Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture – An Anthology

Kingston is the loudest city in the Anglophone Caribbean and Jamaica whose national instrument is the sound system is the noisiest country on the planet. Reggae is but one of Jamaica’s indigenous musical genres. It provides a window into the soul of Jamaicans, the life and style of ordinary people including their historical struggles and contemporary triumphs. As a nation, Jamaica boasts world renowned creativity per capita that is arguably unmatched by any other nation. Sonic innovation, especially around the development of musical genres and the sound system, is at the heart of Kingston being designated a UNESCO Creative City of Music in 2015. It is this city which has birthed at least six (6) indigenous genres in the mid- to late Nineteenth Century. Reggae is arguably the most prominent worldwide, representing Jamaica across the world, with names such as Bob Marley, Dennis Brown, Jimmy Cliff, Burning Spear, Marcia Griffith and Peter Tosh being some of the most easily identifiable artists.

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Big Sounds from Small Places

IASPM Canada Annual Conference 2021 Call For Papers
Virtual Conference
7 – 18 June 2021

Submission Deadline: 15 January 2021

As we enter into a new decade it’s apt to question our place in the world. Almost sixty years ago, Marshall McLuhan notably coined the term Global Village to refer to the global spread of media content and consumption, and yet Canada still struggles with its position in the world as an imposing landmass with a relatively small population, and how that influences where and how its cultural texts are encountered. This conference seeks to address the concept of voice and sound as tied to space and place, in the broadest sense. In regards to popular music in Canada, we have established a strong identity, but one that is often defined in opposition to our more vocal neighbours to the South. As we continuously define and redefine Canadian cultural identity, and cultural outputs, this conference questions how our musical landscape has historically adapted, and will continue to adapt, to an increasingly globalized environment.

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‘Competing Sounds? Podcasting and Popular Music’

CFP: Special issue of The Radio Journal:

Guest editors: Ellis Jones (University of Oslo) and Jeremy Morris (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Abstracts due: 20^th January 2021

On 19 May 2020, Spotify announced they had secured worldwide rights to distribute The Joe Rogan Show – arguably the world’s most commercially successful podcast – exclusively through their streaming platform. This move, reportedly worth over $100m, follows a series of notable licensing deals and acquisitions by Spotify (e.g. Gimlet Media, Anchor, The Obamas, etc.). But the heavy investment in this emerging media format also puts podcasts and music in economic and cultural tension. Noting the paltry royalties Spotify distributes to musicians, jazz historian Ted Gioja scoffed that the Rogan deal shows ‘Spotify values Rogan more than any musician in the history of the world.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Dance and Protest

Special Issue CFP
Editors: Serouj Aprahamian, Shamell Bell, Rachael Gunn, and MiRi Park

IASPM Journal is the peer-reviewed open-access e-journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). As part of an international network, the journal aims to publish research and analysis in the field of popular music studies at both global and local levels.

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2021 Popular Music Books in Process Series

Call for Presentations

Since June, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, Popular Music Books in Process has presented a weekly online event for music writers and scholars to showcase their new books or books in progress to an engaged and interactive audience. The series is a collaboration between the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Pop Conference, and IASPM-US.

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“No one listens to Springsteen anymore. He’s history!”

(Blinded by the Light): Pop-rock Music and 2000s Cinema

– An online symposium –

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW, EA 4399 (France)
Université Reims Champagne-Ardenne, CIRLEP, EA 4299 (France)
Organisers : Clémentine Tholas & Catherine Girodet

Keynote Speaker: Mark Duffett

(University of Chester, UK) 

• Dates : 6 -8 pm (Paris Time) on :

Friday 29th January 2021
Friday 5th February 2021
Friday 12th February 2021
Friday 19th February 2021

• Deadline for submission: 7^th December 2020 

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Perfect Beat Special ‘Riffs’ Issue: COVID-19, Music and the Asia-Pacific

Perfect Beat journal invites contributions to a special edition of short-form ‘Riff’ articles, typically 2000 words, to document the state of music research in the Asia-Pacific region during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Riff is a blind peer-reviewed article that is flexible in format, allowing for a range of novel and creative approaches to scholarly writing, as well as prompt responses to pertinent issues.

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The Figure of the Musician in the Cinema

Savoirs en Prisme, n^o 15, 2022, “The Figure of the Musician in the Cinema” 

Edited by: Bénédicte Brémard, Stéphan Etcharry and Julie Michot 

Although pianists (and even organists) left the movie theaters during the silent era, musicians have become a recurrent topic of cinema. One famous example is the first “sound” feature film, The Jazz Singer(Alan Crosland, 1927), whose hero is also an instrumentalist. Background and source music have already been the subject of numerous in-depth studies. This is why Issue 15 of Savoirs en Prisme will focus more specifically on the musician, a figure that can be found in all national cinemas. The character is featured in many recent biopics focusing on jazz, flamenco, variety or pop-rock music (The Doors, Oliver Stone, 1991; Ray, Taylor Hackford, 2005; Camarón, Jaime Chávarri, 2005; La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan, 2007; Dalida, a television film by Joyce Buñuel, 2005 and a film by Lisa Azuelos, 2017; Django, Étienne Comar, 2017; Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer, 2018; Rocketman, Dexter Fletcher, 2019) as well as in older movies depicting the life and work of classical composers (La Symphonie fantastique, Christian-Jaque, 1942; The Music Lovers, Ken Russell, 1969; Mahler, Ken Russell, 1974; Amadeus, Miloš Forman, 1984; Impromptu, James Lapine, 1991; Immortal Beloved, Bernard Rose, 1994).

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Finnish Yearbook of Ethnomusicology 2021

Etnomusikologian vuosikirja (‘The Yearbook of Ethnomusicology’) is a peer reviewed open access music research journal in Finland. The 33rd volume of the yearbook (2021) will be published as PDF-files on the Open Journal Systems platform (OJS) of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology in December 2021. Editors for the journal are PhD Kaj Ahlsved, DSSc Kaarina Kilpiö and MA Viliina Silvonen. The journal has been granted level 1 status in the Publication Forum of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. The articles will all be supplied by an individual DOI (Digital Object Identifier) -number.

The yearbook contains research articles. Length of the published articles are 40,000–60,000 characters (about 20–30 A4 standard paper pages). Manuscripts should follow general standards of academic research articles. Detailed guidelines can be found in the yearbook’s internet site. For a smooth editing and publication process, it is important that the authors will follow the journal’s layout guidelines while writing and editing the manuscript.

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IASPM Online Research Seminar Series

IASPM is launching a new monthly Online Research Seminar Series in December. Many thanks to IASPM Canada and IASPM Journal staff, Dr Mary Fogarty and Dr Melissa Avdeeff for organising the first one. This will feature former IASPM UK & Ireland Chair Dr Matt Brennan. The series of invited guest lectures will run each month hopefully, and will for the first year at least feature a different branch organising the event each month. Please circulate details of the event and the series.

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