Music for Girls Conference and Popular Music and Society special issue

Music for Girls Conference (University of Sussex, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, 19-20 June 2023)

The AHRC Music for Girls network is hosting a conference on 19-20 June 2023 that will explore popular music, gender, and knowledge.

In the public imaginary the figure of the popular music expert is nearly always male. So strong is the male expert stereotype that it has been successfully and humorously parodied in popular culture from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity to the ‘mansplaining’ proprietor of the guitar shop to the sneering judge of the television talent contest. The Music for Girls Conference aims to illuminate ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been marginalised in media representations and academic conversations alike. What if, instead of looking at how people who identify as women and girls are sidelined by male-focused popular music sites of knowledge acquisition, we centre the experiences of women and girls as key to ‘knowing’ popular music, unpacking the politics of knowledge, and developing an ordinary but powerful ‘expertise’? We seek a broad range of speakers to explore the intersection of popular music, gender, and knowledge across disciplines, regions, genres, and ways of knowing. We also invite reflections on changes and continuities involving sex and gender within popular music culture and popular music studies.

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Rock Your Body: Bodies in Interaction with Popular Music

Annual Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies 2023
September 14-16, 2023,University of Siegen

1. On This Year’s Conference Topic

“I wanna dance with somebody, I wanna feel the heat with somebody” – sung by Whitney Houston (1987)

Music is bound to bodies. We hear and feel it directly, we move along to it, we watch bodies in music videos and on concert stages, we use our bodies to produce sounds or augment them with instruments. In Popular Music Studies, the body-bound nature of music has been addressed since the inception of the research field. This year’s conference would like to continue and update the discussion by exploring bodies in interaction with popular music. For further specification, four focal points are outlined below, which should serve as suggestions or starting points for possible contributions. In addition, the conference is open to further impulses on the topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Dialogues — International Music Research Conference

May 17 to May 21, 2023
Laval University (Québec)
Deadline: January 20, 2023

The academic year 2022-2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the Faculty of Music at Université Laval. For the occasion, the faculty is organizing the Dialogues Conference, which will be held from May 17 to 21, 2023 at Université Laval, located in Quebec City. The conference, hybrid format, will host the principal Canadian research societies in music, teaching and music creation, as well as an international partner:

Canadian Association of Music Libraries (CAML)
International Association for the Study of Popular Music Canada (IASPM-Canada)
Journées internationales de pédagogie instrumentale et vocale (JIRPP)
Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique, Université Laval (OICRM-ULaval)
Réseau canadien pour la santé et le bien-être des musiciens (RCSBM)
Canadian Society for Traditional Music (CSTM)
Canadian University Music Society (MusCan)
Société québécoise de recherche en musique (SQRM)

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2023 Annual Meeting of the New Zealand Musicological Society

Music and Liveness
16–18 June, 2023
University of Otago School of Performing Arts

Deadline for proposals: 22 February, 2023

In his 1999 book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander deconstructed the binary of live vs. mediatised musicking. As we emerge from the Covid-inflicted doldrums, it seems appropriate to re-examine the concept of liveness in the creative arts, in music in all its forms, and of the NZ Musicological Society itself. Has the mediatisation of Zoom and other synchronous platforms changed our relationship to both live and recorded performance? What does liveness mean now in a pedagogical context?

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Celebrating Please Please Me at 60: An International Beatles Symposium

March 25-26, 2023
Hosted by Liverpool Hope University
School of Creative and Performing Arts
As part of the Angel Field Festival

The Music Team members at Liverpool Hope University are delighted to announce an interdisciplinary, international Beatles symposium that will be held on March 25-26, 2023 at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, located in the heart of Liverpool’s vibrant city centre. This academic symposium is in honour of the 60^th anniversary of the release of Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, and will feature a keynote address from Professor Kenneth Womack, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Beatles and their enduring cultural influence.

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Affective Politics and the Policing of the Social Through Popular Music

Special Issue of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, https://journals.uio.no/JEA
Deadline to submit abstracts, 15th of December

The ‘affective turn’ across the humanities and the social sciences suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities and shape new forms of politics in the making (White 2017, Desai-Stephens & Reisnour 2020, Gregg & Seigworth 2010 and Clough & Halley 2007, Goodwin et. al. 2001). In other words, it encourages us to study how affective bodies ‘act and are acted upon’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1) as people engage with each other and with sensory objects (e.g. musical sounds), politically and socially, within specific contexts. These insights have implications for our understanding of politics, of the social, as well as how we understand social control and the ‘policing’ of the social. Instead of excluding objects from the social and privileging theories modelled on structure and agency (e.g. Giddens 1984, Bourdieu 1984), scholars are now redefining agency as relational (Barad 2003, 2007; Latour 2007, 2013). This has led to new research on how sensory objects, such as sounds and music, shape subjectivities, build communities and instigate politics through affect, within and across, contexts (Bøhler 2017, 2021; Shank 2014; Guilbault 2019; Schiermer 2021a, 2021b; Muniagurria 2018; Duque and Muniagurria 2022; Stover 2017, 2017).

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“Let’s Get it Together”: Gatherings, Club Cultures, Parties, and Beyond

April 27-30, 2023

The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University will host this year’s in-person Pop Conference. All events, with the exception of a few remotely scheduled activities, will be held at The Clive Davis Institute, 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn, New York.

Call for presentations

Several years of quarantine and social distancing have set ablaze the desire to gather safely in community in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. This year’s convergence compels a reflection on the power of getting together in the past and present while acknowledging the necessity for new ways of congregating.

So, “Let’s get it together!” Let’s get loud, because we need a holiday, a holy day on the dance floor or beyond. Remember when the DJ dropped the beat, the crowd went wild, and you felt the club vibrating as you showed up in your best outfit? Work! Inside, a kaleidoscope of bodies dancing, watching, sweating, kissing, touching. Music transports, envelops, heals, connects, the dance floor (whatever that looks like!) becomes a classroom, where learning to play with gender, perform experimental versions of self is possible. Where being in communion among strangers, friends or lovers compels gatherers to sweat out the tears, bring in the joy, feel the pleasure. “Can you feel it?,” the desire for sacred spaces of communal celebration in a time of flux.

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International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ)

Third Conference, February 23–25, 2023 (Vienna)

The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ), founded in 2019, will host its Third Conference, February 23–25, 2023, at the JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music, Vienna. The aim of the group’s conferences is to strengthen its network and establish a platform for advocacy for artistic research in jazz and popular music. The methodology of artistic research is still fairly new in jazz and popular music genres and INARJ was founded with the mission to establish guidelines and resources for the field. The specific goal for the third conference is to discuss and experiment with questions of methodology, rigor, knowledge exchange, and positioning. Some conference sessions will be provided in hybrid format, however we encourage participants to plan on in-person attendance for more effective engagement in discussions and projects. Presentations should address one or more of the following areas in the form of discussion forums, project presentations, or performance sessions.

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Innovation in Music Conference 2023

InMusic23
Edinburgh Napier
University, Edinburgh, UK: 30 June, 1 & 2 July 2023

Innovation In Music celebrate their 10 year anniversary in 2023 and are excited to be heading to Edinburgh Napier University for our 10th year conference.

The InMusic23 conference theme is ‘You’re not supposed to do that’ with a focus on misuse and reuse; reimagining and repositioning; hybridisation and recontextualisation; and creating unique pathways and perspectives in music production, performance, technology and business.

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Handbook of Critical Media Industry Studies

We seek chapter proposals for inclusion in the Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies. Critical Music Industry Studies (CMIS) is an encompassing and inclusive field that describes research and analytical perspectives on the music industry that move beyond operational concerns or introductions to subsets of the sector. The Handbook marks an important step in the development of CMIS as a legitimate field of study, bringing together industry professionals and academics from a diverse set of disciplinary perspectives. As Music Industry Studies explodes, it is time to revisit the field as an academic mode of inquiry. Too often, music industry programs of study emphasize getting students jobs and hiring faculty with “real world experience.” As such, the field diverges from other scholarly projects (especially with “studies” in their title). These programs tend to resemble trade schools that emphasize working within the system at the expense of re-envisioning the system. By narrowly focusing on getting students jobs, these systems end up reenforcing structures of domination within the music business. We seek to bring together scholars to intervene in the field and provide teachers with a text to teach music industry students the problems, potential, and promises of performing music.

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