Preface, Prelude, Prologue

5th June 2024
Venue: Screen 2, Depot Cinema, Lewes
Next to Lewes railway station at Pinwell Road, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 2JS
Please see this link for further information: https://lewesdepot.org/visit/travel

Submission deadline: 3rd March 2024

Can you think of an opening moment in a narrative work that engages you, sparks your curiosity, and establishes the themes and politics of the whole piece? In Cinematic Overtures: How To Read Opening Scenes, Annette Insdorf tells us “a great movie tends to provide in the first few minutes the keys by which to unlock the rest of the film” thus enabling our “sophisticated appreciation”. It might “mislead” us in some way or act as “a stylized prologue that is not really part of the action but sets a tone or introduces a theme” (2017: ix-5).

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Metadata: Popular Music and its Metamorphoses

The German-speaking branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music is pleased to announce its biennial conference, which will take place at the University of Zurich from 07-09 November 2024.

In recent years, the term metadata has evolved from a technical IT term to a commonplace and buzzword referring to fundamental cultural semantics and technological dynamics of the present – also and particularly regarding popular music. In the context of digital systems, machine learning (AI), ubiquitous internet availability in the global North, streaming possibilities, etc., “data about data” and the labelling of other data are of considerable importance for the infrastructures of popular music. At the same time, they also affect the production side because genre boundaries and other conventions are shifting – and act as a heuristic starting point for attempts to intellectually explore and criticise respective processes. Streaming services and their music recommendation algorithms are a prime example for the current significance of metadata. Musicologists and scholars of cultural studies have recently increasingly studied such digital systems and their effects. Both ethnographically and using quantitative methods, substantial insights have been gained into the technical (infra)structures, ideologies, and redistribution effects in the environment of platform capitalism – although many (research) questions remain unanswered.

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Creative Music Practice Across Platforms

Special issue of Popular Music on “Creative Music Practice Across Platforms” (spring 2025)

Over the last two decades, web-based communication has become increasingly dependent on a relatively small number of digital platforms, which can now be understood as the sociotechnical nucleus of today’s Internet (Dolata 2021). Platforms occupy a powerful position in modern media cultures, exerting decisive influence on the exchange of information, processes of communication, and the organization of work and markets, as well as creating digital spaces for social action (Dolata/Schrape 2023). Functional rules, defined by the tech companies behind the platforms, are expressed in the platforms’ interfaces and algorithmic logics (van Dijck/Poell/de Waal 2018). These functional rules do not determine the behavior of creative workers active on platforms, but they do substantially influence it – including in the field of popular music.

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Popular Music and Musical Notation

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Die Tonkunst: “Popular Music and Musical Notation”
edited by Janine Droese and Knut Holtsträter

Popular music is – within and outside of the academic discourse – often associated with immediacy and spontaneous creativity. This might be one reason why the role of musical notation in the production and distribution of popular music has received very little scholarly attention yet. Where the production and planning processes of popular music as well as its distribution are studied, the focus is mainly on analogue and digital audio media.

However, it can be assumed that nearly all genres of popular music – understood here in a very broad sense, including video game music, film music, jazz, “Schlager”, Broadway and Hollywood musical etc. – make use of musical notation. It plays an integral part in the production processes (composing and arranging, rehearsing and performing as well as recording) and sometimes even in distribution. It serves as a tool for self-documentation, for creativity and self-assertion of composers as well as for coordination of groups of performers, among others. A closer look at how musical notation is embedded in the field of popular music not only blurs the boundaries between the spheres of Western art music and popular music; as has been shown by some explorative scholarly studies, we can expect to find musical notation and with it traces of cultural practices that rely on the writing of music even in areas where it might be not expected at all, as, e.g., notated free jazz and music manuscripts in the high-tech rock studio. In recent years, more and more estates of twentieth-century popular music artists have been made accessible for scholarly research by archives and libraries. This makes it easier to evaluate the role of music manuscripts for the field of popular music, and to gain more insight into the ways and contexts in which these manuscripts were produced and used.

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EUPOP 2024: Borders

Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn, Estonia, July 1st – 3rd, 2024.
Deadline: 15th March, 2024

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the tenth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn, Estonia, July 1st – 3rd, 2024.

With the overarching theme of Borders, EUPOP 2025 will explore European popular culture in all its various forms. This includes, but is by no means limited to, the following topics: European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Costume and Performance, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Popular Literature and Graphic Novels, Queer Studies, Sport, Curation, Digital Culture, the idea of European identity and its relation to popular culture. A special emphasis, this year, will be on topics such as popular culture borders, politics, forms of propaganda and influencing, and methodological framings within cross-disciplinary thinking.

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Progressive Rock: Beyond Time, Genre, Geography…

The 6th Biennial International Conference of the Progect Network for Studies of Progressive Rock
5-7 SEPTEMBER 2024, The Krzysztof Penderecki Academy of Music in Krakow (POLAND)

The central idea for the Conference would be to combine creatively the two temporal dimensions in which progressive rock can be interpreted today: the past – from its genesis and original definitions through an analysis of the PROG classics to an attempt to read it anew; and the future – from meta-genre fusions to a critical post-progressive current. Hence, we suggest several subjects to be chosen by the participants and specific scopes to be included.

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Song, Stage and Screen 2024

Renewing/Rethinking/Reviving
June 26-29, 2024
Hosted by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Song, Stage and Screen is back!

This call for participation heralds Song, Stage and Screen’s first return to an in-person gathering since 2019. Song, Stage and Screen XVII will convene at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in New York City from June 26-29, 2024. This conference will be in-person, free and open to the public. While the pandemic forced the global musical theatre industry to restart itself since our last meeting, issues surrounding reboots, reckonings, and revivals have long beset both the industry and the study of musicals. What resulting implications for musical theatre research have arisen? We encourage submissions that consider how the terms “renewing,” “rethinking,” or “reviving” apply broadly to any aspect of the musical theatre on the page, stage or screen.

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Openwork

Openwork is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research into experimental music, art, and scholarship. Interdisciplinary in scope, our journal promotes new modes of interaction between scholars and practitioners whose work critically re-listens through and across boundaries and constraints.

For our second issue, we seek artwork and articles exploring the concepts of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’, critically engaging with the established and overlooked boundaries of these temporal markers and reimagining conventional histories, materialities, and subjectivities. We are particularly interested in contributions that engage with themes including musical memory, the Global South, temporalities of performance, narratives of pre-/-post digital, and the Anthropocene.

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Tay Day – Liverpool

June 12, 2024, University of Liverpool
9am–5pm with an evening Tay Day Cabaret
Samuel Murray and Amy Skjerseth, Organisers

On the eve of Taylor Swift’s arrival at Anfield, we invite scholars [including undergrads and postgrads], fans, critics, and musicians to an interdisciplinary exploration of the singer’s many eras. We invite 15-minute presentations on an array of Taylor Swift-focused topics, which include but are not limited to:

• Music and songwriting
• Touring
• Fandom / Swifties
• Ecological impact
• Digital platforms and social media
• Lyrics as literature
• Music videos
• Taylor’s versions and rerecording projects
• Artists and influences
• Anglophilia
• Animals
• Collaborators
• Fashion

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Place, Perspective and Popular Music

Venue: International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University
Date: 4-6 September 2024
Format: In-person

Theme: Place, Perspective and Popular Music

For this meeting of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM, we invite colleagues to consider the fruitful relationships between music, place and perspective. Our use of these terms is intended to encourage discussion around how, where and when we situate our work in the broad discipline (and multiple subdisciplines) of popular music studies as we understand it here and now as well as then and there.

Place is physically located, for example in the spaces and places it represents, in the locations it emerges from and travels to, and in the material aspects of live music ‘ecologies’ – relations between venues, transport routes and their polities, the physical spaces in which recorded music is produced – institutional and domestic). Place is also imagined – both backwards (through nostalgia, tradition and memory) and forwards (through planning, urban and rural policies, ‘placemaking’, cultural initiatives).

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