New Approaches to Music and Sound

SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL OF THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA
Guest Editors: David Suisman and Rebecca Tinio McKenna

If new book series and journal special issues are any indication, over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in the musical and sonic worlds of the past. Scholars of music, sound studies, disability studies, transnational and postcolonial studies, cultural history, history of the senses, and others have been expanding our historical understanding of soundscapes, music cultures, aurality, acoustics, and other aspects of the work sound does in the world. New scholarship is connecting music and sound with politics and social movements, capitalism and commerce, the formation of racial, gender, and class identity and difference, the history of technology and of natural environments, and more.

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Musical Biopics and Musical Documentaries from the Scandinavian countries 

Call for contributions to a Journal of Scandinavian Cinema In Focus section highlighting Musical Biopics and Musical Documentaries from the Scandinavian countries

This is a call for short subject contributions (2000-3000 words) focusing on how Scandinavian film and television have presented musicians, singers, bands and orchestras in biopics and documentaries. We welcome submissions that – after a quick theoretical introduction and concise contextual background – offer discussions of topics such as:

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IASPM Journal

The International Association for the Study of Popular Music has its own journal: IASPM Journal. The journal is a great opportunity for you to publish your work, and it is exclusive for all IASPM members. It is an Open Access (doubly blind) peer reviewed journal, which is registered with Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the European Reference for Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH Plus).

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Narrating Popular Music History of the GDR: A Critical Reflection of Approaches, Sources and Methods

Editors: Beate Peter (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) and Michael Rauhut (University of Agder, Norway)

Submissions are invited for a special edition of Popular Music History that aims to assess the sources, approaches and methods with which East German popular music is written.

Background

Histories of German popular music generally focus on examples of West German music which were commercially successful and/or are considered to be aesthetically and musically ground-breaking. Bands such as Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! or the Scorpions are the subject of many academic as well as non-academic publications, and they are considered as canonical as genres such as Krautrock or Neue Deutsche Welle. East German musicians or movements, on the other hand, tend to be overlooked, as do specific artistic forms of expression which were developed in response to authoritarian leadership in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). The examination of a relationship between the GDR and the arts is almost altogether absent from a pan-German popular music history.

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Popular Music Ethnographies: Open Call for Riffs Vol 5 Issue 2

Guest Editors: Shane Blackman and Robert McPherson

This special issue of Riffs on Popular Music Ethnographies aims to bring together ethnographic writing from any discipline, theoretical perspective or methodological approach. We welcome submissions from writers from academic and non-academic backgrounds. We also encourage short contributions; these could include written, visual, and musical elements and/or interrogate traditional and experimental forms of communication of ideas and arguments. We also welcome collaborations between writers, poets, musicians, composers and visual artists. In-keeping with the Riffs aim, we hope to include work from a variety of contributors.  See our website for previous publications and journal issues – www.riffsjournal.org

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Rethinking the Music Business: Music Contexts, Rights, Data and COVID-19

Call for chapters for an edited volume to be submitted to Springer’s Music Business Research Series

Editors
Guy Morrow (University of Melbourne)
Daniel Nordgård (University of Agder)
Peter Tschmuck (University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna)

COVID-19 had, and is having, a global impact on health, communities and the economy. As a result of COVID-19, music festivals, gigs and events were cancelled or postponed across the world. This directly affected the incomes and practices of many artists and the revenue for many entities in the music business. Despite this crisis however, there are pre-existing trends in the music business – the rise of the streaming economy, technological change (virtual and augmented reality, blockchain etc.), new copyright legislation etc. Some of these trends were impacted by the COVID-19 crisis while others were not.

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Sounds of the Pandemic

International online conference, December 16th, 2020

Scientific Committee:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale

Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno

Keynote speakers:
Nicola Di Croce, Università Iuav di Venezia, Dipartimento di Culture del progetto
Makis Solomos, Université Paris 8, Musidanse
Laura Tedeschini Lalli, Università di Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Architettura

The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the sound of the places we live in, particularly as a consequence of the measures taken to stem the contagion. First of all, the lockdown and the suspension of most activities marking our everyday lives have produced a crucial drop in noise pollution, due to an almost total reduction of traffic: this has caused silence to emerge powerfully in the aural conscience of individuals. In the meanwhile, the lockdown has produced new sonic environments, putting in the foreground new aural experiences and acoustic elements that are usually covered by “noise”: on one hand, these include the case of musical flash mobs taking off in many countries (especially in Italy), and on the other the emergence of animal sounds in urban settings.

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Popular Music and Philosophy

CFP for contributions to a themed session at the #MPSG21

Convener: José Gálvez, University of Bonn, Department of Musicology/Sound Studies

Conceptual reflection on music has an eminent tradition in western philosophy that can be traced back to Pythagoras. Yet, what emerged as popular music at the end of the nineteenth century has long been ignored, whether in debates regarding musical hermeneutics and phenomenology in the continental tradition or in debates over musical ontology and understanding in analytical philosophy. At best, popular music was a subject of (Adornian) socio-philosophical critique, attacking the standardization, pseudo-individualization and alienation it represented. In recent years, though, an interesting shift has been taking place: popular music is becoming more and more a subject of philosophical theory in its own right. The increasing debates on musical improvisation in jazz and electronic dance music, several critical re-readings of Adorno’s philosophy of music, theories on the disruptive biopolitical implications of popular music in neoliberalism, and approaches to the sonic affective affordances of popular music in the context of new materialism are some important vectors of an emerging awareness of popular music in philosophy.

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Writing HerStories: Women’s Rock Memoirs (edited collection)

Editors: Cristina Garrigós (National University of Distance Education, UNED, Spain) and Marika Ahonen (University of Turku, Finland).

The last ten years have seen a significant rise in the number of published memoirs by female rock musicians. Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010) came out in the same year that Kristin Hersch’s Rat Girl (2010) appeared, and others soon followed: Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage. A Chicana Punk Story (2011), Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band (2015), Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Made Me a Modern Girl (2016), Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless (2016), Michelle Cruz Gonzales’s The Spitboy Rule. Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (2016), Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art, Sex, Music (2017), and Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (2016). More recently, there are Debbie Harry’s Face It (2019), Liz Phair’s Horror Stories. A Memoir (2019), and Kathy Valentine’s All I Ever Wanted (2020). These examples – all from the U.S. and the U.K. – suggest that there is a growing interest in, and room for, women’s rock memoirs.

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Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Location: Online
Date: February 12-14, 2021

Keynote Speaker: Maria Cizmic (University of South Florida), and others TBA

Although trauma has always shaped human lives, discussions of trauma have especially come to the fore in our current moment. From the pandemic’s impacts—including global spikes in domestic violence and adverse impacts on mental health—to the tragedies of systemic racism and police brutality, trauma dominates contemporary conversations for wide swaths of people. Today’s focus on trauma follows a decade of burgeoning attention to the socio-cultural and psychological causes and effects of trauma in popular media and academic scholarship, including music studies. This conference—”Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”— seeks to bring together scholars working in and beyond music and sound studies to address the myriad ways that music and sound historically and contemporaneously not only have helped people process trauma, but also have been implicated in violence resulting in trauma. In addition, we are especially interested in hearing from scholars working with music and sound in pedagogical contexts with a focus on trauma-informed teaching and learning.

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