (inter)act with it, and what kind of experience, knowledge and understanding a predominantly audio-visual and multi-sensory culture facilitates and how it ?engages us in as late modern human beings. We imagine that the relations between sound and “a good experience” can be explored through genealogies of sound and listening and through reflections on the interactions of sound, listening/hearing and other sensory experiences.

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Making Things Whole Again: The Take That Reunion

3-4 June 2011
An interdisciplinary conference examining the theme of break-up and reunion in popular music acts, focusing on Take That. Organised by the University of Salford in conjunction with the exhibition “Fan Networks in the Pre-Digital Age: Take That Fans 1990-1996”.

The long-anticipated reunion of Take That and Robbie Williams and the unprecedented sales figures for their summer tour 2011 offer an excellent opportunity for scholars from a range of academic disciplines to discuss key issues arising from this contemporary popular music phenomenon. From at least the time of the Beatles, the break-up of a favoured band has had profound implications for fans, followers, and the music industry.

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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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New MA (Popular Music Research) at Goldsmiths

The MA (Popular Music Research) engages with scholarly debates and public controversies around popular music, while examining and developing both traditional and innovative ways of researching popular music. It provides a grounding in the historical development of popular music research as a subfield of musicology, and encourages those taking the degree to think critically about musical texts, artefacts and ecologies; audiences, reception and questions of interpretation; creativity, industries and production; and to interrogate these through repertoires that are broad in historical range and geographical scope.

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LitPop: Writing and Popular Music

Friday 24th June 2011, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne

Going beyond well-rehearsed comparisons between Dylan and Keats, this conference aims to bring fresh perspectives to debates about the forms and functions of popular music in relation to literature, exploring connections and conflicts between writing (fiction and non-fiction, past and present), and popular music (modern, contemporary or otherwise).  Where cultural value was once sought for popular music through analogy with literature, or popular music and literary texts were seen as incompatible, writers and critics now borrow the demotic idioms of pop.  Why?

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