Cantautore: the Songwriter in Culture and the Media

Edited by Olivier Julien (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Massimo Locatelli (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), Elena Mosconi (Università di Pavia/Cremona)

“Cantautore” is a project that aims to reconsider the role and figure of the singer-songwriter in Italian and international culture.

The singer-songwriter is a mythical figure in popular imagination in different countries, a bridge between a variety and even contradictory forms of experience, both cultural and social. In the Italian context, it has been respectively interpreted in social history as a symptom of collective traumas (Bonanno 2009, Santoro 2010), and in popular music studies as a successful pop icon (Gentile 1979, Borgna 1995-2004), or as a genre (Fabbri, 1982) and – consequently – as an ideological construction (Tomatis, 2019). Only recently, has the transnational dimension of this phenomenon been stressed out and problematized further (Green and Marc 2013, Looseley 2013, Marc 2016).

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Stories From the Field

We are looking for submissions for an edited volume addressed to academic and general publics entitled ‘Stories From the Field’ which aims at being a collection of short, autobiographical stories as experienced and written by fieldworkers.

The selected stories should be non-fictional, experienced by fieldworkers while conducting research and/or other workings in their field(s). The definition of ‘field’ and ‘fieldworker’ is deliberately absent to encourage the submission of contributions from various disciplines.

Stories can be of any nature provided they reflect experiences in the field. Some examples of these could include, but are not limited to:

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education Special Issue: Exploring Audio and Music Technology in Education: Pedagogical, Research and Sociocultural Perspectives

Journal of Music, Technology and Education Special Issue: ‘Exploring Audio and Music Technology in Education: Pedagogical, Research and Sociocultural Perspectives’

Full paper submission deadline: 1 April 2022

The past decade has seen increased interest in the pedagogical facets of audio engineering, sound design, music technology and related fields. Much of this rising interest in the teaching and learning aspects of sound corresponds to a growing number of institutions offering training options for people interested in the technical, creative, scientific and cultural aspects of audio. However, while the options for learning about such topics have expanded, there remains a dearth of scholarship on the theoretical, sociocultural and interdisciplinary aspects of audio and its connection to teaching and learning in a broad array of institutions. Also, little scholarship has emphasized a professional development model for the educational aspects of audio, particularly for those working with the next generation of practitioners in all educational contexts. What impact do audio and music corporations have on facilities and curricular decision-making? For this Special Issue of the Journal of Music, Technology & Education, the guest editors seek contributions addressing one or more of the topics below:

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RMA Research Chronicle Special Issue – Music and Covid-19

The Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle is seeking contributions for a special issue on ‘Music and Covid-19’, guest edited by Dr Larry Zazzo (Newcastle University) and Dr Adam Behr (Newcastle University).  As, educators, scholars, performers and audiences, we are all starting to emerge from the pandemic transformed and still facing substantial challenges.  COVID-19 continues to have an effect on the creative economy and its regulatory environment, as well as the practical contexts of making, distributing, teaching and researching musics of all kinds. For many, these challenges have been — and still are— existential, as musicking performers and venues of every genre still struggle to return to a pre-COVID-19 ‘normal’.

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Music, Migration and Mobility

International Conference hosted online by the Royal College of Music.
Date: 12-14 September, 2022.

This conference aims to investigate music as a mobile phenomenon, and the history of music as animated by mobility rather than fixity. It strives to reflect critically on methodological approaches and theoretical framings of music, especially the music of migrants. We invite proposals from scholars in any arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines – as well as music practitioners – for papers that explore music and musical history through the lens of mobility, as opposed to static, rigid categories of national or geographical belonging.

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Punk and Philosophy

Since the beginning of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ examining of youth cultures in the 1970s, there has been significant debate regarding approaches in how best one can unpack notions of formation, analysis and definition. This has led to the development of what is often termed as ‘post-subcultural studies,’ which has drawn upon a new lexicon of terms, such as ‘scene’ and ‘neo-tribe,’ as a means of unpicking the complexities of ‘subcultures.’ With these debates flourishing, academic approaches to subculture, and punk in particular, entered the 21st century in a postmodern mood. Here, new, exciting theories of punk have been thriving, including those who have argued that the wholesale jettisoning of the word ‘subculture’ was premature.

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Queer, Care, Futures

4^th Symposium of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
https://lgbtqmusicstudygroup.com

22^nd – 24^th April 2022
mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Hybrid Event

Call for Papers, Panels and Performances

Following a pause in our in-person events, the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group is excited to announce its 4^th symposium, to be held (as a hybrid event) from 22^nd to 24^th April at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. This event will be a chance for us to take stock of the drastic changes in the world since our last symposium. We may also want to use this opportunity to cautiously imagine new futures, while addressing the rise in transphobia, biphobia and homophobia. At the very least, we hope that this event can enable new forms of reciprocity and solidarity, performing radical care for our communities as we adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. We hereby invite proposals for individual 20-minute presentations, lecture-recitals, shorter provocations, organised 60-minute panels and roundtable discussions, which investigate any aspect of LGBTQ+ music and music studies, including ethnomusicology, historical musicology, popular music studies, music sociology, performance studies, theory and analysis, music pedagogy etc.. Perhaps you would like to attend to the themes below:

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Methodological Approaches to Music and Dance: Exploring the Field of Heavy Metal and Its Genre Boundaries

September 08 – September 09, 2022, University of Siegen

Music and dance are connected intimately and especially in popular music cultures dance plays a vital role. Even though academic attention so far has rather attended to forms such as tap dance, salsa, hip hop or various forms of electronic dance music, heavy metal is no exception in this respect: It has developed characteristic, music-related bodily practices that at times serve to designate cultural membership as, for example, the term “headbangers” indicates. At concerts, the music is accompanied by common movements like headbanging and moshing and even more unconventional forms such as conga lines or ‘folkloristic’ circle dances can be found. As this suggests, the boundaries to other music genres are not rigid but porous: Historically, for instance, moshing and stage diving entered metal culture via hardcore and (music-)stylistic crossovers can entail extensions of a genre’s dance styles. The specific forms of movement are situated within a complex, relational structure and can vary by (sub)genre, the course of a concert, the interaction among dancers, the dancers’ evaluation of the music, or the music’s aesthetic character and materiality to name but a few aspects.

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Journal of Global Pop Cultures

Real Fake / Fake Realness: (Re)appropriation, the Ironic, and Fandoms in Pop Cultures

Questions pertaining to authenticity, realness and fakeness have been a trademark of approaches to postmodern pop cultures from early on. The bourgeoining Post-Second-World-War consumer and media cultures provided ever growing reservoirs of signs and symbols, narratives and imageries, codes and gestures, materials and products to be combined, deconstructed, reassembled, recontextualized, by professionals but even more so by amateurs. After an era of admiration for the detached genius, it became obvious that nothing comes from nothing, that every cultural act is, to some extent, an act of borrowing and appropriation – or, as Belgian indierock band Dead Man Ray put it in 1998 to further complicate the issue: „We are all copies / But the originals are fake.“

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Everyday is Spatial: Creative Immersive Audio Practice

‘Every day is Spatial’ is an immersive audio conference event at The University of Gloucestershire, June 16th, 2022, designed to encourage and explore creativity in making audio and audiovisual immersive experiences.

The conference will enable practitioners to reveal the potentials, challenges and uses for how spatial audio will define the everyday audio experience.

Call for works here:  uogimmersiveaudio.com

Contact email: [email protected]